be driven to work endlessly, hoping that their accomplishments will make them feel accepted. Years may pass after the initial discounting or dismissal by a parent or some other significant person in a child’s life, but the pain of that negative treatment looms in the shadow of a life thus unfulfilled. Whenever a slight occurs later in life, be it a huge rejection or one barely noticed, those same painful feelings arise. With each succeeding rebuff, the hurt escalates in intensity and so does the reaction to it!
Most of the responses to rejection are self-destructive. The torture of keeping a mental list of abuses received only piles up resentment and bitterness with the list. Paralysis increases. Eventually, an explosion of catastrophic dimensions will occur with fallout landing on either oneself or on those with whom a victim is in closest relationship. Retaining slights or purposeful rejections, which one cannot help but do, especially because they are emotionally charged, constructs a set of grey, cloudy glasses worn every day by the victim and used to predict and prevent reactions from all they meet.
Why should this be? It is because the brain has a method of working, a design to help us to be protected and have the ammunition to combat further rejections. The only issue here, is that those attacks keep piling up and eventually can cause volcanic-type eruptions when we least expect them. Furthermore, those reactions and eruptions bring to us the very rejection that we fear.
Alice Miller, a widely-published and well-known author, has achieved world-wide recognition for her work on the causes and effects of child abuse and its cost to society. In her book entitled The Drama of Being a Child, first published in 1987 and revised in 1995, she states:
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.”
She continues:
“The truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual ‘wisdom’, we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.”
Powerful words, aren’t they? But oh so true! The history contained in the Old Testament is a referral tool, designed for us to use so that we will not repeat the errors of our forefathers. There is always a precipitating event producing inhibitions and fear, but it is possible to break through the shadow of the past and into the light of accomplishment, success and emotional growth. Your interest in the subject of rejection is, therefore, a path of wisdom. Your physical and emotional health will greatly benefit from your choice to face your feelings, head on.
The ways that we connect or plug in to each other are greatly influenced by the shadows created from our early experiences of attaching to primary caregivers in childhood, and that attachment is determined by how those parents or primary caregivers were equipped to bond with us. Because our need to survive is so strong, it has determined how or if we will attach to others in our lives in a secure manner. Our ability to attach or to plug in has also been impacted by the wounds we received while we were in the process of determining our worth and value (the first two years of life are the most impactful, but up to age 7 is when our thoughts and feelings are formed.)
Let’s face it, the bottom line is this: wounded people wound people. Rejected people look for rejection under every rock, and nearly always find it. If they do not find it, they create it, by behaving in such a manner that others will reject them. Their shadow enlarges.
The forty-five years of study in parental rejection and acceptance, conducted by Dr. Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut’s Family Studies Department, concludes that if a person perceives he is rejected, he has received it. One’s perception is one’s reality.
So, if in your character-forming years (conception through age 7) you felt like you did not belong to your family and friends, or if you currently find yourself being sensitive to the slights of others, predicting that friends or family will reject you, you are in the right place! There is so much more to learn and apply to yourself on this subject.
So now, let’s move on!
Chapter One
Unplugged
“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think that everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime – guilt - and there is the story of mankind.”
(The Rejected. 10). Evoy, John Joseph
Picture it. You were given away at birth by a father who wouldn’t even claim you as his, or by a mother who was so young that she had no idea about the needs of an infant, had no ability to meet those needs if she did know them. Perhaps she didn’t really want the responsibility of raising a child. She may have wished to have an abortion but didn’t have the money to have it done. She may have even tried to abort you herself by means that had been suggested to her by others, but her attempts were unsuccessful. Maybe she was unmarried and/or so young that she knew she should tell her parents but was scared to death to confess the truth, for fear of the putdowns and demands she would get from them. She could have been so totally caught up in the trauma of an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy that she had no thought of connecting with the child in her womb and probably wouldn’t have known how to anyway. Most women don’t, regardless of age or status.
The human brain is designed to see to it that the mind and the body will survive at all costs. As a result, through the years the brain will develop techniques to keep the human alive and functioning. In the first two years of life, when the mind is like a giant sponge that soaks in information, your style of attachment was developed. The choice you made was dependent on your mother and father’s abilities to bond to you in the womb. It became a survival technique, designed to protect you from the results of wounding. Each of the self-protective techniques you may have developed carries a price. In addition to difficult future relationships, came the current cost of dealing with personal attitudes and feelings that may not serve you well now.
When a child is abandoned by birth parents, even while still in the womb, that child, unable to articulate the pain it feels, develops several reactions to its experience of being alone. Abandonment can mean actually giving the child up for adoption, to foster care, or even just leaving the infant on someone’s doorstep or in a dumpster, emotionally abandoning or ignoring the child while still being physically present, leaving the child orphaned due to death or divorce, having extended periods of absence of one or both parents due to work-related concerns, removing love and acceptance from the child because of its birth being inconvenient to the parents, being disappointed by the sex of the child, or being pre-occupied with marital strife, addictions or other pursuits. Our shadows, our resulting feelings and behaviors, owe their birth to the light of our beginnings.
Main Reactions to Rejection
Feelings of Worthlessness:
When a child endures a difficult delivery, or his needs are unmet, he or she is abused, physically, emotionally or sexually or he or she has to endure painful experiences of loss or abandonment, the child draws a conclusion and develops an attitude about his worth and value. “If my mother or my father, who created me, would treat me in a hurtful way, then there must be something wrong with me.” Granted, this is not true; however, what the child perceives he receives as truth. Looking at it from a logical adult point of view, his reaction would not be unexpected. If you were beaten severely, if you were ignored
