Being rejected in dating is never fun. Being rejected in any aspect of your life feels horrible! But let’s look at some ways to take this rejection in the healthiest way possible.
- Allow your emotions every time they come up. Realize that your emotions come from your thoughts.
- Reframe the rejection – it is not necessarily about you. Rejection doesn’t have to be negative. It could be a super positive thing.
- Love yourself just as you are – pump yourself up with positive self-talk and positive activities.
- Get out and try again when ready.
Allow your emotions every time they come up
Whenever you have been rejected or go through a hard break up, try to write out all your thoughts about it at least once a day. This is called a “thought download”. It can help you to get all of those painful thoughts out of your head and onto paper so that you can look at them objectively.
Whenever you feel sadness or shame about the rejection, try to stop what you are doing and feel that emotion for a few minutes. If you allow your emotions, just sit there and feel them and recognize them and name them, it will help you process them and over time the emotions will feel less overwhelming.
This is how I like to feel my emotions. I think about what emotion I am feeling. I name it. I tell myself “I am feeling this emotion because of sentences in my brain (or thoughts)”. Then I usually close my eyes and try to feel the emotion. Sadness feels like a pit in my stomach and tightness in my throat. Then I breathe into that feeling. Focus on what it feels like to be sad. After a few minutes of feeling an emotion, it usually lessens and goes away. And then BOOM! You’ve processed that emotion.
When you get really good at feeling negative emotions, life becomes a lot less scary.
If you can get really comfortable with feeling negative emotion, you will be able to do anything in life! Think of what you could do if you weren’t afraid of feeling rejected?!? Think of what you could accomplish if you weren’t afraid of feeling regret, worry, or embarrassment? Practice feeling negative emotions so that you won’t be so afraid of them. Emotions are just vibrations in our bodies. They aren’t harmful. They can’t hurt us. Our bodies are made to process emotion – even negative emotion.
Reframe the Rejection
If someone rejected you, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Let me repeat that. IF SOMEONE REJECTS YOU, THAT DOES NOT MEAN THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU. It actually says a lot more about them than it does about you. Perhaps they don’t like people who are tall or short or loud or quiet or honest or sarcastic. Perhaps they just don’t feel ready to get married or feel shameful about their shortcomings and take out their negative feelings on you. Who knows? The point is their rejection of you has nothing to do with you.
Besides their rejection is a really good thing. You wouldn’t want to marry someone that doesn’t like you, right? Now marrying someone who doesn’t like you WOULD BE THE WORST. And lots of people experience that everyday. A lot of people (including myself) put on a show when dating so that when they get married, there are a lot of unpleasant surprises. (“I didn’t know you liked to do that?!? I thought you liked what I liked!) Anyway, so rejection might mean that you were being yourself. And if you were being your true self and they didn’t like that, then it is a good thing that relationship ended. You want someone who likes you JUST THE WAY YOU ARE.
Being loved just the way you are is the BEST FEELING EVER. And guess what? You can give it to yourself right now! YOU need to be the one to start loving yourself that way first. So let’s talk about learning to love yourself.
Love yourself just as you are
Nobody is just like you. You are unique. And if you are anything like me, you have probably been telling yourself all the bad things about yourself up until now. “Sage – you need to be better at this!”, “Sage – I can’t believe you did that again!” etc. But that needs to stop. No wonder you don’t like being alone with yourself if you are always criticizing yourself!! Would you want to be with a friend or partner that treats you that way? Of course not. In therapy, intense criticism over a long length of time is usually considered verbal abuse. So stop abusing yourself!
Changing your self-talk is not easy. If you have been telling yourself negative things most of your life, it is going to take a while to change it. Again – try to write down your thoughts every evening and evaluate how you are talking to yourself. Be kind to yourself. It’s okay that you have been mean to yourself – you didn’t know any better and it is so easy to criticize. Be kind and start changing a few of those thoughts to more positive ones.
Examples:
My thought download as a young dating person might go something like this: “I feel like I am not pretty enough. No one will want to marry me. There must be something wrong with me. What am I doing wrong? Maybe it’s my acne. Maybe it’s my lack of stylish clothes. Maybe I’m not beautiful enough. I will end up an old maid.”
Ok, let’s see if I can separate out the facts from the thoughts. Can any of the above thoughts be proven in court? No. So they are all thoughts. Which means I COULD be wrong about them. How could I reframe these thoughts into more positive thoughts?
Let’s take the first thought: “I feel like I’m not pretty enough”. Hmm… is this true? Is it a useful thought? What could we replace this with? How about “Media and the world will try to tell me I am not pretty so that they can sell me beauty products. But beauty is subjective. What one person thinks is attractive could be ugly to the next. You know what is the most attractive thing? Kindness and a smile. I can definitely control those things.” I think my positive “go to” thought for this one might be “Kindness is beautiful and that’s something I have full control over.”
Then whenever your brain goes to the old habitual thought of “I’m not pretty enough”, redirect your brain to your new thought “Kindness is beautiful”. If you keep redirecting your brain, it will learn new patterns and you will start thinking of yourself in a more positive way.
Side note: now each person is unique. The thoughts that work for one person won’t work for another person. So find positive thoughts that work for you and feel genuine. I’m giving some examples but ultimately you need to see what thoughts work for you!
Get out and try again
When you feel ready, get out and try dating again. Don’t let the rejection hold you back from meeting some other great people! Dating is kind of like life or business. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall if you keep getting up again. The most successful people in life will tell you that you have to keep going even after failing many MANY times. And who knows? Your perfect person might be right around the corner waiting for you to get out the door and try again.
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