How to Heal from Rejection (Without Getting Down on Yourself)

“This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I requite myself the compassion I need.” ~Kristen Neff

The handsome man I was dating sat on the easy chair to tell a difficult story. We were in my loft, and he was lamister eye contact. I studied the symmetry of his jaw as he spoke.

“I did something stupid,” he said.

I thought he was confiding in me. Maybe this intimacy would bring us closer. Maybe his eye had wandered but he was choosing me. I leaned in.

There was someone else, but not in a way I overly would have guessed. The ugliness of his ticket was at odds with my glowing perception of him.

Adding to my cognitive dissonance, at the end of his tale I was stunned to hear the words, “and that’s why I can’t see you anymore.”

My hands shook. I set my wine glass lanugo on the coffee table. We’re all flooded with stress hormones during separations considering we’re social creatures. My soul felt like it was drowning. I had daydreamed this man would be a swimmies to reach for and hold me in safety during life’s challenges. Instead, he put on his coat.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with genuine sentiment. Then he left, slipping yonder into the night, leaving me vacated on my sofa in the riptide of emotion.

I was at once disappointed, disheartened, sad, betrayed, and scared to be alone. Yet in light of his revelation, I was moreover relieved.

I’d been wrenched up with before, but this time there was no punishing vituperation put upon me, and the shame was all his. For the first time I could see rejection as impersonal. It had nothing to do with my worth, value, or actions. It was well-nigh where he was at in his life, the recognition that I wasn’t in that same place, and the fact he didn’t want to take me.

Nor did I want to go there. His story was that he lost his tomfool while DJing a wedding on the weekend. A woman kept pestering him to play a song he’d once played. When she became irate and shouty he spit on her.

Her friends tabbed the police, who charged him with assault. Spitting on someone is a criminal offense. It’s moreover icky and degrading. Now he was dealing with the legal consequences, something he was taking responsibility for on his own.

My smart-ass said, “This breakup is for the best,” while my soul processed the rejection as a bereavement. Our fun concert dates, record shopping field trips, and song sharing were over. He was gone, and so was the hopeful promise of our budding relationship. The indulgent illusion and fantasy of early-stage dating evaporated in an instant.

Alone on my sofa I wrapped myself in a fuzzy blanket, sipped wine, and watched a movie. I don’t remember which one. I was numb. But without that my rejection coping veered off the usual script.

The Old Post-Rejection Story

There’s a standard RomCom break-up montage—you know the one. The star of the story gets dumped then self-destructive. She gets drunk, sends the messy message she shouldn’t, wallows in her pajamas with unkempt hair, and eats pizza and ice surf until a bestie intervenes. Then she hits the gym, regains confidence, gets a new look, and is all set for a surprising meet cute with someone else.

But what if without a rejection you could skip the self-sabotage?

To sail through rejection, you’d have to see it as not personal, as I did with my crush. You’d moreover need to know it’s not perfect by perceiving people and situations as flawed, the way things really are. And you’d need to winnow that nothing’s permanent and not be tying to outcomes. You would go in and out of relationships like a svelte butterfly, with no ego, expectations, fantasy, or old baggage.

In other words, you’d be a learned Buddhist, or Eckhart Tolle. I don’t know well-nigh you, but I’m nowhere near there yet in my conscious evolution.

But there’s flipside way to process rejection as an sultana that moreover sidesteps the hapless drunken humiliation and numb hiding. It’s so simple we don’t do it, or if we do, we don’t wield it enough. We have to love ourselves.

Why Loving Ourselves Heals

It’s taken me a long time to learn that self-love is not just cheesy sentiment. It’s increasingly than a positive mental vein or a meme from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Active self-love is self-soothing, and for those of us who’ve overly felt inadequately comforted, seen, heard, or understood (i.e., virtually everyone), this concept can be nonflexible to grasp.

I didn’t fully fathom self-soothing until a few years without that breakup with the handsome spitter, when I moved to a new municipality by myself. In the lead up to the move I was so rented planning and packing I didn’t fully finger my myriad feelings. It wasn’t until I arrived and unpacked that I grieved the loss of my friendships and familiar comforts I’d grown used to. It was like I’d wrenched up with a whole city.

Then, facing the pandemic on my own, without my full support network, I took a deep swoop into neuroscience, reading everything I could well-nigh resilience, anxiety, and burnout. In the process I discovered Kristen Neff’s groundbreaking research on fierce self-compassion.

I learned the reason rejections and losses are so painful is that the separation triggers all the times we’ve felt unample before. We finger this in our bodies, which sound alarms. We typically react with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions, and our minds spiral. We might vituperation or shame ourselves, twisting “this isn’t working,” “things change” or other impersonal reasons into harsh feelings of “I’m bad,” “I’m unworthy,” or “I’m not enough.”

If we act with self-love and compassion instead, we unclose the pain and sadness we’re feeling. We repletion ourselves like we would a sobbing small child—with soothing deportment that wifely lanugo our zingy nervous systems.

What We Get Wrong Well-nigh Self-Love

In womanhood our attempts at self-soothing too often numb the pain instead of healing it. We wrap ourselves in escapist rampage watching or video games. We reach for flipside glass of wine or something stronger. Or we overwork to exhaustion. Sitting with difficult emotions we’d rather stave is too uncomfortable and scary.

But the worst thing we can do is to take our raw, unprocessed emotions and lash out at someone else. That’s when feelings turn into reactivity and wiseacre behavior, like spitting on someone or harassing them with tirades of vitriol. That’s when hurt people lose it and hurt others.

That ways the corollary is moreover true: the weightier thing we can do for ourselves, families, friends, partners, communities, and the world is to finger our feelings fully and ride them, surf-like, to shore. To do that we need to be present and enlightened and know how to take superintendency of our emotions through self-soothing. That’s healing.

Self-Love Practices That Really Work

Self-soothing is well-nigh stuff in your body, not checking out or judging yourself harshly. I’m still a novice at self-soothing, but so far, the methods that work for me are:

-Wrapping myself in a self-hug, or rubbing my upper arms

-Breathing in quickly and then releasing a long, sigh-like exhale at least three times

-Standing up and shaking out my hands, shoulders, arms, and legs, or dancing it out

-Taking a moment to notice as many details as I can well-nigh where I am (colors, sounds, smells)

-Breathing in steam from a hot cup of tea or a warm bath

-Listening to calming music

-Lighting a candle to watch it sparkle

-Going for a walk

-Doing gentle yin yoga

When I try to think my way through rejection I either screw into rumination or shut down. Telling someone what happened can help make sense of it and provide validation. But the only words that truly salve the sting are loving reassurances we tell ourselves, like: “You’re okay. I’ve got you. You’re safe.” In this way, repeating positive affirmations can help too.

Remember It’s a Process!

One important thing to know well-nigh self-soothing is that it takes time! In our rushed, busy-is-better culture we don’t souvenir ourselves with time-outs enough. That’s why we’re so often on the whet and reactive. But self-soothing in the moment we finger the first sting of rejection completes the stress trundling faster. It takes less time to heal by self-soothing than we’d normally spend ruminating, numbing, or fuming.

And when you soothe yourself, you might see new ways to connect with others. I didn’t stage the handsome spitter again, but by not taking our breakup personally I didn’t build up a wall of shame or vituperation versus him either. We became friends and unfurled seeing concerts together until I moved to my new city.

Everything changes. Along with the best, the worst things are unchangingly going to happen. Loved ones leave or die. Opportunities are fleeting. Material possessions unravel or fade. There’s grief in losing the familiarity of a home you once lived in, plane when it’s time to move on. Remember you’ve still got yourself to live with.

Loving yourself is a reason to alimony going, find joy wherever you can, and vamp increasingly love. Loving yourself is the rescue swimmies that’s unchangingly there. It’s the soft soothing repletion and wifely power you’ve unchangingly longed for.

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