How Rejection Is Lived

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Rejection seems (or even is) unbearable when the merger occurs. If you are a baby, then rejection by your mom is a disaster. The infant does not yet have any resources to survive alone. His only chance is his mother's affection for him. The key to survival is the preservation of this "we", and there are no separate me and my mother, who has a life that has nothing to do with mine (after all, the realization that my mother has another life and people to whom she can also be attached, creates anxiety. Mom may think more about them than about me. She can dump me and leave). "We" are a single organism. It is good, quiet, calm in it. There is not very much energy, but why is it when it is so warm and satisfying … Curl up, snuggle up to a soft and warm body, hear the beating of the mother's heart, feel milk in the stomach and on the lips … I am you, and you are me. There is nothing else.

We can grow bodily, but some part of our soul (for various reasons) may remain infantile, desperately seeking the restoration of "we". And this baby can cling to someone who, for some reason, resembles a person who can get rid of the anxiety of abandonment. Someone who completely, completely will satisfy all our needs for warmth, love, tenderness. And yet - it will always be there … "I am afraid to be rejected" means "I have not yet learned to live autonomously. I am still looking for someone or someone who will return to me that blissful and semi-conscious state of love and constant presence by my side."

Anyone can be such a person. Parents can cling to their children, demanding from them all-consuming love and renunciation of their lives. Any boy or girl who has grown up children is a mortal threat. Jealous spouses in this are not much different from such parents. "You and only you are the only / only one who can give me everything I need" is the general feeling of people striving for psychological merging with those who, it seems, can replace the lost connection with someone who is always there and satisfies all desires. Yes, in exchange for this connection and a sense of security, you lose your freedom and deprive it of another - but how good it is …

The more frightened this baby is, the less tolerant he will be of any hints that the other person is not able to satisfy this all-consuming infant longing for the lost mother. And these "hints" will inevitably appear - any differences, any view of the side is already a threat. Any hint that he or she has thoughts that are not related to you, has a life of its own is already a threat. And the discovery that the other person, in principle, is not able to fully satisfy the infant emotional hunger - and at all can give rise to a state close to panic.

And then the "baby" begins to act. On one pole of his experiences - rage and hatred towards the one who dared to betray this blissful "unity" (and it does not matter whether it was in reality or just imagined). When we experience rejection, there is a lot of anger and fear in this pain. The rejected one tries at all costs to return the one who leaves. Either through total control ("where are you ?!", "why didn't you answer my calls for an hour ?!" so good and wonderful that they certainly would not quit. After all, only the bad ones are abandoned, the good ones cannot be abandoned! "What else can I do to keep you from quitting ?!" It is not for nothing that psychoanalysts call such a state paranoid - the fear beating in the soul throws from one extreme to another, making a person extremely suspicious and hostile. Everything is not there … For example, the fantasies that the person who rejected me is now laughing at me happily in the company of friends, while I am here alone crying. He / she doesn't care about me at all. Rejected - and went on, giggling. He / she is portrayed in the soul as heartless, arrogant bastards. But nothing! I'm going to take care of myself now, lose weight, go to the gym - and the next time you see me, you will be amazed at how I have changed, but it will be too late !! Or I will kill myself, and you will realize how dear I was to you - but it will be too late, you will know the pain to which you have doomed me!

In this inflamed consciousness, any empathy for the one who rejected you completely disappears (real or imaginary - it doesn't matter). The rejecting person is, by definition, a heartless villain / reptile, because he refused / a who needs something that he cannot live without. He refused to sacrifice himself, as a mother sacrifices her time and health in order to leave a baby. The rejected is not aware of the other as a living, feeling, thinking, experiencing - for him it is just an object that does not give what is required. In general, from the point of view of the infant psyche, it is so. And rage ("GIVE !!!) is replaced by hatred (" THEN SUFFER YOURSELF !!! "), turning into rage and self-hatred (" if I were better, I would not be left! ").

But there is also another pole of experiences, and it is in this that the possibility of growing up and separation lies when a miracle happens: you find that yes, no one else in the world can be a substitute for your mother, but there are people who can still give something you. These people are not able to satisfy all the need for love - but you can take a little bit, and from these little lights comes what warms you, even when you are alone. This is the pole of sadness and grief.

So, at one pole, the experience of rejection is rage and anger, which are directed either at the one who denied us what we want, or at ourselves - as not good enough for another (if it were better, we would never be rejected). This is such a screaming baby, demanding what he wants at all costs.

At the second pole - grief, sadness and sadness. Grief always arises at the moment of realizing the inevitability of loss, when you begin to believe - yes, this is for real, and this is forever. Of course, in such a state, a person often tries to deny this "forever", and then rage is born again, and this state resembles a swing, from rage / anger to grief / sadness and vice versa. "Wait, this is not forever, you can still return everything!" or "You misunderstood him, in fact, he did not reject you, but was forced to say this in order to …" to a person, then this is actually not what we were given to know …). But at some point, behind this veil of illusions, reality appears more and more clearly: WE REALLY DO NOT NEED THIS PERSON, or he cannot give us what we crave so much, and no matter how hard you try, everything is useless.

Grief can be experienced in two ways, and they are very different. The first is total grief that is born when we feel the loss of not a specific person and hope for a relationship with him, but the loss of the last chance for a loving relationship with anyone in general, as if the one who rejected is the last chance in this life. Further - only a gloomy, dreary and lonely existence in the cold desert, where no one will hear your silent cry. This is a condition characteristic of our "infant" part, because a small child does not yet have the experience of meeting new people, the experience of giving birth to new attachments. The attachment that is or has arisen is felt as the only possible one. It is understandable why, then, rejection is a disaster. There is no one nearby who would comfort and comfort, and this is forever. For an adult, despair and grief reach such a level when in his own soul, next to an emotionally frightened baby, there is no adult, understanding and supporting part of his “I”. That is why loneliness becomes unbearable - you abandoned yourself, this is real loneliness, in contrast to the situation when you are alone / rejected, but are able to relate with compassion and compassion to your pain, personified by this inner baby.

The second option for experiencing grief is when you still lose a specific person and specific relationship, and the hope that love / affection is possible in your life (albeit with another person) remains. This hope persists if you experience yourself as a good, albeit suffering, person, and in your soul, next to pain, there is a resource of sympathy for yourself. And this sympathy is not expressed through "come on, you will find another" or "he / she is unworthy of you" - such "consolation" brings us back into rage and denial of the significance of the loss. Sympathy and pity is expressed here through "I see that you are in pain and you cry, I will stay close and hug you." Indescribably lucky those people whose parents treated the pain of their children in this way - as a result, the very “adult sympathetic self”, created from such parental reactions, is born in the soul.

And only in the presence of such an adult compassionate person (inside or outside) can we then allow our baby to cry, and with tears wash away the pain of losing meaningful relationships or hope for them. You don't need to do anything on purpose - it's not for nothing that there is such an expression as “work of grief”. The lost object gradually disappears and dissolves in the past, and we get the opportunity to look further ahead. Grieving is not evenly distributed - it comes in waves, followed by some tranquility. Sometimes we return to rage and anger, and again the presence of a sympathetic and accepting adult who does not judge us for it, but treats us as a normal process, allows us to return again to the interrupted process of mourning. And grief is replaced by light sadness, which in some cases never goes away, but is not painful. Sadness - as a reminder to us of the loss, and of the value of the life that is now.