Rejection Hurts

Rejection -to refuse to accept (someone or something) to discard as useless or unsatisfactory:, or cast out or eject; vomit , a refusal to show someone the love or kindness that they need or expect.

I know we all have had rejection happen to you at one time during our life and it goes all the way back to being a child:

Picked last for a team sport

Overlooked for a birthday party

Told you can’t sit with us at the lunch table

Told, by someone we liked romantically – let’s just be friends

Been cheated on or been a victim of spiritual, physically or emotional abuse. 

Your not a good fit for this company

I need something more, you no longer make me happy, a spouse that was addicted to porn, prostitutes, or another addiction and choose that over you.

Your child finds someone to talk to that “ better understands them”

Your loved ones don’t call or care about you any longer

You feel unloved by a spouse or overlooked by them and 2nd place to work, church, friends hobbies

Now, what you probably already know about rejection is that he isn’t shy about showing up at the most inappropriate places and at the most inopportune times.

In fact, some common situations where he loves to drop by include when you are:

Deeply in love

Chasing your dreams

Job hunting

Starting a new venture

Pursing your personal projects

Applying and auditioning

Have had children

getting plugged into a church family

Logic would suggest that if we have been confronting rejection since a young age on numerous occasions, over the years we should be experts at getting over rejection by now. We all know this isn’t the case.

Rejection piggybacks on physical pain pathways in the brain. MRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. This is why rejection hurts so much (medically speaking)

This is interesting- Did you know Tylenol reduces the emotional pain rejection gives u. In a study testing the hypothesis that rejection mimics physical pain, researchers gave some participants (Tylenol) before asking them to recall a painful rejection experience. The people who received Tylenol reported significantly less emotional pain than subjects who took a sugar pill.

Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant — it always HURTS, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to.

When a parent or family member rejects us over something they feel we did to them that is unforgivable in their eyes. Or when your child has rejected your love or rejected you when you asked for forgiveness for something you did that hurt them in some way not intentional. It hurts and it hurts us so hard in the heart that the enemy tries to come in and take full advantage with us through anger, resentment, strife, hardening our hearts, turning away from God or even serious depression and isolation and even death from a broken heart.

The question is, why? Why are we so bothered by a good friend failing to “like” a picture we posted on Facebook? Why does it ruin our mood? Why would something so seemingly insignificant make us feel angry,  moody, and bad about ourselves?

Because we allow it to!!!!

The greatest damage rejection causes is usually self-inflicted. Just when our self-esteem is hurting most, we allow rejection to damage it even further.

Rejection never has the final say. it may be a delay, distraction or devastation for a for a season but with Jesus you are always invited in to His presence and never rejected. His love is permanent. it cant be shaken, taken or broken.

He can take the worst rejection of your life and build compassion in you for others.  Not everyone can relate to the successes in your life but they can relate to rejection.

God can use that to say to someone who is hurting “ me Too” this is the one thing everyone reading this has experienced at least one time in your life.

The root of rejection is actually incredibly simple: damage from rejection is the result of a misplaced identity.

Whenever we base our identity on somebody or something other than what God’s Word has to say about us, we make ourselves vulnerable to the damage of rejection. Many of us will base our identity on what our parents, teachers, or friends think of us. This sets a lot of children (then Adults) up for Performance Orientation later in life, because their parents give them conditional love based on their grades or performance.

The key to overcoming rejection, is to solve the identity problems.

When we base our identity upon what the Word of God has to say about us, we will become virtually rejection-proof. We can become immune from the wounds of rejection as long as we are not basing our identity upon what that person thinks of us.

Heartbreak and rejection has been a big part of my own life. Rejection hurts then, now and in the future. You cant always feel pain in your body from an injury  like a broken arm that happened years ago ( unless it is a chronic condition) but you can feel the pain of rejection from the past whenever you think about it that incident , its like a movie that plays in your head and you feel it all over again. After rejection we close up. we stop trying and taking risks because we start to protect ourself. We lose hope, trust and faith in people,

It is easy to witness the power of rejection. The more we encounter rejection, the more we view our efforts as pointless, the less we try, and we tend to move further away from people.

The wounds of rejection can open a person up to other issues like abandonment, worthlessness, performance, perfectionism, rebellion.  Lack of love as a child, for example, can cause that child to turn to pornography and lust to fulfill their need to be loved, As with abuse, it’s not so much the rejection that opens us up to these things but rather our reaction to the rejection.

True rejection is just an emotional form of abuse.

I don’t believe that rejection has to be the greatest devastation of your life i think it can be the great place of the deepest compassion and the sweetest way to help each other .

If our identity didn’t depend on what others think of us, we would be virtually immune from the damage of rejection. That is why our identity must be based upon the Word of God, and what God has to say about us. is this easy, nNO, it takes hiding yourself in God’s word and learning to be loved by the Father and needing and depending on that love more than any others love. That is the unshakable rock to which we need to build our house upon.

There will be times we feel left out less than and lonely but we have to see rejection as a trap set by the enemy to get us off track from the abundant life God has given to us and be able to walk out our destiny here in earth.

So now we can know where rejection is coming from and how deadly it is and make a decision to not allow it to control our life any longer.

This wont happen over night and might take a lifetime to actually do but as long as we know the purpose of rejection ( its not always the person themselves) we can fight the battle with our eyes wide open.

Anger & rejection takes a lot of energy, learn to control it and you can avoid a lot of stress!

There’s one verse in Psalms that really puts the light on how we can be freed from the devastating effects of rejection and it does not have to be your parents it can be anyone in which you had a closeness too.:

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.

Psalms 27:10

If you too have overcome the potential devastating effects of rejection let me know.

Blessings,

Stacy