How to Get Over Rejection

The dangerous part of rejection is how it is internalized by our brain, heart, and soul. Rejection can often affect the way you view yourself. It is important to examine how the rejection is changing or shaping that view. Depending on the level of rejection, it could include feelings of sadness, pain, and grief.

That is all okay. It is important to feel those feelings as part of the process of dealing with the rejection. But, if the pain you are feeling is bigger than the rejection, then it is probably tapping into something that was already there that you have not yet processed or resolved.

Ask yourself: what is this rejection tapping into?

Some possible answers may be:

• My needs for a relationship
• My sense of being lovable, or not
• My ability to act assertively, or not
• My ability to make mistakes, or issues with perfectionism

If your rejection is making you feel deeper pain that is tapping into one or more of these parts of you, that is when you need to do some healing work. You need to figure out why this rejection went so deep.

Reframe it and rightsize the rejection.

Most of the time, the rejection says much more about them than you. Everyone has their own needs in mind and they are probably looking for specific things that don’t have anything to do with you not being enough. It is not always about you. That isn’t meant to be said in an admonishing way. It just simply is about their own needs and wants, rather than any intrinsic part of you.

Ask yourself what you are believing about this rejection.

Remember to watch for the danger of letting your mind and soul make decisions about your personhood. Zoom out and get objective. Use mindfulness to observe your thoughts and look at them, consider them, but don’t let them take hold and control you, or lead you down a spiral of negative self-analyzing. There are many parts of you that are wonderful, and probably many areas of life that are going very well. Make sure you see the big picture.

Assess how you can ‘unpersonalize’ this rejection.

You need to have your close, trusted community of people that loves those parts of you that you may be questioning after getting rejected. This can include therapy, good friends, support groups, and more. These people will wipe away that stain that the rejection may have left on your personhood.

Handling rejections is trainable.

The more opportunities you try, the more you overcome your fear, and the more rejections you experience, the stronger you will become at handling them. Get strong to the point where one more rejection is not going to define who you are.