Rejection Impacts

At sometime in our lives, we all face rejection.Everyone hates to be rejected or to be turned down, but then it is a fact of life .Not all the time everything will go as per our wishes and expectation.

Rejection in one or the other way will happen, from ostracism on the playground to romantic rejection, bullying at work, and social disregard for the aged, individuals are at constant risk of experiencing instances of social exclusion, dehumanisation, and discrimination.

Contemporary social psychologists study rejection in an array of forms and contexts. Rejection may be active or passive and involve physical or psychological distancing or exclusion. For example, individuals may be actively rejected when others voice negative views of them or tell them that their presence is not wanted.

In comparison, individuals may be passively rejected when others pay little attention to them or ignore them altogether (e.g., the silent treatment). Physical exclusion from a group elicits feelings of rejection in most circumstances (e.g., when an individual is purposefully left out), and psychological exclusion (e.g., when one’s opinions are discounted or ignored) is also experienced as a rejection.

From school shootings to domestic violence, from cognitive impairment to suicide attempts, the negative impact of social exclusion has been widely  documented.

These phenomena really hurts and have a powerful impact as testified by their immediate influence on people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.

Sometimes it can also inflict severe/intense damage to our psychological well-being that goes beyond emotional pain.

Here are some ways that describe the effects rejection has on our emotions, thinking and behaviour.

1. Self Doubt – We often respond by starting to  find faults in ourselves ,be mourning all our inadequacies, kicking ourselves when we’re already down.
2. Low Self esteem – Blaming ourselves and attacking our self-worth only deepens the emotional pain we feel and makes it harder for us to recover emotionally.
3. Thinking clearly becomes difficult- Rejection temporarily lowers our IQ. Being asked to recall a recent rejection experience and relive the experience is enough to cause people to score significantly lower on subsequent IQ tests, tests of short–term memory, and tests of decision making.
4. Rejection does not respond to reason. Emotional upheaval is so strong that the reason makes no sense and usually the reactions are emotionally driven and regretted later.
5. Rejection destabilise– our “Need to Belong.” We all have a fundamental need to belong to a group. When we are rejected the feeling of being outcasted tends to add to the emotional pain.

There are ways to treat the psychological wounds rejection inflicts. It is possible to treat the emotional pain rejection elicits and to prevent the psychological, emotional, cognitive, and relationship fallouts that occur in its aftermath.

To do so effectively we must address each of our psychological wounds (i.e., soothe our emotional pain, reduce our anger and aggression, protect our self-esteem, and stabilize our need to belong).

I will be sharing tips on these in my next blog posts. Comment on what would you want me to cover in my next posts.