Loving Yourself When You Feel Rejected

What do you generally do when you feel rejected? If you're like most people, you either try to control the rejecting person, or you take it out on yourself with various avoidant and controlling behaviors.

When you try to control the other person, do you try to control by:

• Getting angry, defending, complaining, blaming?
• People-pleasing, complying, giving yourself up?
• Shutting down, withdrawing?
• Threatening violence or exposure?

When you take it out on yourself, do you try to control yourself and/or your feelings by:

• Harshly judging and criticizing yourself?
• Avoiding your feelings by ruminating, justifying, or turning to various addictions, such as food, alcohol, drugs, TV, shopping, porn and so on?
• Seeing yourself as a victim and complaining to others?

How do you feel when you do any of these controlling behaviors toward the other person or toward yourself? Do you feel:

• Anxious?
• Depressed?
• Angry?
• Alone?
• Empty?
• Shamed?
• Guilty?
• Resentful?

You might want to consider learning to love yourself when you feel rejected.

Loving yourself when you feel rejected needs to start way before someone rejects you. It needs to start by not rejecting yourself. As long as you are rejecting yourself, you will not be able to love yourself when you feel rejected by another.

All the ways you try to control others and yourself are self-rejecting. You are rejecting and abandoning yourself when you give yourself up, become defensive, shut down or threaten violence. You are rejecting and abandoning yourself when you avoid responsibility for your feelings by judging yourself, turning to addictions, being a victim and complaining to others – making them responsible for you.

Loving yourself starts by learning to define your intrinsic worth. This means that you stop defining your worth by your looks, your achievements or by how others feel about you. It means you learn to see and value your beautiful soul essence – your natural kindness, caring, compassion, creativity, innate goodness, as well as your natural gifts and talents and your particular form of intelligence.

When you value who you are within, then it's much easier to not take others' rejection personally. Others' rejection is rarely about who you are in your beautiful essence. They might be rejecting your ego wounded self – who you are when you are trying to control others. Controlling behavior is unloving and no one likes it.

When you value your wonderful soul essence, then loving yourself means being a kind and compassionate inner parent toward your feelings. This is what loving yourself looks like:

You put your hand on your heart - according to research from the Heartmath Institute, having a hand on your heart activates oxytocin - moving into deep kindness for your feelings. Here is the out-loud dialog you can have with your feelings – your inner child:

"Sweetie, I love you and I'm right here for you. You are not alone. Spirit is here for us - we are not alone. I know you are feeling sad, lonely, heartbroken and helpless over this other person. You are a wonderful, beautiful being and there is nothing wrong with you. This person rejecting you is in their own fearful, unloving wounded self and taking it out on you. I will stay with you until you feel better."

You stay with your painful feelings until you can feel that they are releasing and are ready to move through you. Once they are released, then you can do some inner learning by exploring how you might have contributed to the problems with your own controlling behavior. Once you fully understand your part of the relationship problems, then you can open to learning about what else would be loving to you.

At this point, loving yourself means doing something that fills you up – such as doing something creative, spending time with good friends, going to a 12-Step meeting, reading a good book, listening to beautiful music, doing exercise you love, or whatever else is fun and fulfilling for you.

I hope you start learning to love yourself through rejection rather than continuing to reject and abandon yourself.

Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships."

Join IBVillage and receive compassionate help and support for learning to love yourself.

Photo by Noah Siliman