Today we are doing a “Q&A” grab-bag…
QUESTION:
“Hi David –
Three weeks ago I was in the library. When I entered to buy a ticket for a play, a girl that worked there laughed in a sarcastic way and said “why you are looking like that” (or something like that).
I felt destroyed. Especially because she didn’t know me and nothing was wrong with me or with my appearance. I asked my friends and they said that there is nothing wrong.
Can you help me understand what happened if it is not a kind of rejection?”
MY ANSWER:
Why yes I can help you understand that. I’d be happy to. :)
First off – the only reason why we feel rejected or suffer fear of rejection is from ourselves. It is just the way it works, only we hurt ourselves with our own thinking.
Anything else is disempowering and self-victimizing.
If you see what I am saying as harsh or mean…it simply means you are further making a victim of yourself, innocently I might add.
We can only feel our thought-based experience. We never, ever feel what someone does to us, or some event that happens outside of us – as much as it may look to us that it happens that way. It just doesn’t.
Anything else is a total misunderstanding of how we experience life psychologically, and we have no power from this position.
Until you get on board with that, you will suffer rejection.
You will be a victim of your circumstances (like most of the world is). Hey I used to be like that too, and sometimes I still do fall into that mindset.
But because I have seen time and again from inside my own experience the truth of this, I bounce back quickly.
Once you look how this is actually true for all of us, you will really become free of being constantly affected by rejection of any kind.
Because all rejection is self-rejection.
It doesn’t matter if someone thought there was something wrong or not. It sounds to me like maybe you had a strange look on your face, but I really can’t say because I wasn’t there to coach you.
Said another way, the meaning that we make about generates our experience of life/rejection/suffering/happiness.
It is something we are very much in control of.
You could have reacted in many different ways.
You could have laughed it off and made a joke.
You could have attacked her verbally.
You could have made a really funny face at her.
You could have been totally indifferent and ignored it completely.
I am not saying any of these reactions, including the one of self-rejection that you had, are any better than the other. They are just different.
The question is how do you want to be?
How do you want your life to be?
The key is that all these reactions stem from the mindset, and if you get that how to behave takes care of itself so much more naturally.
And the social anxiety won’t even be there (or very little).
Look we are all human and experience negative shit sometimes.
But there’s this idea that we always have to feel bad, or feel negative.
That rejection is normal.
Feeling rejected isn’t normal actually, feeling good is.
Social conditioning would have us believe different.
Time to recondition yourself (only if you want to, it’s up to you.)
