How to Handle Rejection: Emotional First-Aid

Image by Riccardo Dubitante

For a good while, I thought something was wrong with me.

I’ve gone through my fair share of break-ups and had to deal with rejection from a multitude of jobs and opportunities I’d set my heart on in the past.

Especially now during quarantine, things have been feeling pretty low, almost like life is rejection.

I thought there was something wrong with me purely because I felt like I wasn’t able to handle rejection in a more substantial way. Words like, ‘just get over it’ ‘what’s the big deal’ ‘there’s probably something better our there for you anyway’, all constantly running through my head. Oh, and also the favourite after going through a break-up, ‘you should be over this by now’.

No one else was speaking these words to me, but me. I was the only one handing myself deprecating thoughts.

There is no time limit to emotional recovery, it’s different for everyone and each situation is unique.

Guy Winch came to the rescue with what he calls Emotional First-Aid, which is something that we should all be learning from an early age.

He explains that just as a person gets a physical injury, like a cut and we know when is the time to get a band-aid or seek medical help, we need to be giving ourselves the same amount of care and attention for emotional wounds.

Our emotional wellbeing is often overlooked in times of trauma or rejection and break-ups, where we don’t give ourselves the same amount of care and attention we need in order to heal.

Looking through someone’s social media, thinking about what we did wrong and idolising the good times is only a way of deepening the emotional cut.

Rejection is meant to hurt. We are hard-wired to feel pain after rejection. It goes back to a time when we lived in tribes and if we were rejected from the group and had to live on our own, we’d die because we wouldn’t have been able to fend for ourselves. We are not meant to survive on our own, we need people and we need connection.

A way in which we can overcome rejection is to re-affirm self-esteem through self-affirmation. This is different from positive affirmation, mind you. Self-affirmations are designed solely for and personalised to you. It is to remind yourself of what’s great about you, what you’re good at, what makes you unique.

To practice self-affirmation, all you need to do is create a list of things that make you great and then continue to write a paragraph or two, or more if you feel like it, each day until you start to notice a change in your mood.

Remember there is no time limit on how long it takes to heal and it’s totally normal to feel the way you do.

Surround yourself with people who have your best interests at heart.

Catch yourself if your mind starts to wonder or you find yourself doing something that is putting yourself in a bad mood. Gently bring yourself back to focus on what does make you feel good. Re-affirm your sense of self and take each moment by moment.

All will be well.