Why REJECTION Hurts So Much - How to Heal the Fear Beneath It

Shelley talks about how the fear of rejection and abandonment can drive relationship struggles, feelings of isolation, and comfort eating.

You’ll understand how experiences of insecure attachment and trauma can come back to affect you later, especially when you’re stressed or going through changes, and why your body reacts to feeling rejected as if it’s a serious danger.

From people-pleasing to overeating, Shelley explains how these deep fears shape our choices, and offers ways to feel safe and trust ourselves again, with somatic and self-regulation strategies.

You’ll also hear a moving personal story of healing through staying with the physical sensations of abandonment, showing how self-awareness and body-based practices can transform emotional pain into resilience. 

You’ll also hear a touching story about healing from feeling abandoned, showing that staying with the physical sensations of abandonment, and listening to our bodies can change our emotional pain into strength.

If you ever felt desperate to keep a relationship, scared of being alone, or have eaten to feel better when lonely, this episode will help you understand what’s really been going on and how to start healing.

Listen to learn: 

• Why fear of rejection feels so intense in our bodies
• How childhood abandonment affects us as adults
• Ways to cope with feeling rejected
• The connection between eating for comfort and not having our emotional needs met.

Your next podcast: Heal Self-Worth Through Embodiment

Citations
Attached - Amir Levine & Rachel S F Heller
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with relational history. You can buy your full training programme here

Transcript

Why Rejection Hurts So Much 

- How to Heal the Fear Beneath It 

Introduction: When Past Trauma Catches Up With You

Today I’m going to be talking about the fear of rejection relative to comfort eating.

Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Stress & Anxiety Recovery Podcast.

But first I want to pass a comment I received on to you:

“I am so glad I came across your blog. As I get older, I find that my past trauma is catching up with me really quickly and all at once.”

I wanted to bring this one in today because it’s so relevant to today’s podcast, but I also want to reassure you that this is a normal experience.

Why Trauma Can Resurface Later in Life

There can be several reasons why trauma can catch up with us later in life, but at least one of them now might be the pandemic.

We were all thrown into a survival response. When the nervous system is triggered, it can bring up other trauma. Not to mention the fact that many of us have been triggered by loss, fear, isolation, and difficulty. Much of this is still going on, and we are still trying to decide if the world is safe for us. So this may have brought up other times when we didn’t feel safe.

Other reasons why your past might catch up with you in later life, include the shame that causes you to keep secrets in the first place. Trauma being too difficult to talk about earlier in life, or being locked in defensive patterns that fall apart when you have a major life change. Many of us act from a place of trauma without realising it for many years.

It can take a lifetime to learn to trust yourself and others after difficult childhood experiences. And sometimes we realise later in life that we are just not living the life we were meant to live. The pandemic, if nothing else, has given us that time to think and to realise these things. So let’s get on with today’s subject…

The Fear of Rejection and Abandonment

Kirkeguard is famously known for saying,

“What we fear most has already happened”

Today I want to talk about the fear of abandonment and rejection because this is a major reason why so many people comfort eat, but particularly during this pandemic. But it’s also a huge reason why people struggle to find a partner and why many people are unhappy in the relationships that they’re in.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the other things I work with is unhappiness about being single or in relationship. I help people to find love through understanding themselves better and becoming more authentic. A fear of rejection is often at the heart of this problem.

I would also say that this has been the number one reason for my comfort eating in life, so I know it’s going to be at the heart of comfort eating and dissatisfaction in relationship for so many of you.

Like I said last week, it can take a while to get your head around the fact that this might be what’s lying deeply underneath your urge to comfort eat or your reason for being single or miserable in relationship. But once you do, it’s so helpful to know that this is what you’re dealing with.

Our Survival Wiring: Why We All Fear Abandonment

The first thing to understand about a fear of rejection is that we all have it because it comes from a survival need.

Ancestrally. We have long needed to group to survive. If you think about living in the jungle or the desert, getting separated from your tribe or your community meant a much earlier death and certainly would’ve been a lonely, terrifying existence. We still have this wired into our nervous systems, so we all fear abandonment.

The second thing to understand is that it is absolutely normal to be left or to experience rejection. It’s a natural part of being human to be left alone for long periods, especially the way we are in community these days. And of course, particularly now with this pandemic, now more than ever, many of us have struggled with this, so we need to find a way to be able to cope with it.

We are all born helpless. We are all in need of secure attachment, so we all have fear of abandonment. The fear of abandonment is really a fear of not surviving, and it’s a fear of rejection. It’s an experience of abandonment, which develops into a fear of abandonment. This is what creates those dreadful stomach wrenching feelings of fear.

It’s in the latter of those two things, in the fear of rejection that we actually have choices, but it’s also that discomfort that can make us sacrifice our health and our boundaries for a quick bit of comfort, whether that may be comfort food or squashing what you really want in favour of pleasing another person.

Living With an Abandonment Mindset

Ironically, if we’re stuck in an abandonment mindset, what happens when we feel that terror binds us even tighter to it? We become obsessed with whether we are being rejected or not. So we orient towards abandonment. We see the world with abandonment glasses where we are unable to see reality. Our view is coloured by the fear of being left. So we only focus on the rejection.

For example, you might have several loving or warm interactions in a day, but you might only focus on the one that worried you. Here we see the world from the question of, am I gonna be rejected? So we’ll only see the thing that went wrong in social situations. The typical experience of the person who is stuck in abandonment mindset is, I hate you, don’t leave me.

We might become overly needy to avoid abandonment or push people away when we feel it coming. We may be clinging to control either in an attempt to control the other person so that they won’t abandon us or to preempt the abandonment by getting there first. This might show itself in jealous fantasies of another’s behavior, or in trying to detach completely and in blocking the other person.

You might recognise this from blocking on Facebook. How many times have you blocked and then unblocked someone you were mad at? Needy behavior means not letting someone be free to enjoy their life and seeing them as someone whose purpose is to meet your needs.

It also shows up in not speaking up about what you really want.

Everyday Examples of Fear of Rejection

For example, if someone asks you to help them with something, but you are already busy, you might say yes. My example this week, (as I said, this one can still trip me up).  I went out for lunch last weekend and I had the most delicious soup, but it was in the tiniest amount, and I was really disappointed with that. I usually, probably, if I was asked by the waitress, if she said, how was your meal? I would probably usually say it was really nice. But to be honest, I was disappointed with the size of it, but there was no way that I was gonna do that this time because I was with somebody who I did not want to disappoint. And it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised that that’s what was happening.

As dramatic as it sounds, we feel on some unconscious primitive level that we won’t survive without this other person. And so we put up with quite a lot. I’m not saying that on a conscious level I thought I wouldn’t survive if I told my waitress that my soup was too small in front of this person I was trying to impress. But it is there somewhere instinctively that I fear I will suffer some great loss that I might not be able to cope with. It is underneath there in the unconscious somewhere.

Developing Inner Safety and Self-Regulation

So we need to develop an internal sense of an attachment object that is safe. We need to develop our own internal reference and sense of loving ourselves enough to be able to handle abandonment, ’cause it does happen! This is where your practice and skills of self-regulation are really needed.

The key to coming out of that experience of helplessness in feeling abandoned is to focus your attention back onto you rather than what the other person might be thinking.

Understanding Your Triggers and Nervous System

Another useful tool is understanding what’s going on in your triggering. As I’ve been talking about for the last couple of weeks, all of us imagine what others are thinking or the intention of others all the time. It’s a normal part of what we do. When there are answers we can’t get, we make it up often. Our default is towards, they don’t like me, but particularly with an insecure attachment history, as I’ve been saying for the last couple of weeks, you see what’s not there.

How to Recognise the Difference Between Past and Present

Adults don’t get abandoned. They get left. Abandonment means probable death, and that’s how we interpret it as babies. Here we start to recognise that the past is affecting our present, and we need to distinguish the difference. So if I say No to you, and you then feel anger or panic, it could be child stuff.

The rational way to deal with this would be to step back to see a broader view, to lower your standards, to recognise that it takes time to get to know someone and to focus on positive interactions. But the reason that’s so hard is because it feels so painful in the body. Your physiological system, your nervous system has been unavoidably triggered into feeling unsafe.

How Rejection Feels in the Body

Think of how you felt this fear of being rejected. It can be a wave of pain, like a gut punch, a feeling of horror and dread or panic.

So first you have to self-regulate. Focus on you, the present, and your skills rather than the outcome or future worry.

See how it is the future that’s worrying you and bring yourself back to yourself right now; your physical symptoms in your body.

If you think about how it feels when you feel rejected, where do you feel it?

Help your brain to see how unrewarding it is to be constantly hypervigilant towards rejection or to be idealising your new beaux, or your job or a group, and slowly unpick what’s happening to you, with the knowledge that your body went into survival mode.

This awareness doesn’t mean that you’ll suddenly feel rejection proof, but it will help you spot it and see the truth better.

A Personal Story of Healing Abandonment

Before I finish on a summary, I want to share with you my experience of some of these things. They are very personal experiences, but I want toshare them with you because it shows the workings of what I’m talking about.

I’ve had a few pivotal moments in my life, and this is one of them. My relationship life has been a gradual development away from feeling insecure, needy, and angry to knowing that I’m lovable and finding love in my life. This experience was life changing for me.

To put it really bluntly, I was in a relationship where I was putting up with a lot of crap! I was fortunate at the time to have a mentor who encouraged me to stay with the physical experience of what I was going through. I understood that this related to my feelings of abandonment from my childhood, but I hadn’t actually realised the extent or the experience of how much I was scared of that.

So she encouraged me to just stay with the feelings and it took me a while to work up to it, but I did it!

And I remember one night, overnight, I think it took me about two hours, I stayed with the physical experience of what that feeling of abandonment was like for me and how terrifying I found it. And I literally shook that night and sweated; it was so uncomfortable.

But that’s all it was. I didn’t die. I did survive, and I did get through it, and I did bear the discomfort. It was so uncomfortable! All that shaking and sweating. It really was terrifying. But that’s all. And then I survived that and thought, well, if that’s as bad as it gets, that’s really all I’m coping with. All I was afraid of in the end was my own physical sensations.

Things have never really been the same since, because I know that’s as bad as it gets.

Gradual Healing: Learning to Tolerate Feeling

So to finish with, in truth, it is a very gradual healing to change and to let go. With early abandonment, we don’t have a sense of self, which is what we need to develop self-regulation and soothing. So we dissociate, and that feels good. Sometimes with food, sometimes with other substances, and sometimes with people.

So we need to learn to tolerate any feeling first. To do this, I’m suggesting you put aside the thoughts and attend to what’s going on in your body. Your body reacted to some feeling of abandonment and maybe in panic. So first, see how your body holds onto it.

Then understand what happens to you when you feel that gut punch of abandonment, so that you can recognise that it belongs in the past and separate it from what’s really going on in the present. Then you can rationalise, like I said in the beginning, you can see and step backwards and see the bigger picture. You can reassess what people are really going through.

You can lower your expectations and your standards because you don’t need people to behave in a certain way for you to be okay. You can recognise that it takes time to get to know someone, and you can focus on positive interactions. You can become less afraid because you understand your internal protector. And you compare and regulate yourself.

Summary and Closing Invitation

Thank you so much for listening. If this podcast touched something for you, please have a look at my relationship pages. You’ll find more resources there. Or watch this podcast next: Heal Self-Worth Through Embodiment