Dealing With Rejection & Disconnection

In today's session with Alexandra Solomon, you will explore the challenging emotions and experiences of rejection and disconnection, and how to transform them. Alexandra's approach creates a safe space where you can heal, reconnect with your true self, and embrace you inherent worthiness. This ultimately leads to personal growth, self-acceptance, and the restoration of authentic connection with others.

Transcript

Love is a classroom.

Dating,

Falling in love,

Making love,

Fighting,

Forgiving,

Building a life together.

These are some of the most powerful teachers on the planet,

Offering us lessons about trust,

Vulnerability,

And empathy.

Loving and being loved holds the power to grow us and heal us,

Making us into kinder and wiser versions of ourselves.

But not until and unless we commit to practicing self-awareness so we understand who we've been,

Who we are,

And who we want to be.

For decades,

I lived with a kind of split inside of me.

I am nerdy,

Like homework is literally a joy nerdy.

I'm also somebody who's fascinated by love and sex and pleasure.

I'm an 80s girl,

Which means that on Sunday nights,

I would sneak off into my room with my walkman and hide under my covers so I could listen to pioneering sex educator Dr.

Ruth Westheimer.

And all of my pleasure reading as I was growing up was quite literally pleasure reading because I opted for romance novels and I read those steamy sex scenes again and again,

Captivated by the physical and emotional intensity of all of it.

But I felt clear these parts of me needed to stay separate.

The good girl,

The bad girl,

The proud girl,

The shameful girl.

Perhaps in an unconscious effort to mend this split,

I grew up to become a psychologist who specializes in love,

Sex,

And marriage.

But clinical training in human sexuality from my own field went like this.

Once you get the couple to argue less and communicate more effectively,

The sex will follow.

End of training.

I'm not kidding.

This message reinforced in me the idea that conversations about love are over here and conversations about the erotic are over here.

Respectable,

Unmentionable.

I can stand before you as a clinician,

A professor,

A wife,

Mother,

Friend,

Sharing this vulnerable truth because here's what I've come to realize.

I'm far from alone in my journey to integrate my erotic self with the rest of me.

I teach a popular undergraduate course at Northwestern University called Building Loving and Lasting Relationships,

Marriage 101.

And some of my students are well on their way to cultivating sexual and relational self-awareness,

And their journeys teach,

Inspire,

And embolden me.

But for every revolutionary I have,

I have so many students who are some of the smartest people on the planet,

But whose erotic knowledge lags far behind.

Male students who tell me the vast majority of their sex education was provided to them by Pornhub because they were ashamed of their questions and afraid that admitting not knowing would mean they were somehow not man enough.

And female students who tell me the idea that sex ought to feel good for them is a novel concept,

And who can't imagine talking to a partner about pleasure for fear of being perceived as hypersexual or controlling.

And for many of my students,

The conversations about sexuality that happen in my classroom end up being the first sex education I've had that's not shrouded in messages about sin and danger or focused solely on what not to do.

Our conversations about sex tend to get stuck at that place of good-bad,

Right-wrong,

Clean-dirty.

When that happens,

We all end up without the information that we need and that we deserve.

Only 50% of the high schools in America cover all 16 topics that the Centers for Disease Control have deemed to be an adequate sex education.

When shown a diagram of the external female genitalia,

Only half of college-age women and only a quarter of college-age men can accurately identify 80% of the anatomy.

Less than 5% of LGBT students have health education classes that show positive representations of LGBT topics.

These glaring knowledge gaps travel with us into adulthood,

And many of us,

Quite understandably,

Struggle to talk even to our own partners about sex.

Research done with heterosexual couples who'd been together for over a decade found that partners could identify only about 60% of what their partner likes sexually and only about 20% of what they didn't like sexually.

As a therapist,

I'm always listening for what's not being said.

And when it comes to the topic of sexuality,

Our silences are deafening,

And they're problematic,

And talking helps.

A brand-new meta-analytic review found that being able to talk to your partner about sex is tied to all kinds of good stuff.

Sexual desire,

Sexual arousal,

Erectile function,

Lubrication,

Orgasm,

And experiencing less pain during sex.

Couples who enjoy the love they make are happier in their relationships,

Happier overall,

And more likely to stay together.

It's time for a love revolution.

We need to reimagine,

Co-author,

And enact new stories about love,

Sex,

And intimacy that are guided not by shame,

Silence,

Disconnection,

But instead by curiosity,

Compassion,

And authenticity.

This love revolution,

It begins as an inside job by reflecting on your relationship to relationships,

How you do love,

Your strengths,

Your patterns,

Your tendencies,

Your blind spots.

Because the more self-aware you are,

The better you can weather the storms inevitably brought by love.

But your self-awareness will be incomplete unless you honor and likely heal the relationship you have with this tender,

Complicated part of you,

Your erotic self.

This love revolution begins at the beginning by thinking about how you even learned about sex in the first place,

Because those early messages and experiences leave a lingering imprint that shapes your relationship to your sexuality.

What you were given by the generation that came before you,

That's your inheritance.

What you impart to the next generation,

That's your legacy.

For a whole lot of us,

An inheritance of sexual shame blocks connection to ourselves and to our partners.

As James Baldwin said,

Not everything that is faced can be changed,

But nothing can change until it is faced.

So naming the impact of those early messages about sexuality is a vital first step towards shedding shame and claiming wholeness.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures,

Which renders impossible the notion of meaningless sex.

We bring into the bedroom our deeply human stuff,

Our yearnings,

Our longings,

Our hopes,

Our triggers,

Our fears,

Our wounds.

So our best and bravest work is to turn toward the meaning and the emotion that accompanies the behavior,

With nothing short of total self-compassion and curiosity.

This love revolution is going to require us to rethink our collective relationship to the big O,

Orgasm.

It's time for us to stop conflating pleasure and orgasm,

Because you can have a pleasurable sexual experience without an orgasm,

And because an orgasm is an involuntary muscle contraction,

You can have an orgasm without experiencing pleasure.

Many of us bring a sort of goal-oriented mindset into the bedroom with us,

And we act as if the orgasm,

Our partner's or our own,

Is like a little gold star upon our foreheads.

Mm-hmm.

When we focus so much on the destination,

We risk missing out on the beautiful,

Intimate stuff that happens on the journey.

While orgasm isn't everything,

It is definitely something.

And when researchers ask,

How likely are you to reach orgasm during a sexual experience,

The findings point us in a troubling and elucidating direction.

There's an orgasm gap,

And it's gendered.

There's not much difference in orgasm frequency between men who are with men and men who are with women.

There's a significant difference in orgasm frequency between women who are with women and women who are with men.

The orgasm gap between straight men and straight women does not happen because men are lousy lovers.

Those men with men are doing just fine.

Thank you very much.

But something is amiss when a man and a woman go to bed together,

And I submit to you that something is the highly gendered stories that we've been told about the roles we're allowed to play behind closed doors.

Let me break it down.

In psychology,

We talk about two modalities of existence,

Two sorts of ways of being in the world,

Agency and communion.

Agency is about getting stuff done,

Acting on the world,

Leadership,

Assertiveness,

Pursuit.

Communion is about relationship maintenance,

Tending,

Nurturing,

Caregiving.

So our culture's predominant love story casts men in a role of agency.

He asks her out,

He pays,

He proposes,

He leads the action in the bedroom.

The same love story casts her in a role of communion.

Hang back,

Quiet down,

Wait,

Be pleasing,

Take care of him and his feelings.

This very narrow storyline,

It keeps all of us from living out one half of our full humanity.

There are definitely signs of progress everywhere,

But we do still live in a world that punishes men for tenderness and emotionality and women for ambition and assertiveness.

This is a problem that plays out both in the streets and in the sheets because joyful sex rests on both partners being able to access both agency and communion.

But the cool part is,

The moment that one person steps out of that role,

Potential is created for the entire narrative arc to shift.

I'll give you an example.

A student of mine was telling me about a recent hookup.

She was making out with this guy,

And he said,

Do you want me to take off your shirt?

And she did what she's always done.

She shrugged her shoulders.

So far,

He is in a role of agency,

He's taking the lead,

And she's in a role of communion,

She's following along.

These two are enacting the culture's predominant sexual script like a couple of champs.

But here's the twist.

In response to her shrug,

He stops kissing her and he looks at her and he says,

Uh-uh,

I'm not taking off your shirt until and unless you tell me that you want me to take off your shirt.

And this,

My friends,

Is how we smash 10,

000 years of patriarchy.

In that moment,

What he did was flow right from agency into communion.

He attuned himself to her.

And his declaration invited her to step into something far more agentic.

Do I want my shirt taken off?

Instead of enacting a sequence in a knee-jerk sort of a way,

She tells me that in that moment,

Her previous ceiling becomes her new floor,

And from here on out,

She commits herself to only entering into sexual spaces with partners who view sex the same way that she now does.

It's a deeply co-constructive process founded in both emotional attunement and conscious choice.

Awareness.

Bringing awareness to our love lives is about pausing and checking in with ourselves,

Getting clear on what's motivating us.

I think when you boil it all down,

There are really only two motivators,

The energy of love and the energy of fear.

Saying yes because I want to say yes,

That's the energy of love.

Saying yes because I'm afraid of the consequences that might accompany my no,

That's the energy of fear.

Saying no because I checked in with myself and that choice isn't aligned with who I am or who I want to be,

That's the energy of love.

Saying no because I'm afraid of how you'll perceive me if I say yes,

That's the energy of fear.

So when you stand at a fork in the road,

A choice point,

Start checking in with yourself.

Learn how the energy of love and the energy of fear feel inside of your body and cultivate relationships that are rich with heartfelt yeses and loving no's.

The young woman in our story was a straight-A student who had not internalized this idea that she was entitled to checking in about her own motivation.

Why?

I think a big part is that because girls and women are so heavily sexualized,

They often struggle to feel sexual.

Being sexualized is an outside-in experience,

The result of having been told again and again who and how you're supposed to be.

Being sexual is an inside-out experience,

One that starts with connection to self.

And for a woman especially,

That connection to her sexual self may be blocked by a lack of basic information about her own body.

And that lack of basic information about her own body is the result of the fact that our culture has been rather willfully ignorant about female sexuality for a long time,

And we don't get answers to the questions that we don't ask.

For years,

Those who held the question-asking power opted not to inquire about the centerpiece of female sexual pleasure.

Are you ready?

The clitoris.

The clitoris was omitted from many medical anatomy textbooks until really recently.

And it wasn't until June 1998,

Barely 20 years ago,

That the Australian urologist,

Dr.

Helen O'Connell,

Published her research,

Which for the first time ever mapped the full anatomy of the clitoris.

The glands is the part that's visible from the outside of a woman's body,

But the structure extends into the labia and toward the pubic bone.

The artist Sophia Wallace,

Who created the installment ClitoriSea,

Says it this way,

The clitoris is not a button,

It's an iceberg.

And the data that 50% of otherwise healthy women struggle with sexual desire suddenly makes 100% sense.

It's tragic that a woman would make personal a problem so clearly rooted in sexism and contempt for the feminine.

And it's infuriating that her partner would feel inadequate when that partner has been given neither the information nor the encouragement about how to engage with female sexuality.

This love revolution,

It's one in which we relate to our bodies,

Whatever our gender,

With fierce,

Unapologetic self-compassion,

Which is hard because there's a convergence between this lack of information and the fact that whole industries are built on selling us the idea that our bodies are not OK as they are.

Think weight loss programs and anti-aging products and Instagram filters and on and on.

It's easy to feel like you are at war with your own flesh,

Making lovingly and fully inhabiting your body revolutionary indeed.

This war is one that has real-world consequences because research has found the more a woman struggles with body image challenges,

The less likely she is to do what she needs to do to care for her sexual health.

And the more a man struggles with body image challenges,

The more likely he is to report sexual dissatisfaction for a whole lot of us.

There's another variable in this already complicated mix.

The National Sexual Violence Resource Center says that one in three women and one in six men are survivors of some kind of sexual violence.

And we know from the field of trauma science that trauma creates a disconnect between self and body,

And that recovery from trauma is a process of reclamation,

Taking back your relationship to your body.

For all of us,

This journey home to our bodies is one that grounds us in ourselves and readies us for connection.

And that space of feeling both grounded and connected is a space of sexual healing indeed.

Your sexuality,

It's a dynamic and unfolding story.

Who you were sexually at 18 is different than 38 and 58 and 88,

Which means that your erotic knowledge will need to be constantly updated.

And in an intimate relationship,

There are three sexualities,

Mine,

Yours,

And ours,

And each of those is a moving target.

Our work is to meet the changes with curiosity,

Not resistance.

So instead of saying our sex life isn't what it used to be,

Couples need to stand shoulder to shoulder,

Looking together at their love story,

And saying what is it that each of us wants and needs in order to enjoy our erotic world together.

You get to determine your love legacy.

Trust that the work of self-awareness is a worthy endeavor.

Be brave enough to listen to what your erotic self longs to say.

Meet your questions about love,

Sex,

And intimacy with the care those questions so richly deserve.

Honoring this part of you deepens self-love,

So you can live as a home to yourself,

And it opens you to connection,

So you can live as a home to another,

Making love,

Not fear,

Your compass north.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Reviews

Excellent alternative deep and useful perspective on managing the thoughts and feelings of rejection. Thank you! I needed this after being ignored after casual sex. It hurts. Connects with previous wounds of not fitting in from a young age. Is hard to manage. Your approach was inspired and insightful.

Your recording on rejection and acceptance was life-changing. The writing exercises were very helpful. Thank you for this gift!

Thank you! 🙏🏼❤️💫

Helped to regroup my feelings about a friend/lover!!I feel abandoned ➡️✈️

Awesome class. Really helped me get through a difficult rejection of a long-time friend. Highly advise this to others.

Great thank you I learnt alot by writing things down ❤

Helpful to reframe from the 3rd person and recognize how I downplayed rejection.

Thank you so much on a different layout session on what we do in 12Step programs a Step 4. He rejection hurts so much jet once again I'm closer to acceptance and your guided exercise made it a well worth experience. I'm sorry I missed Day 1 but so grateful to myself for joining. Thank you 🙏🏻 Thank you 🙏🏻