Welcome to Life Unedited,
The Power of Radical Acceptance.
28 Theories of Living in Reality.
This is a series of practical strategies to use in life through the lens of reality,
For changing obstacles into opportunities.
I'm Tiffany and this is Theory 18.
Rejection.
What if I said there is no such thing as rejection?
I know it sounds wildly unpopular,
Yet when we sit in a seat of reality,
It is true,
And that truth is powerful.
The concept of rejection is dependent on expectation,
Taking things personally,
And judgment.
Culturally,
We as a society believe we have the right to expect things of others.
One of the stories we tell ourselves is that people in our lives are expected to be there for us.
Then when they do not show up in the manner we expect them to,
Or they fade from our lives for whatever reason,
That means they rejected us.
Think back to when you were in elementary school.
On Monday,
You played with your best friend Billy at recess.
On Tuesday,
Billy played with Tommy and Sally while you swung on the swings with your new best friend Cindy.
As children,
We had not yet learned the concepts of expectation or rejection.
We happily went about our day by playing and sitting by any number of our peers.
Life just was.
We did not question when people came and went from our lives.
It had nothing to do with us.
As we grow into adolescence and adulthood,
The fundamental nature of our understanding of relationships changes because they become shrouded in spoken and unspoken expectations.
We learn to expect loyalty,
Longevity,
And consistency.
We no longer accept that people come and go.
We think that they are always supposed to be there.
We expect that they will.
No one is promised to us for a lifetime.
During these years,
We also look back on our lives seeking answers,
Reasons,
Or people to blame for why we are the way we are,
Behave the way we behave,
Or why our lives are not the way we imagine that they should be.
Maybe we grew up with an absent or barely there parent,
Struggled with relationships with our mother and still do not speak,
Or our best friends started being friends with someone else.
We say that we were abandoned by our absent parent,
That our mother could not accept us,
Or that we were not enough for our best friend.
All forms of perceived rejection or abandonment.
All relationships that were not promised to us for a lifetime.
We expected our parents to be present in our lives.
We expect our mothers to be close and loving.
We expect our friends to be loyal and consistent.
We take it personally.
When we judge our past on what we believe was supposed to have happened,
How things should have been,
Or should be,
How people ought to have behaved,
We are arguing with reality.
Our rejection of reality is based on our own story of how we expect people to be.
Things happen the way they did,
And people behaved the way they behave.
That is true,
And it has nothing to do with us.
The only expectations we can realistically have are for ourselves,
Because we are the only ones who can choose to fulfill them in the manner we desire.
An ego steps in,
Making it about us.
We take it personally.
What did I do wrong?
What could I have done differently?
I must not have been enough for them.
It's not you,
It's me,
Is a true statement.
It is their decision,
Based on their life experience,
And has nothing to do with us.
It is a reflection of them,
Not a rejection of us.
People come and go in our lives.
That is reality.
Relationships do not come with time frames.
Can it hurt when they end?
Absolutely.
It is hard and sad and uncomfortable when people end relationships and or grow or drift apart.
That is not a rejection of us.
It simply means the relationship has ended.
Rejection is not something someone does to us.
And an even deeper truth is this.
The feeling of rejection is a projection of us rejecting ourselves in that moment.
