Rejection is more powerful than you think
In the
brain it registers like physical pain
Rejections can cause four distinct psychological wounds, the
severity of which depends on the situation and our emotional health at the
time. Specifically, rejections elicit emotional pain so sharp it affects our
thinking, floods us with anger, erodes our confidence and self-esteem, and
destabilizes our fundamental feeling of belonging.
Many of the rejections we experience are comparatively mild
and our injuries heal with time. But when left untreated, even the wounds
created by mild rejections can become “infected” and cause psychological
complications that seriously impact our mental well-being. When the rejections
we experience are substantial, the urgency of treating our wounds with
emotional first aid is far greater. This not only minimizes the risk of
“infections” or complications but also accelerates our emotional healing
process. In order to administer emotional first aid and successfully treat the
four wounds rejection causes, we need a clear understanding of each of them and
a full appreciation of how our emotions, thought processes, and behaviors are
damaged when we experience rejections.
Emotional
Pain: Why Even Stupid Rejections Smart a Lot
Imagine you’re sitting in a waiting room with two other
strangers. One of them spots a ball on the table, picks it up, and tosses it to
the other. That person then smiles, looks over, and tosses the ball to you.
Let’s assume your tossing and catching abilities are up to the task. You toss
the ball back to the first person, who quickly tosses it to the second. But
then instead of tossing the ball to you, the second person tosses it back to
the first person, cutting you out of the game. How would you feel in that
situation? Would your feelings be hurt? Would it affect your mood? What about
your self-esteem?
Most of us would scoff at the idea. Two strangers didn’t
pass me a stupid ball in a waiting room, big deal! Who cares? But when
psychologists investigated this very situation, they found something quite
remarkable. We do care, far more than we realize. The ball tossing scenario is
a well-researched psychology experiment in which the two “strangers” are
actually research confederates. The “subject” (who thinks they are all waiting
to be called for an entirely different experiment) always gets excluded after the
first or second round of ball tossing. Dozens of studies have demonstrated that
people consistently report feeling significant emotional pain as a result of
being excluded from the ball-tossing game.
What makes these findings remarkable is that compared to
most of the rejections we experience in life, being excluded by two strangers
tossing a ball is about as mild as rejection gets. If such a trivial experience
can elicit sharp emotional pain (as well as drops in mood and even self-esteem)
we can begin to appreciate how painful truly meaningful rejections often are.
That is why getting dumped by someone we’re dating, getting fired from our job,
or discovering that our friends have been meeting up without us can have such a
huge impact on our emotional well-being.
Indeed, what separates rejection from almost every other
negative emotion we encounter in life is the magnitude of the pain it elicits.
We often describe the emotional pain we experience after a significant
rejection as analogous to being punched in the stomach or stabbed in the chest.
True, few of us have actually been stabbed in the chest, but when psychologists
asked people to compare the pain of rejection to physical pains they had
experienced, they rated their emotional pain as equal in severity to that
associated with natural childbirth and cancer treatments! As a counterpoint,
consider that other emotionally painful experiences, such as intense
disappointment, frustration, or fear, while highly unpleasant, pale in
comparison to rejection when it comes to the sheer visceral pain they cause.
But why do rejections hurt so much more than other emotional
wounds?
The answer lies in our evolutionary past. Humans are social
animals; being rejected from our tribe or social group in our pre-civilized past
would have meant losing access to food, protection, and mating partners, making
it extremely difficult to survive. Being ostracized would have been akin to
receiving a death sentence. Because the consequences of ostracism were so
extreme, our brains developed an early-warning system to alert us when we were
at risk for being “voted off the island” by triggering sharp pain whenever we
experienced even a hint of social rejection.
In fact, brain scans show that the very same brain regions
get activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain.
Remarkably, the two systems are so tightly linked that when scientists gave
people acetaminophen (Tylenol) before putting them through the dastardly
ball-tossing rejection experiment, they reported significantly less emotional
pain than people who were not given a pain reliever. Sadly, other negative
emotions like embarrassment do not share these characteristics, rendering
Tylenol ineffective when we get the date wrong for our office Halloween party
and show up to work dressed like Marge Simpson.
From Emotional First Aid by Guy Winch, Ph.D. Reprinted by
arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A
Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Guy Winch, Ph.D., 2013.
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