7 essential coping mechanisms to help you handle rejection.
When a romantic relationship comes to an end, you don’t get the job you wanted or you’re unexpectedly made redundant, it’s normal to feel disappointed. But if your sense of rejection is all-encompassing, it can start to take over your life.
Psychotherapist, broadcaster and health writer Christine Webber explains how to overcome feelings of rejection and come back stronger:
How to deal with rejection
It’s natural to feel unwanted or not good enough after experiencing some sort of rejection. Here are seven ways to help cope with this:
- Open up
Talk about your rejection. Don’t keep this to yourself. Phone a friend. Go and stay with someone you love and trust. Open up to a colleague, or to someone you know has gone through a similar experience.
Communicating your upset, shock and distress to others will help you to deal with it. By talking things through, you will not only feel stronger – but the sense of rejection will gradually lose its power over you.
- Let others help
Let other people look after you and give you hugs and tempt you with nice food. You would do this for someone else – so allow others to take care of you.
- Don’t be so hard on yourself
Don’t push yourself too hard. You may be having to go out to work despite your heartache, or be busy with children or studying, but you really need to build periods of rest into your routine. You are shocked and saddened and your body and mind require time to recover.
- Find time to laugh
Build some laughter into your schedule. Read some amusing articles online. Or carve out half an hour a day to watch some comedy or listen to a podcast that always makes you giggle. Humour restores us to normality.
- Do a good deed
Do three useful things daily for other people. You might find this quite a challenge when you are feeling so bereft yourself. But the fact is that it will really help you to be reminded that you are a decent and kind person. It’s true that you’ve been rejected – but you need to appreciate that you are full of goodness.
Doing good deeds will really help you to be reminded that you are a decent and kind person.
You are not a bad individual just because someone else doesn’t want you. So, do charitable things for others – maybe buy a Big Issue Magazine of a homeless person, smile at someone who looks sad on the bus, or make a donation to a refugee charity. When we extend kindness to others, we feel better about ourselves.
- Remember the positives
Every day, make a note of something about yourself that you like. Again this gets you focusing on your good and positive points rather than what you perceive to be your failure.
- Give mindfulness a go
Finally, try mindfulness. It’s a very useful strategy when life and our emotions overwhelm us. Also, remember that you will recover. As the old cliché goes: ‘time is a great healer’. This is so true – as millions of other people have found. And one day, it will be true of you and your situation too.
Net Doctor