JW: On the Fear of Rejection

I'm not sure it matters where it came from; it's here, with me every step of the way and, if I read things right, it's something we share. And yet, we've embarked on a journey involving more possibilities for rejection. That seems like an odd thing to do unless we treat it as one of the hazards ... the trials along the way to greater self understanding and that illusive boon we've sought together. So as fear and confusion battled sleep tonight, I finally gave up and decided to write through this.

Last week, you offered the idea of looking at past relationships from the point of view of why they were chosen and why we were chosen by them ... and yet we did not open up that same query for us and our journey ... why did I choose you? why did you choose me? 

At the time, I thought about it but did not venture into the possibility. Fear. Our friendship has become very precious to me and perhaps that preciousness is increasing the fear of rejection and decreasing the willingness to be vulnerable. That seems to make this topic an important one ... a minefield that needs to be cleared as we walk through it.

I feel particularly challenged since, from the beginning, I have been more emotionally engaged than you and assume I still am. That has created problems that I don't want to keep creating. My understanding of the situation is that I may not be able to control my emotions, but I can control how I act on them and I thought that was working relatively well. Until recently.

Unraveling my decisions to do a month in England and the deep dive into Substack, I think both have been influenced by fear of rejection ... keeping busy and engaged being a coping mechanism for feeling safe or avoiding feeling at all. I enjoyed our time together last week as always but it felt like our conversation bobbed along the surface a little more than normal. That's not an issue ... unless it is a sign that there's something we need to address or are holding back for any reason.

If both of us are subject to the fear of rejection, perhaps we should bring it out into the open and examine it ... not with the idea of trying to fix it, just understand it and how it works with each of us. The idea still terrifies me but what's a hero's journey without a little fear?

I assume this would best be done in Julian.

BTW,  choosing to go on this journey with you is one of the better ones I've made in a long time ... even when I lose sleep over it.😇

Postscript: A new friend and I were walking around campus last night. She is a dog lover and not one dog, close or at a distance, passed without her calling her love to him. I passed it off as a quirk until a few blocks later, and another dog, prompted her story of how she had been forced to leave her dog to be adopted by another family when she moved to Santa Barbara.

 She talked about how much she loved him and he loved her. And, then she shifted to wondering why she couldn't love herself as much as her dog loved her.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that one of the reasons humans love dogs so much is that dogs never, ever reject us. They don't judge us, they don't care how we look, how much we know, how much the world respects us, or what kind of car we drive. All they ask for is our time and attention (plus some food and water.) No wonder we are crazy about them.

Time and attention ... and unconditional regard. Seems like a simple formula. How do we care as much for ourselves as a dog would?

EWR. Well my issues around rejection, which I am only now resurfacing in response to the article I posted, run deep and are long standing and pervasive. I recently re-read a letter I had written to my first girlfriend, Susan, sometime in the middle 1970's. It was a voluminous (19 legal pages), anguished recap of our years together that was infused with a dread of rejection and abandonment. Made all the more poignant because I had written it so long ago and therefore uncontaminated by any tendency to whitewash the memories. 

At this point in my life, it feels somehow easier to unpack the past than encounter the present. I realize though, after reading your comments, that does impose a limit on my willingness to be fully present and “open up”. I don’t know quite what to do with that since I don’t want to cause us to disengage. I also noticed that we were a little more superficial (i.e. distant) on our latest sojourn. 

I was also surprised by “A New Light” from Gratitude Mojo when I realized that you had some experiences that were deeply challenging and had gone through your own version of “dark night of the soul”. For some reason I have tended to see you as “the dyed-in-the wool, rose-colored-glasses, cheerful optimist” that “never came in at less than a 9” on the Richter scale of emotional positivity. 

One thing I noticed about that story was that a friend provided an unexpected portal out of the abyss. When I underwent my own crisis - the time when Floss told me she wanted a divorce-  no one around me was able to offer that portal or, if they did, I was not able to see it. 

Rejection and abandonment are our deepest, primordial fears, which we manage by either clinging or preemptive rejection (I.e I’ll break up with you before you break up with me). One of the more common ways of protecting ourselves (which is almost a cultural cliche) is to not get too close to begin with; the rejection stings less if you can convince yourself that the relationship wasn’t that important. 

I say this speaking as a psychologist, which is my “safe” zone and the place were I can consider things without getting vulnerable and hijacked emotionally by them. So yes, let’s talk about this in Julian

JW: Thanks for this and for the insight about my "always a 9" "mask" (not quite the right word because I might well have a predisposition for this ... or another possibility is that I created it so early I don't know if it's real or made up.) My heart goes out to young Eric who poured out 19 pages of his rejected heart to a long ago Susan.

After my sleepless night of contemplating potential rejection and then writing about it, I feel more connected to myself and to whatever territory this journey takes us to. You say things that make me think ... not just about me, us, or this journey ... but about what I truly want. I've pondered that first line of your rejection post:

The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want, isn’t even knowing what we want, but knowing what to want.

I've tried to believe I know what I want ... it feels like I should know what I want and I should want what the world tells me I should want (to paraphrase the psychologist talking about mothers you mentioned, whose name I never seem to remember.)

Perhaps what I truly want, at least in this present moment, is what we're doing ... digging into our own psyches, walking a lot, talking a lot, and then taking whatever is discovered back into our own overlapping worlds.

It's absolutely true that we might disengage. However, I believe ... I trust ... that if that should become a choice either of us would make, we would do it in the kindest and most generous of ways after a very long, extended conversation. ;-)

I also believe that the most likely way to stay engaged is to continue exploring the territory of our fears, facing our dragons, engaging with our shadows. What you said about no one being around during your dark times is also true of me in mine. I recognize how isolated I was during those times ... not only from others, but also from myself.

I'm still a bit baffled about how we wound up here, but I feel like you and I are both "here" now exploring and helping develop the depth and strength we need to deal with whatever else might come our way. And, perhaps, even finding the boon to share with the world.

You are a gift, and I am fully engaged and committed to this journey, unpredictable and bumpy though it might be.