Blogpost 7: Understanding Rejection

People have always known that rejection sucks. But have they always known why they are being rejected? We were always taught to behave nicely and be good so that people will accept us. But no matter how good we do, rejection keeps on reaching you.
I found an article entitled "Rejection: A Loser's Guide" by  Adoree Durayappah in the website "psycologytoday". According to the article, The human mind is said to always find a reasonable explanation for the situations it faces. If people reject you constantly, you should think of the following: They are jealous of you, they are afraid of you, they are currently interested in someone else, they’re ignoring you back, they unintentionally are ignoring you, and you have done something unknowingly against them. These are the things that probably gave reason as to why they don’t like you.

In my opinion, definitely, rejecting is never a good thing. When rejected, we feel and view ourselves as passive, unable to do anything. Rejection deals greater with our psychology even greater when we break it down. First, we are stunned and disoriented. Then, we get this feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. And if lucky, you get to feel better again after a short period of time. For some people, they remain in the hopelessness stage, wherein depression starts to arise.

Moreover, it is found that unexpected social rejection is associated with the nervous system and basically makes the rejected’s heart rate fall. And in different scenarios of being rejected, the heart fall down different heart rates. This includes different forms of rejections such as experiencing an outcome unfavourable to what you anticipated and hear negative points instead of postivie opinions.

Another article entitled "Dealing with rejection" by Farouk Radwan in the website "2knowmyself". It is mentioned in the article that we are sensitive to rejection, a reason why we take caution especially when socializing. We always look for acceptance and belongingness. In my opinion, There are people who is  not good with dealing with loss or that feeling of being rejected. One reason is said to be that people tend to view the significance of something lost than it be gained. 

Derived from here is most likely the reason why you never find out how important something is until it is lost. This brings us to the Prospect Theory. It says that people make realistic decision and risk than be simply practical.

Interestingly, rejection is also the reason why we try to not make the same mistakes or at least be reluctant to take risks. Learned helplessness theory, the act of not responding to open opportunities, has proven that people would rather be idle that be hurt as whatever these people do would be ineffective anyway. We would often feel that what we did was so wrong it did not produce what we want to happen.  This also happens even if we do not act, sometimes being just an observer to other who experience uncontrollable events trigger our state of being “helpless”

Moreover, we also get to the point when we realize that we will fail even before starting, thus we would try less to avoid being rejected. Ironically, this idea is the exact reason why we would most likely fail. Not because of being such a pessimist but the exact effort we put in what we’ll do. A research showed that the belief of succeeding or failing influences how much effort we use. The level of how hard the individual performed depends on if he or she thinks will fail or otherwise.

Lastly, these sudden events bring us to catastrophizing, wherein we make an even bigger deal out of what we just experienced. Individuals who catastrophize and who tend to irrationally fear bad events, consequences, even death, are more likely to die from accidents or violent death. Knowing these things are enough for you to realize and understand what will happen the next time you got rejected. Thus I say, before you learn to be helpless, try to act to prevent further damage to your self and to damage others.