By Elayne Savage, PhD
Image by Joshua Willson from Pixabay
Not at all surprising that Donald Trump and JD Vance get all upset by being called “weird.
In fact I’m hearing from colleagues, friends and clients about how recent political behaviors are bringing up painful childhood memories of criticism, insults, accusations, taunts, lashing out, teasing, blaming, baiting or manipulating.
When Rejection Feels Like Self-Rejection and Feels Like Shame
I know very well what it’s like to grow up feeling ‘different’ or ‘defective’ or ‘weird.
Hearing he word 'weird' brings back many negative growing up memories of feeling less-than and unaccepted and left out by peers. I used to compare myself and feel self-conscious.
As a teen I often felt different from my peers – I lived in a small-ish house on a gravel road and wore hand-me-down clothes. I was often comparing myself to my schoolmates and coming up short.
As a child I moved so much that I had to constantly be trying to adjust to a new culture, new rules and new ways.
When I was nine, we moved from Washington, D.C. to Omaha, then back east to Baltimore when I was a senior in high school. I attended three grade schools and two high schools.
I remember feeling as if I were on the outside looking in, as if I didn’t belong anywhere.
One of the clearest memories I have of feeling left out was the first day of school in eighth grade.
This was a week or so after the plane crash that killed my mother and grandmother and their photos had been all over the newspapers.
I remember, about a week after the accident, the first day of the school term walking across the playing field toward the inner schoolyard. Students were clustered together but as soon as they spotted me, they stopped talking.
I just knew they had been talking about me, feeling sorry for me.
I remember feeling so different from everyone else, so alone, as if I was the only person in the world without a mother.
I felt so left out, ‘different’ ‘defective’ and yes, ‘weird.’ (And what a shock it was to learn decades later at a high school class reunion I learned that two other classmates had lost their mothers too! And each of us thought we were the only one without a mother!)
As you may guess, over the years feeling left out has triggered strong reactions for me.
Mostly I was feeling rejected—sometimes even abandoned and I began to pay attention to what was happening.
First, I learned to recognize when those “left out” feelings begin to take over. Putting words to my feelings helped define the situation for me.
Understanding this process changed the way I was able to respond to overwhelming situations. Now it’s easier to keep my balance and my composure.
It helps when I ask myself a few questions here:
- Am I taking this personally? How?
- Is there any cause for me to feel threatened?
- Am I feeling rejected in some way? Judged? Criticized?
- Is this an old message?
- Where did this reaction come from?
I was able to take a moment and consider how much energy it is taking dwell on something so much.
And I ask myself, “Do I really want to put so much time and energy into this?”
So ‘walking alongside myself’ and noticing and naming this process allows space for:
- recognizing options and making choices
- learning your blind spots—if you can't see it, you can't change it
- surveying the past — re-labeling works wonders
- transferring skills from one area to another
- grieving your rejection and disappointment losses, and moving forward
By ‘noticing’ we are able to begin to identify and manage painful feelings of rejection that threaten to immobilize us. It may be an old feeling we recognize. It may even be the same one that caused so much confusion in childhood.
It helps to remember that we can choose to stay immersed in this childhood pain — or we can make an effort to invite in our adult perspective.
I keep reminding myself that I do have a choice, I can begin to feel in control of it — instead of allowing it to control me.
I Wouldn’t Talk to Someone Else the Way I Talk to Myself –
Self-Rejecting Messages
I hear these reflections all the time from both psychotherapy and workplace clients:
“I’m pathetic. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me.”
“I’m really different from other people.”
“There’s something wrong with me.”
or . . . “I’m kind of weird.”
A man I know confides “When something goes wrong, I call myself terrible names. I see myself as some defective thing. I feel flawed, like something’s missing.”
So let’s focus on the way in which these self-rejecting messages manifest themselves in our daily lives and how they’ve come to control our behaviors.
“I’d Like Myself Better If I Could Just Be Someone Else”
We often spend our days thinking about how much better life would be if only we could be smarter, more attractive, taller, more witty, and on and on.
Are you really saying to yourself that you’re not good enough the way you are? Self-rejecting messages come in all shapes and sizes, just like the people who are thinking them.
How Self-Deprecating Can You Get?
What kinds of things do you tell yourself about yourself? Do you find fault with your looks? Do you think your ears are too big or too small? Your nose? Your chin? Are you always having a bad hair day?
Besides the physical messages, there might be a bunch of psychological messages you tell yourself too—such as calling yourself “stupid” for missing a turnoff on the freeway, or “idiot” for leaving home without those letters you meant to mail.
Then there may be some social self- rejecting messages, such as feeling socially inept or unsophisticated — the “I can’t believe I said that (or did that)” variety.
The Big Blow-Up — Overgeneralizing
Another man calls himself names whenever he makes even a small mistake. If he accidentally spills even a small drop of food on his shirt he mutters, “Dunce!” He’s overgeneralizing of course—blowing things way out of proportion.
Perhaps it’s true you made a mistake in a specific situation, but when you start to tell yourself you always make mistakes, and that you’re stupid for making mistakes, you’re overgeneralizing.
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda . . .
This brings us to the “shoulds”—those self-critical, second-guessing messages such as “I should have done it better, differently, more gracefully, more quietly, more quickly, more perfectly.”
What about cutting some slack and lightening up about those “shoulds”? Maybe you can practice telling yourself, “This isn’t a should-have-done, it’s a might-do-later.”
Hindsight is a great learning tool if you can refrain from flagellating yourself with the “shoulds.” Why not ask, “What did I learn from this? How can I do this differently next time?”
“Should have” is about the Past. “Next time” is about the Future.
Try Saying ‘Thank You!’
Accepting compliments is an important step on the road to self-acceptance.
By rejecting compliments we’re also rejecting ourselves. Many of us put a lot of energy into not letting compliments in or pushing them away. We excel at making excuses or habitual self-deprecating responses.
Sometimes we can’t even hear the words when something positive is being said to us. I became aware I’d see someone’s mouth moving but no words were coming out.
I finally figured out that perhaps something nice was being said to me, but I sure wasn’t letting it come in.
If we don’t feel accepted enough in childhood, as adults we may spend way too much energy seeking signs of caring.
While part of us keeps hoping that we’ll magically receive the love we want from others, another part still expects that people will disappoint us.
And disappointment too often feels like rejection.
Early Messages Become Your Beliefs About Yourself and Your World
and the People In It
How you explained these hurt feelings in childhood, and what you told yourself when these experiences occurred, constitutes the messages you carry into your adult years.
These messages become your beliefs about yourself and your world and the people in it, affecting your ability to trust and feel safe and secure... or not.
And too often we find ourselves holding on to these old beliefs.
I know it sounds weird, but maintaining these negative expectations actually serves a useful purpose, offering a kind of security because they’re familiar and giving a sense of order and organization to our experiences.
Without this sense of order we feel unbalance and confused. It is often easier to hold on to an old belief than to change it
Here’s why:
If we threaten the beliefs we’ve developed about ourselves, it could throw us off balance, so we learn not to allow new information in.
New is risky. If we dare to let in favorable stuff from others, we might risk anxiety.
The bottom line is that we’re more comfortable with our old beliefs. I know a screenwriter who says she is so used to rejection that she actually gets anxious when a producer likes her work. Acceptance is so foreign to her, it makes her nervous.
Because of this need to feel ‘comfortable,’ we often develop a system that filters messages. We become selective about what we take in from others. From the time we’re little we learn to filter out messages that could threaten our belief system and upset our sense of order and organization. And how do we filter? By blocking or distorting messages.
We not only block out positive messages, but we add a constant stream of negative messages as well, audio distortions that sound like “you’re bad” or “not good enough” or “not smart enough” or “weird.”
One of the most basic tools I know for practicing self-acceptance is to practice accepting compliments from others. For example, when a compliment is offered to you, what about responding with a simple, “Thank you”?
What about practicing saying “thank you?” Accepting a compliment is an important first step toward self-acceptance. But for some of us, it takes lots of practice until we find a way to get comfortable with it.
(More or less from Don’t Take It Personally! The Art of Dealing with Rejection)
© Elayne Savage, PhD
Until next month
Elayne