Fear Of Rejection: This Is How It Isolates Us From Other People
When we think about that facet of our lives that has to do with personal relationships, it is very easy for us to imagine it measuring the number of friends and loved ones that each person has.
However, there is something that is as important or more important than this “count” of the number of habitual relationships we have: to what extent is it likely lose contact with those friends, lovers or people we would like to meet?
The truth is that human beings are predisposed to give more importance to possible losses than to gains; This makes us pay close attention to signs of possible rejection, whether from people with whom we have a close relationship or from someone we would like to get to know more.
However, there are some people who are especially sensitive to rejection, and that is why they fear it and frequently anticipate it, experiencing significant doses of psychological discomfort. The curious thing about this predisposition is that it increases the chances that rejection will actually occur, due to the mechanisms that we will see below.
The idea of people with poorer social skills being rejected for her clumsiness when it comes to communicating and strengthening ties with others is only partly true. It is true that not having a good toolbox to manage your social life makes it easier to end up being more isolated, but this is not inevitable. In fact, many people with difficulties in their relationships are not less agile when it comes to thinking about social interactions, but quite the opposite: they become obsessed with it because of the fear of rejection.
People sensitive to rejection They remain in an almost constant state of alert thinking all the time about pleasing the other person and analyzing the behavior of others for signs of boredom, mockery or anger.
How did they get to that point? Many times it is not due to poor social skills, but rather a series of bad experiences in the past. For example, a very hard breakup or a childhood marked by bullying or other forms of abuse are capable of leading us to a state of social hypervigilance.
Thus, the fear of rejection is a fruit of very worrying expectations about what others require to establish a relationship with them, and this may be caused by past events that were beyond one’s control and the resulting lack of self-esteem.
Why the fear of being rejected isolates us more
The obsession with the possibility of seeing ourselves rejected makes us conceive of relationships as a machine, and not as a space for interaction between two human beings. The reason is that the pressure to not lose that person is so high that they only concentrate on measuring their movements so as not to “cross an imaginary line” that sets off alarms in the other person.
On the other hand, people who fear rejection the most are more likely to interpret any ambiguous action as a sign of rejection, which causes them to adopt a defensive attitude.
In a research carried out on the subject, a questionnaire measuring this psychological characteristic was given to a group of single people and, months later, those who had started a relationship in that period of time were asked to imagine that their partner was doing a series of strange actions, such as spending less time with them, being distant, etc. The results showed that people who feared rejection the most quickly moved on to assume that your relationship was in danger instead of first considering other more reasonable hypotheses.
It has been proven that this pattern of thinking makes people become more hostile more quickly and without needing too many reasons, and they even become more reluctant to admit their mistakes, something paradoxical if one takes into account the fear they have. to the possibility of isolating yourself.
On the other hand, it has also been seen that this fear makes people enter a harmful dynamic in which the first victim is oneself. For example, research showed that men who have been crudely rejected in a social circle are more willing to make sacrifices to be part of that group, confirming that dynamic of submission to others that causes such a bad image (in addition to being detrimental to whoever they are). suffers it in first person). Men who had been rejected by a woman on a dating website were also more willing to spend more money on a date after going through that bad experience.
Concluding
Sometimes we forget that the basis of healthy relationships is simplicity and honesty. Assuming the role of victim condemned to rejection only precipitates the appearance of a stigma that leads others to distance themselves.
