Hello dear ones,
It has been a heavy, heavy week across the globe. I hope that your hearts are receiving the support that they need. I wanted to expand on some thoughts that I shared on OPENINGS: a monthly advice podcast about moving through the feeling of rejection. I’ll share some reflections on how we can show up for ourselves in the moments where we feel rejected by those we love and/or the world writ large. But first, a few announcements / reminders:
Episode #2 of OPENINGS is here and now available for all subscribers! You can submit your questions for Episode #3 by emailing me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line OPENINGS SUBMISSION. Please keep your submissions to 150 words. You have until Friday, March 25th at 11:59pm MT to submit.
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Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
Content Note: discussions of bullying, slut shaming, rape, substance use, parental neglect and abuse
I know the feeling of rejection all too well. As a child, I was never one of the “cool kids” and I was always picked last for teams in gym class. The boys that I liked would hang out with me in secret while they dated the popular girls. The summer before I started high school, desperate for attention, I’d go down to the park near my house and smoke cigarettes and joints with boys a few years older than me. One night, one of those boys raped me. He’d later tell everyone that we’d had sex, and I entered high school branded a slut. My two closest friends ditched me so that they could be popular. I was alone, walking through the halls to jeers of “slut” and “whore.” At the end of each day, I’d tried to walk home and avoid the group of girls that would stop and threaten me. By the end of grade 9, the whispering subsided and I found a new group of friends amongst the kids who skipped class and got high under the bleachers.
I wish I could say that I’d get home each day to the warm and loving arms of my family. But my house was also a cite of rejection. My father preferred to spend time with my younger brother. For a little while, after my mom’s death, he’d take me on father/daughter dates where we’d drive out of the suburbs and into downtown Toronto for dinner and some bookstore shopping. But as I got older and we became poorer and poorer, these outings stopped. My father had once been an affectionate man, but my mother’s death broke something in him and he became cold and withholding, cruel and unkind. He too became a bully that I’d learn how to avoid.
These repeated occurrences of rejection were traumatic. The website healthline explains how:
A couple of social rejections in a lifetime is normal and the brain can continue to rationalize those events, but when those rejections become frequent, our brain develops a trauma response to the perception of rejection … When someone becomes expectant of social rejection, the trauma response can become chronic. Fight-or-flight becomes habitual with what can be every day social interactions. … In some cases, memories of social rejection can hold the same pain and trauma response that the initial rejection held, creating damage over and over again.
Rejection is painful — quite literally. Studies have demonstrated that being rejected lights up the same part of our brain as physical pain or trauma does. Rejection can also be life-threatening. Back in the early days of human experience, you survived by being a part of a group. If you didn’t agree with the group, you could risk being ostracized and alone. And so it became advantageous to adapt your behaviour and avoid rejection. Goodtherapy.com describes how “Those who were able to avoid further rejection were more likely to survive, while those who did not find rejection to be particularly painful may not have corrected the offending behavior, making them less likely to survive. In this way, humans may have evolved to experience rejection as painful.”
These days, one can survive much easier if they’re alone and isolated. But humans still need to feel a sense of belonging and connection with others. We are, quite literally, hardwired for connection in the sense that when we first perceive danger, we look for others who can keep us safe. If no one is around, we then move into fight-or-flight. “We need to be part of the pack” writes Staci K. Haines. Rejection is the feeling of not belonging, of being an “I” without a “we.”
These early experiences of rejection shaped my whole sense of self-worth and belonging. To cope, I internalized the rejection into a story about myself: I must be unlovable. There must be something wrong with me. I must be to blame for the rejections I experienced. In last week’s CARESCAPES, I talked about how blame and shame are protective mechanisms that enable us to feel a sense of control and autonomy. If I was the problem, I could change me and become someone who’d never be rejected. But the game was rigged from the start — it was never about me to begin with. And so, in order to secure connection with others and avoid being rejected, I learnt how to sacrifice my safety and my dignity. In other words: I learnt how to reject myself.
It would take until my early 20s before I started to undo the harm that so much rejection had caused. I found my two best friends, and the love and sense of belonging that they offered me was a balm for these deep wounds. With them, I learnt to name my fear of rejection. I also learnt that it was okay to ask for verbal affirmation that countered the story I was telling myself (which usually sounded something like “They don’t want to be around me” or “It’s only a matter of time before they reject me too”). There was no amount of verbal affirmation that was too much for them. They were always ready, again and again, to tell me how much they loved me.
We heal trauma through connection. Oftentimes, the connection is between us and others. Equally important, though, is the connection we have with ourselves. A lot of healing was made possible with my two besties. AND at a certain point, no amount of reassurance from them mattered. Even fifteen years later, I still have moments where I climb up the ladder of inference and interpret a quick text message response as a rejection. What do I do in those moments? I learn how to give myself the missing experience of connection and belonging that I needed.
I learnt about the concept of the missing experience through therapy and later took some classes with Kekuni Minton, one of the founders of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, who unpacked this concept further. Kekuni told us how, “In each [nervous system] state there’s a missing experience.” There are numerous categories of missing experiences, but two relevant ones are positive beliefs and attachment experiences. In terms of positive beliefs, I grew up believing that I was unlovable and that I deserved the rejection I experienced. And so the missing experience would be the positive beliefs of “I am lovable” and “I never deserved rejection.” For missing attachment experiences, I never got to experience that felt sense of belonging in my family of origin. The missing experience here, then, would be to feel like I belong.
Now it’s gonna be pretty hard to feel like I belong if I’m still enacting that pattern of self-rejection. There is no amount of verbal affirmation that can counter my rejection sensitivity if I’m still participating in my own rejection. It’s also really important to name that the one person I can always trust to show up for me, is me. I might ask a friend to do something with me and they might be busy. Or I might ask a loved one for verbal affirmation via text and their phone has been dead all day. Other humans can’t always meet our needs. But I can always meet my needs. I can give myself the missing experience (don’t worry, I’ll share more on what this looks like in practice in the next section).
If the opposite of rejection is belonging, then we can start to ask: what does it look like to belong to myself? For me, belonging to myself looks like not sacrificing my needs to please others; it is knowing what my boundaries are; it is the practice of celebrating myself for things both big and small; it is reminding myself that I have always been lovable and I continue to be lovable, no matter how messy I am, no matter if I fuck things up sometimes. Belonging to myself is practicing self-compassion; it’s challenging myself to be the fullest, most expansive version of myself that I can be. When I belong to myself, my value and self-worth does not rest in the perceptions of others. I am actively choosing to not let their reflection of me take precedent over my own.
Each time I orient myself towards this practice of self-belonging and give myself the missing experience, I heal the wounds of past rejections and build my capacity for the rejections that may come. Because the reality is that there will be people who reject me, who choose to not know me fully because the story they’ve created of me is more appealing to them. It hurts. I won’t lie about that. It used to feel like the most agonizing pain I could experience. Now, it feels like a paper cut. In this way, every rejection becomes an opportunity for me to turn towards myself, reorient towards self-belonging, and anchor firmly in my belief that I am and always have been deserving of love.
PRACTICES
I want to offer a practice that has played such a big part in my healing journey: making affirmation cards. The practice is pretty simple:
Download the collage kit, affirmations, and templates here.
Cut out 5x5 squares or use the templates above. I prefer to use a slightly thicker card stock when I make my cards, but printer paper will totally do.
Select an affirmation that you want to work with. I’ve included many of my favs, but I also encourage you to write your own based off of the things that you find yourself needing to hear.
Choose a background from the ones provided in the collage kit, or grab your own stack of magazines if you want something else. If you’re more of a digital person, you can also search for pieces you like on the internet.
Select different pieces from the collage kit that speak to your affirmation and/or please you aesthetically.
When you’re done, and you’ve glued everything down, place your affirmations around your home in places where you’ll see them: beside your bed, at your altar, on your bathroom mirror, at your desk.
I’ll also be hosting a free make your own affirmation cards session on IG on Friday, March 18th when I do a takeover on @tangled_arts, as part of their #CripRitual exhibition that I’m a part of. I’ll be sharing more details on that in the coming weeks. Make sure to give them a follow to stay in the loop.
I also have a zine of affirmations for trauma survivors called you are magic! that you can work with!
ACTIONS
There’s a lot of shitty stuff happening in the world right now, and so I wanted to share a couple of links to organizations in Ukraine that support queer, trans, and intersex folks. I got these suggestions from a twitter thread that was reshared on IG by @accountabilitymapping. You can find the post, with more info, here.
Insight: They provide psychological and legal support to LGBTQI community in Ukraine. Being super vocal about anti-rights and religious fundamentalist organizing in Ukraine
NGO “Women’s Perspectives”: with an experience of 21 years, they're working on GBV /domestic violence — super important atm
Thanks for talking about how rejection activates the same part of the brain as trauma. That's really helpful when thinking about retraumatization.