SPFPP 343: Get real about rejection with dakota
Rejection is something that I’m all too familiar with. By definition, rejection is refusal to accept something from someone, which can be boiled down to someone just saying “no”.
That word “no” can often have so much power and influence over someone that we can structure how we navigate the subject that could bring about that response to a request we have.
In many ways, navigating around a no in fear of being rejected might avoid HEARING the word “no” from someone else, but we internalize the possibility of that reality and structure an entirely new reality based on something we don’t want. I can bucket self-rejection for people with herpes into two particular categories, single, and or in a relationship. Here goes:.
Staying in unhealthy relationships:
Herpes or not, remaining in a relationship that any party is experiencing nonconsensual harm is one that nobody should be in. There are unfortunate circumstances that people HAVE to remain here as a result of limited options, but please note that I am recognizing that there are outliers that this information will not be useful to. That’s my little disclaimer. Now for people with herpes, I see an unwillingness to part ways with a partner who has a history of causing harm to the person. I have a philosophy of the more we do a thing, the better we get at it and then it becomes challenging to UN-do said thing as it solidifies as part of our identity. In tolerating unhealthy and harmful behavior in relationships, we get better at just that to the point where receiving from something healthy feels more harmful than the harm we’ve experienced due to its unfamiliarity.
So we can become so familiar with the way a familiar person treats us, that when we receive a herpes diagnosis and we have this internalized belief that we’d be treated horribly, the idea of what we’ve grown accustomed to AND being judged for having herpes becomes paralyzing. So we may stay in this relationship not just out of fear of being mistreated AND being judged by someone new for having herpes, but also out of a sense of telling ourselves we don’t deserve anything better. This can justify the harm being done to us and we become so willing to accept this harm over the idea of the pain that can be caused by telling someone we have herpes and they tell us no thanks, that we interpret that as being more harmful than the actual harm being done.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his book Psychocybernetics, talks about how the human mind cannot differentiate between an experience that is real and one that is imagined. So when we hypothesize that we’ll be rejected, those emotions become so real to us, that the real emotions and harm being caused can in fact seem more tolerable than that. The self-rejection here is subscribing to the narrative that we do not deserve the baseline of a harmonious, compatible, and healthy relationship. We deprive ourselves of what we really do want for ourselves by refusing to face these fears of rejection externally because the internal ones have become so familiar to us.
Staying single:
This is one I struggled with early on in my herpes diagnosis. I would go out with friends who would annoy the crap out of me by telling me how lame I was for not getting girls’ numbers at the bar. It infuriated me and I chose not to tell anyone why, so the emotions pinned up within me. “Courtney that girl clearly wants you to go talk to her”, and “She’s clearly hitting on you” are two of the most common statements my friends at the time would make. I eventually just begrudgingly would follow through on flirtations social cues from the women not because of a desire for them, but to shut my friends up. This led to sometimes nice conversations and them having confused looks on their faces when I’d take them home or to their home and not make a move. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get out of the car. I had even at one point convinced myself that I’d have a better time masturbating than having sex, so I made myself excited to go home alone.
Aside from friend zoning myself before letting anyone in about this deep, dark secret, one of the things these repressed emotions of frustration led to was me justifying to myself not disclosing my status. I’ve since reached out to those people because of the work I do and the last thing I needed was anyone coming after my fortune because now I’m famous, saying I gave them herpes. Could you imagine!!!?
But the self-rejection in this was the justification of settling for masturbation when I wanted to have sex, friend zoning myself before having to explain away potential thoughts of these women thinking I was not attracted to them, telling my friends I didn’t want to hang out because I knew it’d lead to the pressure of talking to girls, and then not talking to girls because I just didn’t want to tell them I have herpes so that they could reject me. So it was easier dealing with the rejections I’d perpetuate internally than receiving one externally.
Whether single and dating, or more accurately, NOT dating, these are ways self-rejection expresses itself. I use these examples because I would be able to categorize all the people who come to me for guidance into these two categories and I, myself have seen how self-rejection plays out in these situations. I wanted to go into how it trinkles into day to day life of friendships, career, passions, hobbies, and social life in general, but I believe readers here can make that connection. And if not I have plenty of podcast episodes where parallels are drawn about how herpes stigma shows up in day to day life based on the interviews I’ve done with people with herpes.
If you’re familiar with my work in herpes stigma education, you know I’m huge on mindset, energy, emotions, and philosophy. One of the most grounded ways I can put this is “the more we do a thing, the better we get at it. So by this logic, we may become good at structuring our lives around an alternative reality from a perspective of negative, which means we can structure our lives around an alternative reality. Now what happens when we structure it around a YES…. OUR OWN YES!?
For as self-help as this sounds, the more you tell yourself no, the better you get at telling yourself no. So much of living with herpes is just like living, herpes or no herpes, all this represents is one vehicle of potential mental, emotional and behavioral expressions of our beliefs about it. Our attitude about rejection in relation to our herpes status is often equal to our attitude about rejection.
I encourage you to explore this with a licensed mental health professional by initiating a conversation about a recent rejection. One of the exercises I like to implement with my Yoga clients is extending an invitation to share their surface level response to rejection. I ask what the feeling is that comes to them. After we accurately identify the feeling, we think back to the most recent time they had that feeling and talk through the situation that activated that feeling, then we look for the first experience where they experienced that feeling and we have a history of 3 occurrences we reference to see the accurate story that upholds their belief about rejection.
That’s all I’ll giveaway for an exercise and if you want to know what to do with that, you can join me for our “rejection-handling 101” workshop On August 14th in New York City, and if you can’t make it in person, my co-facilitator, Dakota Ramppen and I will offer a virtual version so you’ll want to keep up with us for that by joining our newsletters: www.getrealwithdakota.com and www.spfpp.org. At this workshop we’ll explore practical skills and exercises to not only deal with being rejected, but navigating the emotions surrounding it as well.