Why you shouldn’t equate rejection with defeat

One of the deepest human desires is love, most people would agree. And because love is our deepest need, our greatest fear would automatically be the thought of being rejected by people we love.  Rejection is real and painful and makes one feel unimportant, attacking a sense of identity and self-worth. But in one form or the other, it is part of everyday life. Popular fiction, magazines and movies are flooded with cases of women being rejected by their spouses, friends and even families, underscoring how important the issue is to our dear gender. “Rejection is one of those universal experiences we can all relate to whether it is family or social, it could be business or a romantic rejection, that feeling of exclusion or lack of acceptance is something we all dread,” according to a commentator on the net.

An Abuja-based accountant says she has seen situations where husbands reject their wives for no just cause because they want to have fun outside. Fatima Nasir added that the worst form of rejection is when a husband forgets his responsibilities just for the chauvinistic reason that ‘he is the man’. “Men with more than one wife are guilty of this, as they tend to concentrate more on one wife, leaving the other to wallow in her rejection,” she said.

Handling rejection can be frustrating – and hard to digest – for many, especially women, who are considered the weaker sex. Rejection is difficult to handle as in some cases all sense and logic is lost. However, instead of drowning in self-pity and isolation, we can come out with some pearls of wisdom and experience.

When we feel rejected, we often respond in unhealthy ways. Some of us internalize our rejection and become passive and aggressive as we silently withdraw our affection from those around us. Our success in life depends largely on how we handle rejections.

Saidu Ibrahim, marriage counselor in Abuja says most people who are successful today have passed through heavy criticism and rejection before they got to where they are today. “It is important that you do not lose hope.  It is important to understand that nobody can cause us the pain without our permission. It can only affect you if you give in too much to it and allow it to bother you.”

While it comes in various forms, rejection can occur even in the smallest ways in our lives, but whatever the case we always tend to blame ourselves for it even if it is the other person’s problem and not ours.  Upholding our dignity and self-respect depends on how we deal and handle rejection. When it happens, we have a propensity to feel unloved, worthless, insignificant and insecure. At moments like those, we lose our self-confidence – or even worse – rejection could lead us into doing something disgraceful as a twisted form of vengeance. But it all boils down to one thing, that no matter how tough we might be or pretend to be, rejection definitely hurts.

Self-confidence is necessary in overcoming rejection in our life. If you feel good about yourself, you do not need to bother about what other people think of you.  The more confident you are, the better you will be in handling different forms of rejection. Like it or not, it is a fact of life. But then we need to understand that rejection is not the end of life.

We all hate rejection but at one point in our lives have to face it. Some choose to see it as a learning process, thus dealing with it in a positive light, as opposed to falling into depression, keeping them stuck in the past and clogging up the future. Hajiya Amina Muhammed of the Asokoro Marriage Counseling School says rejection-based depression is a waste of time. “What a rejected person needs to do is focus on the future and learn the lessons it offers and move on to the next level,” she said, adding that life attracts life. Rejection is never a sign of defeat: it’s a step to move further in life. So if you are rejected, brace yourself, for it will always how up one way or the other. After all, how do Bob Marley’s famous lyrics go again? “The stone that the builder refuse…” Fill in the gap.