Loving rejections can be one of the experiences that produce the most anguish and discomfort if they are not managed well .

On the one hand, the self-esteem of the person experiencing it may be affected if he or she interprets this episode as a sign that he or she is worth little as a human being and that other people do not want to relate to him or her. On the other hand, rejection can also be a way of disrupting a series of life plans for the couple and illusions about how the relationship with the other person can evolve, leading to disappointment that can result in anxiety.

Overcoming Loving Rejection with Philosophy

However, loving rejection need not be a big problem if you know how to deal with it philosophically. That is why it is worth training in the capacity to adapt to these situations , which will allow us to stop avoiding the possibility of them happening (running away from situations in which we should express our feelings) and at the same time adapt to a series of events that are beyond our control and have to do with the interests of another person.

1. Doubting one’s intentions

There is a strong social influence that pushes us to be constantly looking for a partner, even when we feel like being alone. A good way to deal with rejection is to question to what extent we feel a sincere desire to be with that person . The emotional intelligence that helps us to see personal relationships from an appropriate perspective is also related to the ability to review and question assumptions about our own intentions, motivations and true goals.

That is why, in order to overcome a rejection, it is essential to ask ourselves first if it is a genuine rejection , that is, if what has not been reciprocated by the other person is a true partnership project.

2. Taking the situation as an opportunity

Loving rejections also can be an opportunity to train one’s management of emotions and become emotionally strong . The very fact of having the ability to stand up to situations where luck is not on your side is already a very valuable asset, and this ability can only be trained by taking advantage of moments of adversity.

Managing rejection constructively will not only help the negative emotions associated with it to fade away as we pay less attention to them, but it also helps us in our personal development plans.

3. Recognizing the power of care management

We tend to believe that our perception of reality is given by our senses, but there is another factor that we almost never take into account: attention . In cases where someone does something that makes us feel bad, we will tend to focus on the unusual aspect that makes us feel bad (their hurtful phrases, their hostile attitude towards us, etc.) and we will not realize that it would be perfectly possible to perceive the same stimuli by distancing ourselves from the unpleasant aspects of the scene.

Similarly, to overcome rejection it is important to keep in mind that taking control of our attention to direct it towards the positive (or neutral) aspects of the situation is a large part of the solution.

When we overcome rejection, we are also overcoming the loop of negative emotions that it produces. That’s why it’s good to remember that much of the pain that triggers rejection originates not from what the other person has done, but from our focus on the negative feelings and thoughts that are weighing us down. We must learn to “manually” correct our brain’s tendency to focus attention on the potentially hurtful in order to get out of the loop of negative emotions.

4. Avoid “suppressing” negative emotions

This step is derived from the previous one. To stop focusing on the negative aspects of rejection does not mean to fight to forget this rejection nor to make it seem that one has not gone through it, but to reformulate this experience in other terms. Trying to mentally “block out” all the memories associated with the other person does not cease to be a way of always keeping in mind what we are trying to avoid, since both the objective and the plan to forget about it all refer to the aspects of rejection that hurt us the most. While it may be wise to stop seeing the other person as often as before for a few days, the goal of this should be to get used to new habits and to have time to devote to self-reflection, not simply to bury this relationship.

In short, learning to implement coping strategies to overcome a loving rejection implies having confidence in one’s ability to deal with negative emotions, rather than denying them.

5. Demystifying rejection

Just as some people believe that the universe can conspire in their favor to help them achieve their goals, when it comes to facing a love rejection, we may perceive it as a sign that something that should have been in our best interest has gone very wrong for reasons that we cannot explain and that somehow we attract bad luck. This thought is not only not rational, but it can also be an obstacle to promote personal projects, since induces us to assume that everything will fail and that, therefore, it is better not to invest a lot of effort in certain things .

So it’s good to keep a simple fact in mind: virtually everyone has faced a rejection of love, but this is not something that is usually talked about easily. If we think that rejection is something exceptional that could only happen to us, it is because we do not have access to the private compartments of other people’s lives.

Yes, love rejects can be very hard. But much of this feeling of anguish and discomfort has to do with taking these kinds of situations too seriously by believing that this is a very particular case. We magnify the drama that supposes that one person does not correspond to another as the latter would like, but the fact is that this happens constantly, as is to be expected in living beings that do not have identical concerns and interests.

6. Detecting recurring thoughts

When we are faced with situations that trigger stress or distress, it is common that at first we lose the ability to control our flow of thoughts as we usually do. That is why recurring thoughts often appear that are in line with our mood and feed back to each other, producing a greater feeling of discomfort in the case of negative emotions.

Knowing how to detect recurring thoughts related to rejection of oneself (such as “you are worthless” or “no one wants to know about you”) is fundamental to overcoming rejection.