My rejection saga

To those of us who knew the pain
of valentines that never came
and those whose names were never called
when choosing sides for basketball.
--Janis Ian

I've been writing about a lot of non-recovery fun stuff for the past couple of days. So today I decided to get back to the "heavy" stuff, even though my heart is light on this rainy day.

Heather actually asked me to write about rejection and abandonment from my experience. So that's what I'm blogging on today.

This may be a bit long because rejection is an early issue for me. It started probably as something innocuous. But then it grew, became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and took on a life of its own.

I don't know the age when I started to feel rejection but possibly it happened very early. I remember scoldings from my father. I remember being singled out by a teacher to stand in front of the entire lunchroom in second grade. I remember other school yard rejections. And I remember being dumped by my first love.

These are all pretty normal things though. What I didn't understand is how deeply these things affected me. I've done some reading about fear of abandonment and rejection because these fears form my main character defect.

Evidently, if someone has a few traumatic rejections, then every time their needs aren't met, they may filter feelings through the lens of rejection. That is what I do. Whenever I am in a situation that suggests abandonment or rejection, I start thinking that the worst is going to happen. And surprisingly, it usually does because I drive people away from me.

I have done this in several ways. Probably my favorite is to look to others to validate how lovable I am. Another is to panic and let the fear of rejection smother any love that I had. I've also rejected others first (before they dumped me). So in many ways, I actually created a situation in which what I fear most (rejection) will happen.

So I have tended to fall in love with women who are unavailable emotionally, or who are unreliable with their emotions and aren't capable of loving me the way that I wanted. This is probably why so many of us codies are in relationships with alcoholics.

And I know that these were not random choices for me but a decision at some level to have a relationship with someone who was also feeling lonely, rejected, unaccepted, unappreciated or insecure. In short, I fell in love with my mirror image.

My wife was a party girl. She was about as emotionally slippery as an eel. She could be powerfully passive though and that was the emotional hook for me. For much of our relationship, I never knew what to expect. So I lived in a state of anxiety and fear. I know that I didn't cause the drinking, but I have wondered why she stuck with me when I was such a pain in the ass. Now I know that we were like two magnets drawn to each other.

So the hard part of accepting this about myself has been to acknowledge that if I don't do something about this fear (my no. 1 defect), I'll continue to be drawn to people who will reject and abandon me over and over.

I have learned that others don't define me, I do. I've learned that no one else gets to determine whether I am lovable. Only I do that. I've learned that I have to fill the void within me that wants to believe that I'm not worthy of love. I've learned to make a list of affirmations about myself. I've learned to do things that make me happy and that meet my needs. I've learned to ask for what I need in a healthy way and not in a "hostage taking" way. And I've learned to make amends to those who I harmed through my messed up behavior.

When I consider that my father, my mother, my wife, and my friends have all experienced rejections of their own, I have compassion. I begin to see the truth: that we are each insecure, frightened and unsure at times. And the biggest truth of all is that the God of my understanding loves each of us, no matter how imperfect we are.