Moment 61 - How To Handle ANY Rejection: Dr. Julie Smith

00:02What you were describing there, that scrolling through comments looking for the bad one is something I think we can all relate to because I will get 99.9% like great comments and then it'll be, as you say, the one that's either that's critical or that feels personal. It's if someone's like criticizing something that I've like done, I don't really care. It's when it's when they are criticizing who I am, I think I find it hardest. And so I wanted to understand why that was. And I started doing some reading and some writing about this topic and understanding the nature if we go back in our like in our history as humans of rejection and what that used to mean when I was a human the idea of being like despite like kicked out of my tribe yeah and the threat that that would put me under if I was removed from my tribe and this idea of rejection and really like a lot of rejection this is kind of what I came to came to the conclusion of when someone says something like that it's almost like for me it feels like a a threat of rejection, a threat of being expelled from the tribe or whatever. Obviously not. Obviously that is not the truth. But deep within me somewhere, that desire to fit in and be accepted by the tribe

01:07is still there. So having millions of people being able to give me feedback and some of them seemingly rejecting me from the tribe or saying that I don't fit or whatever is difficult. Is that like, that's a lot of words, but does that make any sense? Yeah, because the feeling comes before the rational thought about it. So, you know, your body has that reaction before you're able to consider that, you know, this isn't your only community or this isn't your family or people that are sort of, you're dependent on and that kind of thing. So I think the feeling will always be there and it's always difficult, isn't it? But then you can override that with what comes next.

01:48So it's not about never having that feeling. And I hate it when people kind of say online, you know, just to stop caring what everybody thinks. And that is impossible because you're built to care what people think of you. And you probably wouldn't function in a society that well if you didn't care what anybody thought of you. It's about how you then manage it. So when those thoughts come along about, you know, a negative comment, it's what do you do next with what comes up?

02:14so yeah it's really about how you kind of respond to to the thoughts that come up after and is it is it in those moments of rejection is it really like the story we tell ourselves about what that rejection means to us i'm thinking now more broadly about romantic rejection my you know i'm dating someone she says you're dumped like the harm surely isn't in the separation surely for me it's always felt like oh well i got to the point where i realized that it was more steve's subconscious brain is telling himself he's a scumbag and not beautiful and not smart because of this rejection is that really where the harm is done like that self-inflicted self-story yeah so i mean rejection is difficult for everybody isn't it but but certainly if if rejection taps into um what we call a kind of core belief so if someone grew up with um a core belief around being unlovable for example because maybe their parents were inconsistent in their care for example so they they you know and you don't think about these beliefs consciously all the time you know they're not at the forefront of your thought processes, but they will influence how you feel and they'll influence how you behave and the choices that you make. Because what happens is when we have

03:21a core belief that is a sort of damaging one or detrimental one, we develop sort of rules for living around that, that help us to keep it at bay. So it might be, you know, if I can just be the perfect business owner and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect dad, then no one will reject me and everything will be okay. And so you set yourself these rules for living that if at some point, inevitably, you break or there's signs that you're not gonna be able to keep up with them.

03:50And what that does is when there's signs that you're not going to keep up with those rules for living, you then it kind of triggers that core belief to come to the forefront. And that's when you get that rush of kind of psychological distress, because it's a distressing thing to believe about yourself. And so that's when it can cause people real problems when, when that sort of damaging core belief is being triggered on a regular basis for example maybe because it's a turbulent relationship or whatever the situation is um and that's when you can work not only on the present stuff but on the core beliefs and and looking at how those are playing out in relationships and how do you get to the heart of understanding what your core beliefs are because i went through life and i think i got to about 24 years old without being in a relationship and when I asked myself what my core beliefs were as it relates to relationships I realized that they were heavily shaped by watching my parents like toxic relationship and this belief that relationships were prison I because my I thought my dad was in prison for my entire childhood that's what I thought I thought he was trapped in prison because he was in a relationship with my

04:56with my mother because they were very argumentative shall we say so it wasn't until I was 24 and I because of journaling and writing and really this podcast that I was able to realize that I even thought that and I was having this like avoidant behavioral pattern where the minute I would pursue someone romantically and the minute they would accept my advances I would run for the hills and try and dissuade them out of being in a relationship with me and I had no idea that core belief was in the back of my control center of my mind. Yeah absolutely and there's there's a really fascinating therapy called cat therapy actually so it's cognitive analytic therapy and just CAT for short but that really is just a fascinating therapy where it looks at the relationships that you have when you're younger so when you're growing up with with parents or siblings or family and in those relationships you learn how to behave in the world right you learn about you know who I am what to expect from other people and what to expect from the world at large and then you develop kind of survival strategies or coping strategies in for example in a difficult relationship like that, you learn how to cope with that. And you have these kind of safety

06:03behaviors. And as you grow up, you're in a different situation, right? You're not dependent on parents and stuff like that. But those survival strategies, those safety behaviors continue, and they get played out in your adult relationships. And I just love that therapy. It's great for looking at the patterns and the cycles that people tend to feel stuck in, in their relationships, and how that reflects those early life experiences that are essentially outdated coping strategies.

06:34But it's really difficult. You know, if something's been a lifetime of habit, you can't just break that by telling yourself to do that. So it takes time and it takes practice. And you literally kind of map out the cycle so that you learn to sort of acknowledge it in hindsight first of all. So you say, OK, last week that happened and that happened. And yeah, I went around the cycle. and then eventually you've done that enough that you start to recognize it when you're in it so as you're about to do something you think hang on a minute I know what this this is predictable I know what I'm doing and in that moment you then get this chance this is a beauty of kind of awareness is you then get this chance to choose whether you go with it and sometimes you will and you'll go around the cycle again and sometimes you'll do this other thing that you've already worked out you need to do and you break the cycle and and then you get the benefits of that and and And so it's this really kind of long process of sometimes going around the cycle again, and then sometimes breaking it and finding this new life that you can create in your relationships and stuff like that.

07:32So, and it's incredible how life changing that can be for people.