Overcoming fear of rejection with hypnosis

Rejection can happen at many times in your life, at a friendship, in love and, of course, after a job interview. Not to mention the search for a dorm room where you often have to prove to your roommates that you are "nice enough" to have the honor of renting with them in the apartment.

I’ve written a blog post before about dealing with rejection after a job interview. In this blog post, I’ll delve deeper into the fear of rejection in a more personal context—namely, rejection by friends or even (potential) romantic partners.

Response to implicit and explicit rejection

Rejection and being ignored are two similar circumstances with the difference being that rejection is an active form and ignoring is an inactive form of rejection. Yet both have a different effect on the person being rejected.

In the case of active rejection, you often get responses that prevent you from being rejected again in the future. What often happens is that people isolate themselves socially and you are more agitated. After all, if you don't want to belong to someone you can't be rejected. Ultimately, this is the same thinking that Stalin had: No people, no problem. We all know the things Stalin did, so I think it's safe to say that this is not a healthy line of thinking.

In the process, you can also think more about things you did and shouldn't have done after an active rejection.

If the rejection is more subtle, you’re often ignored. Research shows that in such cases, you actually feel more like you’ve failed socially, which leads you to dwell on the behavior you should have exhibited. You also try to make more connections. However, when you’re ignored, you experience less agitation but more depressive feelings.

Implicit and explicit rejection thus have different effects on the person being rejected, but in both cases, it is something that can cause anxiety and insecurity.

The origins of fear of rejection

In whatever way you have been rejected, ever having been rejected may have been a trigger for fear. To overcome the fear of rejection, it is important to identify the cause of the fear.

If you have ever been rejected, implicitly or explicitly, you can often clearly identify for yourself where the fear comes from. However, you may suffer from this fear even if you have never been rejected.

Research shows that people who fear rejection feel they experience less support socially than those without it. In doing so, they are also more susceptible to stressful situations.

Risks of fear of rejection

You would say that fear of rejection is no big deal, but unfortunately it can be. For example, research shows that young gay men are more likely to have unprotected sex when fear of rejection is present than when the fear is not. This is also a phenomenon that occurs in heterosexual relationships (or onenight stands).

So, the fear of rejection can lead you to do things that aren’t in your best interest at all—and in some cases, can even make you sick. This study focuses on sex, but you might, for example, want to be accepted so badly that you start experimenting with drugs because the people you hang out with do it too or ask you to join in—because only then are you “cool.”

Check your beliefs

As mentioned, people with a strong fear of rejection may feel that they have less social support. It’s wise to examine this belief. A hypnotherapist can help you with this if you find it difficult to do on your own.

For example, ask yourself the questions which people you can ask for help or who you can go to to talk something off your chest. There are probably more than 0. Just writing a list of people you can call can give you a sense of relief. Even if this is only family.

Write about the stressful situations

By keeping a journal and writing about your emotions in stressful situations, you can already reduce the fear of rejection. This is a good strategy to suffer less from the negative emotions that come with the fear of rejection. This is according to the study Written Emotional Expression and Emotional Well-Being: The Moderating Role of Fear of Rejection conducted in 2005.

Accept Yourself

Self-acceptance is very important to overcome the fear of rejection. If you accept yourself as you are, you are also more likely to feel that other people should accept you as you are. If that is not the case, it is they who are unlucky and not you, because you are just a great person.

A hypnotherapist can help you improve your self-esteem and self-confidence in social situations. That way, when faced with rejection, you can tell yourself that it’s their loss, not yours. This also allows you to be more yourself, and you’ll even be accepted more quickly by people with whom you’ll get along better than when you’re not being yourself just to be accepted.

For example, self-acceptance can be promoted with self-hypnosis. During self-hypnosis, suggestions can then be repeated so that these become your beliefs that you live by. This gives you less fear of rejection and therefore you are also less likely to do things that are not in your best interest.

For self-hypnosis, you first relax. You do this by first focusing on even breathing. You then breathe in as long as you breathe out. Next, you relax your muscles and then you turn on the mp3 with suggestions, or even better, you repeat the suggestions aloud to yourself. These can be, for example:

"I am good the way I am."

"If I don't actually want to do something, I don't do it."

"People prefer to deal with me when I am being myself," he says.

"There are always people I can turn to when I want to talk about something," he says.

These are just examples of suggestions, depending on your beliefs about yourself interacting with other people you may get other suggestions from a hypnotist.

Confront your fear

How bad is it really to be rejected? Does the world perish? Confronting your fear can also make being rejected less scary. A hypnotist can help you with this. For example, you might make a list of situations you find the most scary and the least scary. For example, you may find rejection for a job less scary than rejection after a fun first date.

By visualizing social situations, the hypnotherapist can help you apply techniques to stay calm and stay true to yourself. Afterward, you can work your way through the list, starting with less intimidating situations and moving on to the more intimidating ones where anxiety has a greater impact on you. By experiencing rejection, you can also reduce the impact of your anxiety.

Before you know it, you'll be speed dating 😊.

Strengthen your self-confidence

Everyone knows someone, or perhaps you are one such person yourself, who completely changes themselves when they have a new partner. From clothing style to hobbies. This is very unfortunate, because being someone other than yourself is something you can't sustain for very long. Therefore, such a relationship is also difficult to maintain, unless both partners can handle (back) change well.

It is therefore important to boost your self-confidence and let go of the belief that you must completely change in order to be accepted. If you don’t know why you’re doing this, for example, regression can help you figure out how this belief originated. Often, events from your childhood may have led to beliefs that now hold you back as an adult. Since you’re now in a completely different situation, regression can help you let go of those beliefs and approach social situations with more confidence.

Visualize social interactions

By visualizing in advance how you want to behave during a social interaction, you are more likely to do so. This makes it more likely that you will remain yourself and, as a result, get people around you who accept you as you are from the start. Suppose you are meeting with a friend and he has invited other people. Then you can visualize in advance how you will join in with the fun, and also how you will stay true to yourself when people demand something of you that you do not want to do.

A nice example of how something can go along in a group setting is when you are having a bite to eat. If you want to watch your line at that very moment, you would prefer to order a salad. If everyone else then just orders a fries or something, you may become afraid that you are too out of line. By choosing that salad anyway, you can actually get a lot of admiration from people. Being out of place is really not a bad thing, as long as you are yourself.

If you find it difficult to visualize social interactions, a hypnotist can help you with this.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how it can help with various issues? Then come to the workshop or attend an event hosted by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

Sources:

http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2009-00255-010

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167204271556

https://search.proquest.com/openview/2a32e6d8dbda5df33cd68b984960bffb/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y