When my child is rejected, I feel it in my body before I can think it through. I experience rejection as a physical discomfort, the gut drops, a chill runs up my spine and out across my shoulders. Sometimes my hair stands up on end. I realize I’m holding my breath. My mind starts to race and a familiar emotional ache sets in.
Logically, I know she is amazing. I am absolutely certain she will be just fine. So …..um…..what the hell is this?
I watch her face fall, see the heartbreak cross her face and suddenly it is like I’m looking in a mirror and it’s the 1990s. I find myself somehow holding two experiences at once: the present moment— and an old memory I never invited back.
The dialogue in my head goes something like this, “Um, hello? She is waiting for you to say something! Why aren’t any words coming out? Hello?” Finally I muster, “It just wasn’t meant to be. You are going to be okay.”
Almost immediately she whips her head back in agony and exclaims, “You don’t understand what it feels like!” There’s a retreat to her room, the door closes and the sobbing continues.
My instinct is to follow, to fix. The old me would have smothered the emotion with love, robbing her of her right to feel and self soothe. I’m uncomfortable from emotional overwhelm and for some reason adrenaline . I want to stop it now. Instead, I try something new and sit with it. I hear that inner voice whisper, “You’re failing her.”
Now listen, when I’m emotional, it is so easy to believe that voice. I am learning to recognize the distortion. The reality is I gave her the best I had in that moment. What was that moment?
Before, I would tell myself the reaction felt so big because I love her so much. While I’m sure that is a truth and plays a factor, another truth is that rejection has a history in my nervous system. My body was remembering.
I didn’t always talk to my parents about rejections I experienced as a child. I often found them embarrassing or confusing. I feel like maybe I hadn’t even developed the right words yet to describe or explain them to others. When I reflected on my earliest memories of rejection, I realized that I attempted to deal with them on my own. At the time, of course I was unable to fully understand what was happening around me. As many children do, I internalized the blame. I believe now it was there the seeds were planted for the problematic self talk I am slowly learning to challenge still today, “What’s wrong with me?”
Rejection sucks. Biologically it is a real threat to survival. We rely on others to stay alive. It’s deep. It’s primal. Without adult context, it became shame. It became a problem of self worth.
In these moments of reflection and discomfort I gifted to myself, she exposed that lie for me. She is deserving of no shame and she is beyond worthy. In this particular instance, rejection was from lack of experience. Experience can be gained and it is very much separate from worthiness. The same must be true for younger me. My lack of understanding did not equate to lesser worth.
As an adult, I can see this clearly. As a disappointed adult, I tell myself, “It wasn’t meant to be.” That comforts me because I can look back on all the disappointments in life that felt like the end of the world. Somehow eventually those painful experiences all set me on the path to my most beautiful blessings. This is her first big disappointment. There is no way she can conceptualize that!
She was right. I didn’t understand. I just gave adult advice to a child. To her, it probably sounded like, “You’re Not Good Enough. It wasn’t meant for you.“
With this understanding, I regrouped. I texted that I would like to talk more with her about it, when she was ready. I let her know that it would be okay if she wasn’t ready until morning. I’ll tell you how it went in my next post.
