"It's not you, it's me" - my journey through rejection ...
How can you describe the feeling of being rejected to someone who has never experienced it?
All I can do is try and paint a picture with my words of what the physical and emotional reality of it was like for me, and hope by doing this, that someone out there might feel less alone in what they are going through.
About 24 years ago, my ex-husband came home one day and told me that he didn’t know what he wanted in life anymore, but it wasn’t me. When he walked out the front door that same day, leaving me with our 5-week-old daughter, it was as if time stood still. It was as if all the air was sucked out of my body with a huge whoosh, like I was having an out of body experience, watching the scene from outside of myself as if it was being projected onto a movie screen.
I read the other day that your heart can’t actually be broken through emotional events, that that is a fallacy and impossible, but I beg to differ. Not only did I literally feel my heart break, I heard it. It sounded like a mirror shattering and then it felt like those glass shards sliced my heart into little pieces; and that was just Day 1.
““One of the hardest things you will ever have to do my dear, is to grieve the loss of a loved one who is still alive”. ”
The end of a relationship, especially when it is not initiated by you, is similar to a death and like mourning the loss of a loved one, you must pass through all the stages of grief. Different lengths of time are spent working through each stage and each stage can be experienced with different levels of intensity. The stages do not necessarily occur in any specific order and you can go backwards and forwards through these stages multiple times.
Stage 1 - Denial and isolation; for me it was so absolutely impossible to accept, so denial was an easier alternative. Surely, I must have misunderstood what he said! We had just experienced the joy and wonder of having a baby together less than two weeks before. How could I not notice that there was something wrong? You don’t just wake up one day and decide you don’t want to be married to someone, do you?
So, I isolated myself by not telling those close to me for as long as I could; my family had just returned home after being with us to share in the arrival of our beautiful daughter – how could I tell them what was going on when I didn’t even understand it myself? I was ashamed and embarrassed so kept it to myself, when I so needed the support of those close to me.
Stage 2 - Anger; What cold-hearted son of a bitch could do this to someone who had just had a baby? I was so angry that he found it so easy to tell me, so easy to walk out that door and put his happiness before us. My post-natal hormones were in full force at that stage and the ebb and flow of my anger scared me – I demanded answers and none of the ones I received could ever be satisfactory explanations for the situation I now found myself in. I would get hysterical whenever we spoke and couldn’t control my emotions. This was supposed to be one of the happiest times of my life and it was spoiled, marred and forever ruined in my mind by his selfish actions.
Stage 3 - Bargaining; looking back, this was the most demeaning of all the stages for me. Begging for him to reconsider, to attend counselling, to have some time on his own and give him space – whatever it was that would return our lives to the way they were before. I would do anything I could to repair it, hang on, have something to give me hope that my whole life had not just been turned upside down. I now know I had done nothing wrong, but I was so desperate to wind the clock back and try and fix the situation that I remember falling to my knees, sobbing and begging at his feet. I wish I could go and hug that girl, tell her she had nothing to apologise for, that she was so worthy of love and being loved, that she was enough just the way she was.
Stage 4 - Depression; one day turned into another. I slept walked through the first year of my precious baby girl’s life. Each morning lying in bed, if I had even slept at all, the realisation of my situation would dawn on me with my first waking thought. “Oh God, that’s right, this is my life now”. It felt like there was a knife being twisted around in my guts and that all pervasive sense of dread would encompass me, and I would carry that pain and grief around with me all day like a heavy backpack. I had to drag myself out of bed, try and be the best mother I could be, especially as I was now solely financially and parentally responsible for my child. I lost a ridiculous amount of weight, I looked tired and strained. I didn’t recognise the person looking back at me in the mirror, if I could even look in her eyes filled with pain at all. She was flawed, she was unlovable, she became invisible.
Stage 5 - Acceptance; I use to hate it when people would make statements to me like, “You will get over this. Things will get better. One day you will look back at this and realise it was for the best”. Even though this may be the eventual outcome when you experience a situation like this, these platitudes actually make you feel worse. Like consoling someone who has lost a loved one, words aren’t always necessary; all you need do is be there, even if the person affected doesn’t want to talk, so they don’t feel they are alone and know that they are loved.
Acceptance finally came a few years later when the truth was spoken, because as my intuition had whispered to me constantly, those words uttered on that day my life changed forever were not the truth.
So how do you move through an experience of rejection and come out the other side?
The most important first step is to take back your power. Often when people are rejected they wait for the other person (or “rejecter”) to decide how the relationship is going to play out moving forward. The person who has been rejected (or “rejectee”), might suggest the “rejecter” have more time before they make their final decision to leave, in the unlikely event that they might change their mind and stay. Then the “rejectee” will sit with baited breath waiting for the “rejecter” to decide. I have seen this happen time and time again and it breaks my heart. When we do this we are giving someone else the power over what happens with our lives – if this was happening to someone you love dearly, what would you say to them? You would tell them to respect themselves, that they deserve better and walk away. Then why do YOU deserve to be treated in any less a respectful way?
A lot of the time the “rejectee” is blamed by the “rejecter” for the demise of the relationship. From what I have again observed many times, this is usually because the “rejecter” feels guilty so in some way so to assuage their guilt, they deflect the blame off themselves and back onto the other party. When someone blames you for a relationship break up based on a lie and their guilt, naturally you then start believing of course you must be flawed in some way for them to leave you.
“The truth will set you free”. I love this statement and it is so true, for both parties. When you are the one who has been rejected and the other party is not being honest and transparent about the reasons why, it makes it so much harder to accept and move forward with your life. It keeps you stuck in that limbo of maybes and what ifs. When you are faced with a truth such as a partner’s infidelity, even though it still hurts like hell it is something tangible that your conscious mind and reasoning can grab onto, something that you can’t ignore; it also gives you not only the power but the dignity to decide how you can best work through it and move on with your life.
Many times when someone rejects us, we believe that we are flawed and not enough in some way, and it can really shatter our self-worth, self-esteem and the way we view ourselves. We worry that because of this one person rejecting us we will never be in a close loving relationship again. If I could pass on one pearl of wisdom from my experience to anyone who is going through this or may go through it in the future, it would be that it is not about you, it was never about you, you have done nothing wrong, you are not broken, you are not flawed – it is all part of the ebb and flow of life and relationships, we are forever changing, evolving, growing and the only person we have control over is ourselves. Most importantly of all I want you to be kind to yourself and teach others how to treat you – like the beautiful, unique gift that you are.