Fear of rejection: this is how it isolates us from other people

When we think about that facet of our lives that has to do with personal relationships, it is very easy for us to imagine it by measuring the number of friends and loved ones that each person has.

However, there is something that is as important or more important than this "count" of the number of habitual relationships we have: to what extent is it likely? lose contact with those friends, lovers or people we would like to meet?

The truth is that human beings are predisposed to give more importance to possible losses than to gains; This makes us pay close attention to signs of possible rejection, either from people with whom we have a close relationship or someone we would like to know more about.

However, there are some people who are especially sensitive to rejection, and that is why they fear it and anticipate it frequently, experiencing significant doses of psychological distress. The curious thing about this predisposition is that it increases the chances that rejection actually occurs, due to the mechanisms that we will see below.

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Why does sensitivity to rejection occur?

The idea of people with poorer social skills She is rejected for her clumsiness when it comes to communicating and bonding with others is only partly true. It is true that not having a good toolbox for managing social life makes it easier to end up being more isolated, but this is not inevitable. In fact, many people with difficulties in their relationships are not slow when it comes to thinking about social interactions, but quite the opposite: they become obsessed with it because of the fear of rejection.

People sensitive to rejection remain in an almost constant state of alert, constantly thinking about liking the other person and analyzing the behavior of others for signs of boredom, mockery or anger.

How did they get to that point? Many times it is not due to poor social skills, but rather a series of bad experiences in the past. For example, a very hard love breakup or a childhood marked by bullying or other forms of abuse are capable of taking us to a state of social hypervigilance.

So the fear of rejection is a fruit of very worrying expectations about what others require in order to establish a relationship with them, and this may be caused by past events that escaped the control of oneself and the lack of selfesteem resulting.

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Why the fear of being rejected isolates us more

The obsession with the possibility of being rejected makes us conceive of relationships as a machine, and not as a space for interaction between two human beings. The reason is that the pressure not to lose that person is so high that they only concentrate on measuring their movements so as not to "cross an imaginary line" that sets off the alarms in the other or the other.

On the other hand, people who fear rejection the most are more likely to interpret any ambiguous action as a show of rejection, which causes them to adopt a defensive attitude.

On an investigation carried out on the subject, a questionnaire to measure this psychological characteristic was passed to a group of single people and, months later, those who They had started a relationship in that period of time that they imagined that their partner performed a series of strange actions, such as spending less time with them, being distant, etc. The results showed that the people who were most afraid of rejection quickly moved on to assume their relationship was in jeopardy, instead of considering other more reasonable hypotheses first.

This pattern of thinking has been shown to make people more hostile more quickly and without needing too many reasons, and they even become more reluctant to accept their mistakes, something paradoxical if one takes into account the fear that one has of the possibility of isolate.

On the other hand, has also been seen that this fear makes people enter a harmful dynamic in which the first injured is oneself. For example, research showed that men who have been crudely rejected in a social circle are more willing to make sacrifices to be part of that group, confirming that dynamic of submission to the other that causes such a bad image (in addition to being harmful to those who suffer person). Men who had been rejected by a woman on a dating website were also more willing to spend more money on a date after going through that bad experience.

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Concluding

Sometimes we forget that the foundation of healthy relationships is simplicity and honesty. Assuming the role of victim condemned to rejection only precipitates the appearance of a stigma that leads others to distance themselves.