Rejection Recoil

Have you ever felt physical recoil when someone has rejected or criticised you? Discover why and how your body may be talking to you when you feel rejected or there's a tricky social interaction you're navigating. 

Understanding the recoil of rejection can be a truly permission giving game changer in our relationship with ourselves!

Join your host Andrea Urquhart, a professional emotion and positive psychology leadership and life coach and mentor who believes in authentic character growth and developing our emotional strength without fakery or toxic hacks!

In today's episode, Andrea walks you through what the therapeutic and coaching industry generally mean by "somatic", and how our body speaks not only in burnout, but in our everyday social interactions and experiences.

Curious? Listen now!

If you like to nerd out on further reading, articles used in research for this episode are linked at the end of the transcript.

Thanks for joining me today! If you've had an "Aha!" moment whilst listening today, click subscribe to add Strengthen Live to your favourite podcasts.

Click through to https://strengthenlive.com to discover more about online courses, coaching and training with me.

Transcript

Welcome to the Strengthen Live Podcast! I'm your host, Andrea Urquhart. This is the place for trailblazing, empathetic leaders who are also recovering people pleasers! If you have a big heart and your passion is supporting others to change their lives for the better, find home and belonging here and in the So It’s Not Just Me Then?! community.

Thank you so much for joining me here!

Today, we’re focusing on rejection and the physical recoil we experience with that.

You may also be familiar with the word somatic. If not, get ready! It’s going to become an increasingly mainstream phrase as our modern society continues its fascination with wellbeing as we all search for increased understanding of what makes life fulfilling, how to build our resilience, and how to heal and move on from adverse experiences. 

There’s also a significant insight that professionals working on a psychological and emotional level with people have known of for a while and are researching more intensely: That our body not only responds to our relational and emotional experiences, but it also provides us with emotional and cognitive intelligence. 

It doesn’t just “keep the score” as Bessell Van Der Volk describes the build of traumatic impact on our physical wellbeing, it also speaks to us. It warns us with physical sensations whilst our mind is busy second-guessing things so that our emotions are alerted not only to physical danger, but also to emotional or relational danger. This is what happens when we experience rejection and negative social interactions. But whilst most of us are familiar with the phrase “follow your gut”, we’re not usually so good at being attuned to and listening to what our body is telling us in our day-to-day life.

But what about when our body is actually telling us something that our mind and emotions are too preoccupied to notice? 

Let’s set the scene for our focus on rejection and recoil today by clarifying some of the phrases around physical intelligence and our “somatic” experience. 

Stay with me here while we check out the psychological jargon!

An online article called “A Brief Overview & History of Somatics” which I’ll link in the shownotes,  describes the work of philosopher, theologian and writer Dr Thomas Hanna who used the term Somatic  to mean  - and I quote - “each person is the mind and the body, together--a holistic and global understanding of the biological, cultural, emotional, psychological, spiritual, energetic, and evolutionary functioning of the human organism.”

Simply put, it means that every part of our living being is interlinked.

Science is increasingly supporting ths understanding that our mind, body, emotions and spirit are all interlinked and interdependent within us. This goes both ways and all ways – not just with negative impacts. The physical sensations of excitement or safety, for example, come with some positive emotional, mental, physical and spiritual experiences as well.

I hope this podcast doesn’t just give you some insight, but also permission to you to consider and explore your own physical experiences around rejection and recoil. Not to feel shame, but to gain insight and perhaps, to begin to understand that you’re not “too sensitive” and it’s not that you’re "not resilient enough" to cope with rejection and the push and pull of leadership life, but that your physical responses to rejection and negative social evaluations are, in fact, normal physical function. Our body reports emotional and social rejection as physical pain and absorbs it physically.

Over recent decades, research has increasingly shown that rejection activates the same neural regions within us as physical pain. This means that when we feel rejected, we feel it as physical pain.

Not only that, but negative social evaluation – so things like judgemental feedback also activates pain-related regions in our brain. 

We don’t just feel judgement and rejection in our emotions, mind and spirit, we feel it in our body. No wonder our thoughts can spiral as we grapple to respond to these. And spiral they do, often with defensiveness, self-questioning and, perhaps most challenging of all, with shame.

The physical impact of rejection is something that many of us find tricky to navigate. We may not even associate the two together. Within our modern and busy cultures, we’re encouraged to simply shake off rejection and pull ourselves together emotionally. Isn’t that what many call resilience, after all? 

But what we may think of as emotional resilience and stamina as we keep pressing forward, may actually cause our body to take the hit for us not pausing to work through the rejection or that challenging interaction.

It’s not so difficult for us to understand this when we’re experiencing major rejection, but have you ever noticed or considered that this is also happening in our everyday lives? We are not just holistic beings when the going gets tough: We’re actually holistic 24/7. 

In our everyday lives, our bodies experience the joy and thrill of positive emotional experiences. They also experience the physical pain of everyday rejection and the downs of negative social interactions. 

It’s just that we don’t always notice this. Or maybe, we don’t allow ourselves to notice this? Perhaps you already know that your body responds physically to relational challenge and rejection, and you just put it down to you not being resilient enough? It is part of our body functioning healthily.

That’s why we’re not only talking about rejection today, we’re also going to briefly touch on Rejection Sensitivity and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. Although we're going to understand a little bit more about these, it's not our job to diagnose other people, but perhaps to just recognise some behaviours and have more understanding and compassion in an interaction

Because sometimes our response to rejection is out of proportion to the negative interaction. But who’s to say how that is actually measured when we all have our own life experiences, history and personalities?

Firstly, I need to tackle the word sensitivity with you because I’m fully aware that many people think of sensitivity in a negative and judgemental way. That brings a double whammy when we feel the impact of rejection deeply – the shame of rejection and the shaming of our response to rejection. 

For many, sensitivity is associated with “too much” or "imbalanced". We can too easily connect it with being “over-sensitive”. But just as I invited you in Episode 1 to consider humility as a strength on a sliding scale between abandoning ourselves and being arrogant, I’d like to invite you to consider sensitivity itself in a more constructive light.

Sensitivity shows caring, perspective, insight and social intelligence. When we display sensitivity, we are responding deeply to something. There is no optimum level of sensitivity that we should all be aiming for. 

Sometimes, it’s healthy to pause and respond to others with more care and sensitivity. At other times, with some perspective, we realise that in the grand scheme of life, something isn’t worth us being too sensitive about. 

l invite you pull away from labelling others or yourself as too sensitive, over sensitive or out of balance when we display sensitivity. There are great strengths that come with sensitivity. I invite you to think of sensitivity as an intensity of experience instead. 

Sometimes, this means that you, or your team member or client have a greater perspective and insight into something because of your sensitivity. At other times, it means that the person is simply hyper-focused on what they are experiencing. Sensitivity itself is not negative. I’ll say that again; Sensitivity in itself is not negative. So, no more shame, okay?

Remember that our brain responds to rejection in a very similar way that it does to physical pain, so our response also includes a physical reaction.

We all respond extra sensitively to rejection at times. It’s important for us to know about because there is no shame in this. It is simply us responding more intensely to rejection – and likely influenced by a specific part of our inner story and life experience. But shaming rejection sensitivity doesn’t help. What we or the person need is time to regulate our whole system and to gain perspective. We’ll also need some form of repair to the emotional recoil that we’ve experienced. 

Now let’s talk about Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria which, the clue is in dysphoria, is way more intense than rejection sensitivity. It is, by all definitions, a response to rejection that is out of balance with the level of rejection – that’s the dysphoria part. It’s also felt very physically – like a sucker punch to your gut for example. You may have experienced this yourself or noticed someone physically recoil as they respond to a relational rejection or challenge particularly deeply. 

Remember, our brain receives rejection as physical pain, so the physical impact is normal, it’s just that the intensity of it is dramatically heightened in Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.

If you’re neurodivergent, you may have heard of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. For example, it’s common in people with ADHD. Again, I’ll link an article on RSD in the show notes.

However, it’s not only neurodivergent people who experience that very physical pain from rejection  – even from small, everyday interactions of rejection. 

For people who have empathy as a significant strength, rejection is often tricky to handle. That’s why we’re lifting the lid on it today. We want to please and serve others, so rejection or negative social evaluation can hit us harder than people who aren’t operating so consistently with empathy as a key driver. So it’s not surprising if you have very physical reactions to rejection and negative social evaluations like gossiping or even performance reviews that give just one small thing to improve. 

The fully somatic experience of rejection can linger within us. But remember, everyone feels rejection physically, and everyone may experience rejection sensitivity on different occasions.

Just acknowledging this can be liberating. It can free us from self-doubt and self-shaming and help us to give ourselves permission to actually physically feel and then regulate our bodies as well as our emotions. Go to the gym, get some sleep, do meditation. Just give our bodies time to recover as well as thinking things through and doing the emotional work like forgiveness.

Recognising our personal physical responses to rejection or negative social evaluation can also be really useful in helping us make healthy and insightful judgements in some situations – This is precisely because our body is talking to us whilst our thoughts and emotions are trying to sift through the different layers of our own inner story and how to respond to the other person or the situation.

Whilst you may be battling in your thoughts, and your empathy is getting in the way of your perspective about a situation or an interaction with someone, your body may already being showing you that something isn’t right or healthy in the situation. 

It recognises and remembers patterns of rejection pain (remember, it keeps the score) and it can sense when an interaction is leading us into that pain or stress pattern again. So, learning to listen to our body and its responses can be really helpful. It’s not woo woo or weird, it’s your body being sensitive to rejection in a good way and speaking up to prevent you from going there again.

Equally, our body may be over-protective  - just like with the rejection sensitivity dysphoria – where the response is out of proportion. However, out of proportion doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be dismissed completely. Somewhere in there, within our inner story, within our experience, there will be something that has triggered that within the current situation.

I hope that this has been insightful for you today. As always, self-compassion is key here, and growing our willingness to become increasingly self-aware of what our whole, somatic being is telling us.

Join me next time for more positive psychology and emotional intelligence insights for you as a trailblazing, empathetic leader. 

Know too, that if you recognise a regular pattern of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria in you – that’s reactions that are out of proportion with the rejection and if you regularly assume intense rejection from those gaps in communication with people who may not be rejecting you at all – then consider taking some time with a therapist or professional who understands you and Rejection Sensitivity.

Remember though, that it's really important that we don't go around diagnosing ourselves or assuming diagnoses about other people.

As a coach, I can recommend strategies that help us put rejection sensitivity into perspective, such as personalised affirmations that take into account the underlying inner stories that you're aware of, and thought processes that lead to that intense sensitivity. 

My Rebel Affirmation Creation Online Course will teach you one process that can help.

Find out more about that and other ways to work with me at strengthenlive.com.

For now, I encourage you to notice your own and other people’s physical responses to tricky social and team interactions this week. 

See if you can spot when your body is already speaking to you, even though your mind and emotions are busy second-guessing how you should respond in the situation. I wonder how quickly you might listen to your body this week and how that might influence some on the spot or considered responses and reactions to others and choices you’re being asked to make?

Thank you for joining me and I’m looking forward to welcoming you next time!

Articles you might like to nerd out on:

On Rejection experienced as physical pain:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3273616/#:~:text=As%20such%2C%20this%20study%20demonstrates,pain%2Drelated%20regions%20as%20well.

Kross E, Berman MG, Mischel W, Smith EE, Wager TD. Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. P Natl A Sci. 2011;108:6270–5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1102693108.

Start here for that introduction to Hana's view of somatics:

https://somatics.org/about/introduction/overview-history#:~:text=There%20are%20lots%20of%20disciplines,nature%20of%20the%20human%20being.

And last but not least, this is a really clear article on defining and clarifying the differences between Rejection Sensitivity and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd