What is the purpose of Fear of Rejection?
As someone who was raised in a conservative society with patriarchal family values, I never learned how to be at ease with my emotions.
I wrote previously about fear of rejection and how it impacted my entrepreneurship journey. It is something that I still struggle with. It is so deeply ingrained that it feels impossible to surmount.
As someone who was raised in a conservative society with patriarchal family values, I never learned how to be at ease with my emotions. I never learned that I was allowed to feel my feelings; let alone express them (well, unless it was anger and lashing out… that looked more ok to do).
Many years later, the startup journey has forced me to face many of my fears. And let me tell you; it’s a mess in there! As a person who is trained in science and works in tech, and raised in the situation above, I feel very ill equipped to deal with emotions and a lot of “softer” ways to understand and interact with them, well, don’t work for me. At least not yet. So, naturally I gravitate towards the more “logical” explanations.
I have posted a few of these more “logical” explanations I have come across, but a newer one I’ve seen is treating emotions as signals or data. I think I first heard of it on Mayim Bialik's Breakdown podcast. But this was also what we discussed at “founders’ health” session!
We did a guided exercise led by a professional life coach. It was an interesting exercise with a lot of nuances and I don’t feel qualified to talk about those at all. But the part that really stuck with me was the whole “emotions as signal thing”. The coach guided us through some “mental warm up exercises” and then asked us to “relive” a case where we felt strongly about the fear of rejection. I visualized a recent event where I didn’t walk up to a person I really respect because I thought they might not recognize me or don’t feel that I’m worthy of their time (or whatever f’d up thing stopped me).
And then she asked “how is this feeling trying to help you?”. I thought “well, perhaps I want to feel that I belong, and I’m recognized, and that I have enough authority to be given the benefit of the doubt, and my brain is predicting that this situation might not lead into that”.
She then asked, “think about that need; how is that trying to help you?”. And went on “repeat that exercise a few times and build a chain of thought (lol) that ends with the most fundamental need that you think this fear is signaling at”. This was deep and interesting. Let’s say I was very distracted by that task for the rest of the night. I don’t yet have good answers for the questions she asked and I am guessing that this will be a discovery journey of sorts. But, apparently my brain likes thinking about emotions this way. It’s logical. It’s methodical.
The takeaway here is that emotions are there to let you know that, from your brain’s point of view, something is off. Some underlying core value or need is being threatened. Understanding that relationship is an important first step. Then one needs to think about and investigate why that need or core value exists, and if it serves a constructive purpose. If not, addressing the underlying cause is a good way to calm down the resulting emotions involved. And sometimes it might be that the emotion is actually right and we’re not paying attention to an important need.
