Experiment on your rejection!

Rejection

Rejection Issues.  Do you know someone, have you been someone, are you someone that has a Attitude of Rejection?  Usually one or more significant rejection experiences in childhood is at the root of this.  Those that are yet to be resolved have heightened awareness and hyper vigilance and now see rejection everywhere.  Even in daily life they see rejection where there is none.  I've suffered personally from this and like a typical Approval Addict I sometimes relapse.  

What will fix this?

We've all heard of the sandwich approach: say a positive, then criticism (the negative), then a positive.  So that's a 2 to 1 ratio.  But in a Harvard study successful teams give each other 5 positives to every 1 negative.
Harvard Article click here. 

CNN found 6:1.
CNN article click here. 

Why is that?  New York Times says that negatives words are stronger, our brains react more to them, also we remember and ruminate more to the negative words than the positive ones.
NYT article click here. 

I decided to do human experimentation!  -on myself.  The treatment modality I decided on was Immersion Therapy.  The means: Youtube video.  For an added risk and a potential trigger I asked my daughter play a role in the video.  
One strange area of success in my life is I had a Youtube Video go viral and is over 200,000 view and subsequent subscriptions to my channel are over 3,000.  This has opened a few doors for me and although I don't understand how this happened -I like it!

This morning I uploaded the quickly produced spoofy video that I shot yesterday  and shared it on about 15 Facebook groups.  To agitate the "Immersion" of negative feedback I introduced each one with snarky statements about it being the best video on such and such.  Most knew I was being sarcastic, but one by one all day today some humorless people went out of their way to say something ugly to me.  Two had mild criticisms that frankly made me feel a little sorry for them.  But the crescendo of the day was one person on Youtube called me an idiot!  Mission accomplished!  

I know what you are thinking ...and your right.  Since I did all this to get called an idiot when it finally happened I felt like I won the game instead of how I would normally feel if called an idiot.  But it actually proves another point I want to make:  What if we change the game?  The 'norms' of approval.  The 'rules' of life.  What if next time I receive a negative criticism I spin it in my own mind?  What if I represent it to myself in a funny way that I can actually laugh at it -like I did today.  

Maybe I can let others play their game by their rules and I have the freedom to play my game by my rules!  Maybe I don't need everyone's or society's approval.

But isn't that a psychopath?  (...or sociopath?)  Just creating my own truth without any ultimate source of truth.  Now that I think about it, as a counselor for the last 20 years, I've met a lot of dysfunctional people that do live that way.

Well... the point is that we CAN change the way we represent our reality to ourselves.  We really can. In working professionally with the mentally ill, I can spot it a mile away! It helps me to diagnosis what's probably going on with that person. Or 500 viewed that video. What goes on in the mind of the 7 people that gave it thumbs down? Maybe nothing as that's a pretty mild response. Or the people leaving negative comments? Well, two were just confused and didn't get it that it was satire. Understandable. But someone that takes the time (with great zeal apparently) to be as ugly and attempt to insult as much as possible? This person is to be pitied. I reclassify them in my perceptions as not having the capacity to do anything other than be ugly. I pity them because most likely they were treated horribly at some point that now that is their paradigm.

I did laugh at the "idiot" comment, and then I did delete it and blocked them from ever seeing my channel again because who wants that lingering around?  That's my boundaries that I set, my fences that I decide where they go.  But I also did some internal mood management and some external affirming.  So for every 1 negative I reminded myself of not 2, 5, or 6 -but 7 (for good measure) positive truths about myself!  Click here for list and another list 


Here's my favorite:
God loves me and has chosen me.

We know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you … (1 Thessalonians 1:4)

At the end of the day the video got 11 thumbs up and 7 thumbs down.  

So, whether we internally change negatives into something we can laugh at or counter them with positive truths about our identity -we are the only person that can manage our moods.

Want to know more?  I authored a written and addio program that is an advance techniques for self regulation of emotions called Mood Managment.  Click for more info.
https://gumroad.com/l/cudZt