Understanding rejection as a gift
“After a long storm of growing up feeling unheard and unconsidered, they both hold hands and walk out of the storm. They started to spread love everywhere and to everyone. They finally felt at home once they had the control to be who they are.
(That was experienced by two people while helping each other learn how to love themselves.)”
Come with me. Let me take you on a journey through my thoughts, showing you the world through my lens of vibration and frequency. Everyone on Earth deserves to feel loved, respected, and safe. However, many of us have experienced situations that make us feel unloved or insecure. If we don’t question these experiences, we might begin to believe that they define our reality. For example, if someone breaks our trust, we may find it hard to trust again.
Let’s consider another example: Imagine that a traumatic experience from your childhood still lingers. Because of those past events, you might view yourself as unworthy or not good enough. These perceptions and the beliefs formed during those moments leave a mark on your mind, shaping how you interact in future relationships—until, as adults, we decide to question and release these limiting beliefs.
It wasn’t until I began to understand what it truly means to love myself that I gained clarity. I realized how much we are enslaved by our thoughts, living in a prison built by concepts that no longer make sense once we start to truly respect and love ourselves.
The journey started reflecting on the family concept
Each of us grows up with a particular concept of family. For me, family meant being present for each other in both good and bad times. It meant loving, protecting, trusting, listening, accepting, respecting, and caring for one another. If everyone acted this way, we would all experience the wonders of belonging, no matter what name we give it.
When we argue, conflict serves a positive purpose: it helps us align our viewpoints with one another. Despite not always living in a picture-perfect family environment, the basic values of trust and being there for each other should pave the way for healthy relationships.
“When we experience what we fear the most, it sets us free”
I started to see that my experiences with family were far from the ideal I had in mind, and I realized that this was my issue, not theirs. They were living according to their own ideas of family. I had to go through a process of awareness, acceptance, and finally, action to set boundaries to protect my mental health.
Of course, setting boundaries is about protecting ourselves because, from our perspective, the treatment we receive doesn’t resemble love and respect. These experiences taught me what it means to love myself, and now there’s no turning back—I’ve learned to set the tone for how I wish to be treated.
However, creating these boundaries can lead to an internal storm of guilt, because we know others might see us as selfish, unkind, or unloving. This is never an easy task, as guilt can sometimes feel overwhelming.
You might be seen as the bad person because, by setting boundaries, you’ve stopped feeding their addictive behavior of feeling good at the expense of making you feel bad. While you were in the relationship, you allowed unacceptable treatment to continue because you were under the illusion that you had to accept it to receive their love. But eventually, you explore the concept of guilt and let it go.
When you clearly understand why things happen in your life and start giving yourself the love you deserve, you can stop the pain. You feel empowered and free. You finally learn to say no to interactions that pull you out of alignment.
During this journey, I reflected a lot on the fear of rejection. When you truly experience rejection, you come to two fundamental conclusions:
1. It doesn’t hurt to be rejected by those who didn’t treat you well.
2. Rejection is a blessing in disguise because it’s liberating to realize they’ve done you a favor. You’re free and no longer have to endure their offensive jokes, being ignored, or being silenced. With this clarity, I knew in my heart that rejection can indeed be a blessing in disguise.
Loving ourselves is a continuous mental exercise that involves developing our awareness of what it means to feel loved and then directing that awareness and love toward ourselves first. When we integrate this concept into our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, giving love to ourselves first, we align with our inner selves, and our new reality reflects that.
Learning to love ourselves is challenging, especially in the society we live in, because it takes time to shed erroneous concepts. But it is rewarding and possible to reach a point where we conclude that nothing is perfect, and it was never about perfection. We know that the journey of self-discovery never ends. I am constantly learning more about what it means to love myself and what makes me happy. However, I am now confident in what I want when interacting with others. I create interactions that align with my beliefs, set boundaries, and give love to myself.