Daily Closer

Rejection is a deadly disease. It ruins lives, inhibits potential, and scars people time and time again throughout the remainder of their fleeting life on Earth if left to its own devices. Children who grow up in dysfunctional homes are crippled by it, their vision of humanity tainted. The girl whose father ran out on his family feels rejected as a human being, or the boy who was severely beaten and harassed by his drunken mother understand the concept very clearly, and become defined by the notion. Horrific yet ordinary stories that have become ingrained in our culture to the point of expectancy. We expect our youth to learn and feel rejection, hell 68% of our youth as of 2010 are now growing up in non-traditional families due to one reason or another. It's literally the epitome of modern day living.

The worst part of it all? Rejection is an illusion, perpetuated by our brains due to ancient biological triggers. In a society like what we're dealing with today I feel it's even more important we take an aggressive stance to cure ourselves of this odd disease, and it truly is disease-like in nature, almost a cancer that grows off of normal psychological responses and behavior mechanisms. We've been treating the symptoms and trying to band-aid over it, dealing with it like a tangible thing, when in all reality it's a creation of perceptional confusion.

In a nutshell, people develop the psychological disease between the ages of 0-6 when the brain is still underdeveloped and learns in very primal ways, so it's actually easy to see how the perceptional confusion can occur and how this boogeyman of emotions can become a reality. Susan is 36 months old, is fumbling around the kitchen and knocks over the cookie jar. Her mother has eighty-eight different things on her mind stressing her to her limits as it is, so when little Susie makes this in particular ruckus it just pushes her over the edge: she screams, curses, yells and emotes negativity straight at her rambunctious toddler. Susan doesn't realize that her mother is simply responding to a perception of a stimulus, all she understands is her provider is rejecting her. Needless to say, she responds and cries in a classic attempt to acquire pity and soothe her own emotions. The mother, however, is too furious to give in to the cries and snatches her up and puts her in the corner or even spanks her.

Is any of this out of the ordinary? Nope. It happens quite frequently, and when Susie's gambler father eventually disappears later on that year her mother spirals downward into her own depression, now having the burden of raising a child to herself. Susie grows up with only the most shadowed memories of her father, constant berating and obvious scorn from a mother who has the slightest vendetta against the child she's stuck taking care of by herself, and one big underlying emotional pattern: rejection.



You see, Susan never understood that her father wasn't rejecting her as person and as his daughter. He was rejecting himself as a father and responding to a perception of being unable to handle the responsibilities he was faced with. She never quite logically understood why her mother seemed distant and when she did pay attention it was to scorn her for one thing or another. Emotionally though, she came to conclusion after conclusion that she was not worth it and was just being continually rejected.

During the defining formative years, we contract this disease that feeds off of illusion and is enabled by everyone who acknowledges feeling rejected as a human feeling, when in fact it is quite the opposite. Rejection is a dehumanizing psychological experience. You may feel disappointed, uncomfortable, angry, distraught, confused or feelings of discontentment but you never feel rejection. We create it, we spread it, we let it prevent us from living unbridled by it and it's all a lie.

True success and happiness cannot be obtained in any form while being shackled down by this boogeyman. It's time to break free.