Handling Rejection
Recently we were asked a question about how to deal with rejection from others. Unfortunately, many of you may have wondered the same thing. The question was specifically about handling rejection from a parent, but the principles here will reply to any significant relationship. Here is Dr. Bill Gillham's response to the question:
Your mom or dad's ability to love was disconnected when they were very young. Here's the way it works. A child is born with the need to be loved because God made us this way. We do not know God (who is the ultimate giver of love), yet we have this great need to be loved. So we target humans to try to satisfy our need to be loved. This begins with mom, dad, brothers, sisters, etc. Meanwhile, God's enemy, Satan, tries to block us from finding God's love. He leads certain moms or dads to focus on themselves instead of on their kids, so the kids grow up feeling neglected and unloved.
Your soul is made up of your mind, your will, and your emotions: your thinker, your chooser, and your feeler. Your feeler reacts to whatever you set your mind on. Set your mind on a poisonous snake that's about to bite you and (on a 1-10 scale) your mind will think, I'm in great danger and that's a ten! Your feeler will instantly shoot up and you will feel terrified at level ten! But, then you see that the snake is made of rubber. Your thinker immediately thinks, I'm safe! and your mind zooms down to one. However, even though your feeler will slowly start down, it will take it hours to slowly sink to one. Thirty minutes later when your feeler is still fearful at level 8, you open a drawer and a spider scoots up your sleeve. Both your mind and your feeler (emotions) zoom back up to ten, but whereas your mind had to travel ten points, your feeler only had to travel two points to arrive at ten because it started on an eight! This up and down process occurs many times per day until the emotions begin to lose their ability to use the entire ten point scale. Your feeler gets stuck up nearer to the top of the scale! So, you begin to meet life with only a few points on your feeler scale. Your feeler is stuck!
Now back to the baby. Due to the fall of man, a baby is born totally self-centered. So the small child learns about himself from the way others react to him. If mom or dad to not kiss him or hug him the child does not learn that such things are difficult or impossible for his parents. He learns "I am unlovable. I am worthless. I am no good." Because this is painful, his feeler stays near the top. He FEELS unlovable, rejected, worthless. His feeler gets stuck!
Although these folks want love, they don't know what to do with it when they get it. It makes them very uncomfortable. So many of them build their lives around how to live in a loveless world. This is what happened to your mom. She can handle rejection better than she can handle love. She wishes she were different, but she sees herself as hopeless.
The solution is to come to Jesus, the Great Lover, in faith. But, even though you may come to Jesus in faith, sometimes it is possible to still not realize your connection with Jesus' love in a practical way. The good news is that God has raised up this ministry to teach people how to connect with God who loves us. All of our materials that we have produced are designed to help folks realize and receive God's love. I encourage you to read my book Lifetime Guarantee available from our online store. It goes into much greater detail than I am able to provide here.