THE PAIN OF SOCIAL REJECTION

Anyone who lived through  same hurt feelings bubble up when you are excluded from lunch with co-workers, fail to land the job you interviewed for or are dumped by a romantic partner.
Rejection feels lousy.
Yet for many years, few psychologists tuned into the importance of rejection. “It’s like the whole field missed this centrally important part of human life,” That’s changed over the last decade and a half, as a growing number of researchers have turned their eyes toward this uncomfortable fact of life. “People have realized just how much our concern with social acceptance spreads its fingers into almost everything we do,”

Clearly, there are good reasons to better understand the effects of being excluded. “Humans have a fundamental need to belong. Just as we have needs for food and water, we also have needs for positive and lasting relationships,”

 Although humans are social beings, some level of rejection is an inevitable part of life. Nevertheless, rejection can become a problem when it is prolonged or consistent, when the relationship is important, or when the individual is highly sensitive to rejection. Rejection by an entire group of people can have especially negative effects, particularly when it results in social isolation.

 

Need for acceptance

Rejection may be emotionally painful because of the social nature of human beings and the need of social interaction between other humans is essential. All humans, even introverts, need to be able to give and receive affection to be psychologically healthy.
Psychologists believe that simple contact or social interaction with others is not enough to fulfill this need. Instead, people have a strong motivational drive to form and maintain caring interpersonal relationships. People need both stable relationships and satisfying interactions with the people in those relationships. If either of these two ingredients is missing, people will begin to feel lonely and unhappy
 The main purpose of self-esteem is to monitor social relations and detect social rejection. In this view, self-esteem is a sociometer which activates negative emotions when signs of exclusion appear.
 

In childhood

Most children who are rejected by their peers display one or more of the following behavior patterns:

1. Low rates of prosaically behavior, e.g. taking turns, sharing.
2. High rates of aggressive or disruptive behavior.
3. High rates of inattentive, immature, or impulsive behavior.
4. High rates of social anxiety.

 Rejected children are likely to have lower self-esteem and to be at greater risk for internalizing problems like depression.Some rejected children display externalizing behavior and show aggression rather than depression. The research is largely correlational, but there is evidence of reciprocal effects. This means that children with problems are more likely to be rejected, and this rejection then leads to even greater problems for them. Chronic peer rejection may lead to a negative developmental cycle that worsens with time.

We will look at rejection in spiritual way and see how to handle it...in our next article...