Belonging, Rejection & Why You Reject Yourself In Advance

Podcast Transcript

Hello, my beautiful friend. I am so excited to deliver this episode for you today.

One of our core needs as human beings is to belong. We want it, but we also need it to survive. But that being said, belonging is a feeling. Belonging is an emotion. Belonging isn’t a circumstance, and it isn’t a thought.

Instead, it’s something we feel because of how we interpret what is going on with other people. And as I’ve been coaching on this through the years, I’ve noticed something really important.

The number one thing that gets in the way of people feeling like they belong is rejection. Specifically, not wanting to feel rejection — or being afraid of feeling rejection.

Now, rejection can be a circumstance. You can be rejected when you apply for a job and receive a rejection letter, for instance. But the part we want to talk about here isn’t the circumstance of being rejected — it’s the feeling of being rejected. Because rejection is actually an emotion.

That’s the piece we don’t want to feel.

A lot of us have plenty of experience with rejection in the ways it typically shows up. When we don’t make the team. When we break up with somebody. When someone doesn’t call us back. When we don’t get the job.

This is regular rejection — the standard flavor. We all know it. It doesn’t feel great, but it’s also a normal part of life. This type of rejection hurts because we don’t get what we want: the relationship, the job, the outcome we were hoping for.

Most of us have a certain level of tolerance for rejection. We can tolerate some of it. But over time, we can also develop rejection sensitivity without realizing that’s what’s happening.

There’s another side of rejection I want to talk about — beyond these direct experiences. This is a different kind of rejection, and it grows quietly, almost like a cancer.

It looks like being told you were too loud as a child. Or too quiet. It’s reacting in ways that aren’t fully tolerated by society. These are micro-rejections.

It might be someone rolling their eyes when you say something. Someone sighing instead of engaging. Not being validated when you share something painful and being told to “think more positively.”

These are small, mini rejections.

A lot of us grow up tolerating them. We learn to have a stiff upper lip. We internalize them.

When someone snaps at you — even something like getting flipped off in traffic — you pull it in and process it. And when it confirms other micro rejections, it just becomes another one added to the pile.

I think of it like a stack of feathers.

One feather isn’t that bad. A thousand feathers might not even be that bad. But ten thousand feathers? That gets heavy.

Over Christmas, my husband and son were moving a king-size mattress for my father-in-law, and it was incredibly heavy. Obviously, it’s not just feathers — but when everything accumulates in one place, the weight adds up.

People often come to me because they’ve experienced rejection in many forms. And it’s tempting to believe, especially if you’re single, that you wouldn’t feel this way if your circumstances were different.

But that’s not true.

We can feel rejected when we’re dating. We can feel rejected when we’re married. We can feel rejected with no friends or with a full circle of friends. With a job or without a job.

Because rejection isn’t about the circumstance at all.

When we interpret something as rejection, the emotion is generated. And when we don’t want to feel that emotion, we start protecting ourselves.

We put up walls. We try to avoid rejection entirely. And slowly, our life gets smaller and smaller.

Not because we don’t want connection — but because we don’t have the capacity anymore. The feather bed is too heavy. Adding even one more feather feels impossible.

This is when connection starts disappearing.

And here’s another fascinating part: we start rejecting ourselves in advance.

Rejecting yourself in advance looks like deciding people don’t like you anyway, so you don’t invite them. It often shows up in very reasonable-sounding ways:

“All my friends expect me to do everything, so I’m not going to reach out.”

Then nobody reaches out. And suddenly that means, “No one likes me. I can’t make friends. Something is wrong with me.”

That’s self-rejection.

You’ve taken someone else’s behavior, made it mean something about you, and rejected yourself first. This happens quietly, in the background of your mind.

We do this all the time.

At dinner with in-laws. Someone gives a look. We personalize it. We feel rejected before anything is even confirmed.

Why does your brain do this?

Because it’s trying to keep you safe.

Your brain wants to keep you in the cave. The cave is safe. It’s not exciting, and you won’t find your dream partner or dream job there — but you also won’t feel rejection.

So your brain creates pre-rejections to keep you there.

The good news? Once you see this, you can change it.

I was talking to a client about this recently. After working on this together, she went to a gathering and told herself beforehand: I belong here. I am lovable.

She became the strong voice in her own head.

She enjoyed the experience — and when she got home, she didn’t overthink it. She didn’t spiral. She didn’t feel that familiar pain of not fitting in.

This is what happens when we reprogram a different part of the brain.

Once we understand that rejection is an emotion, that it comes from what we think and believe, and that it’s built from a lifetime of micro-rejections — we don’t need to get rid of it.

We don’t need to heal everything.

Instead, we build another voice.

A voice that says something else that’s also true:
I am lovable. I belong. I don’t need to be different.

This might sound like a mantra — and it kind of is. But it’s most powerful when you use it in real time, when you notice yourself rejecting yourself first.

That’s one rep.

And we take these reps in real life.

We’re not pretending the past didn’t happen. It did. But we don’t have to process it the same way anymore.

We simply recognize our fear of rejection. We notice when we’re rejecting ourselves in advance. And we choose not to.

This takes seconds. Not hours.

When your brain says, “That look meant something,” you respond with:
I belong. I’m lovable. It’s okay. I don’t know what they’re thinking.

This is practice.

And if you want more connection in your life, this is where it starts.

I’m not going to reject myself in advance anymore.

We set the target: I am lovable. I belong.

And we aim it toward whatever we’re working toward — friendships, dating, jobs, connection.

This is the Love Yourself No Matter What method in action. Not theory. Real life.

And I want you to know: this is possible for you.

You don’t have to stay stuck here.

If you want to belong, you have to decide that you belong — and stop rejecting yourself first.

As always, I invite you to book a discovery call with me. I currently have space in my one-to-one practice, and it would be an honor to talk with you.

You can book at amandahess.ca/book-a-call.

I’ll see you here next week.
Bye for now.