Ever wonder why you feel even more obsessed with someone after they rejected you? We're going to explore why this happens and what you can do instead.
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Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hey there. Before we hop into the episode, I wanted to invite you to something really special that I'm doing. It is a free workshop to help you become the hero of your own life. If you have been feeling a lot of worry, anxiety, doubt, fear, or even those feelings of like, woe is me, I'm never going to get out of this. I want you to know I've got you. There's a better way out of this. I am going to teach you how to shift out of those feelings and into feeling more empowered in your life where you can take action from a clear, grounded place to make real change in your life. This is how I went from somebody who was always working a job I never quite liked, always dating unavailable men to building a business that I love, traveling the world and having really wonderful relationships with people I really like. I want to share that all with you. Okay, so this is happening on Wednesday, October 29th. I'm going to give you the signup link in the show notes and I really hope to see you there. Thank you.
(01:49)
Hello, my friend Sarah Curnoles here, your breakup bestie. Have you ever noticed that the moment that someone rejects you, you want them even more? Think about it. What is it about rejection that actually makes us want the other person more than we did before? It's like when you take the option away. Now I want the option. Maybe I was indifferent. Maybe sometimes this happens of like you're going through your relationship and you've gotten to a point where you're both a little indifferent about it, but if they're the one that ends things, all of the sudden that's all you can think about is the other person. That's exactly what we're talking about today. We are talking about why rejection breeds obsession and what you can do instead. So I'm going to tell you a little story from my own life. I was dating somebody for a little while, somebody that I ended up liking more than I thought I would.
(02:52)
I really liked this guy. I thought it was going to go somewhere and this was happening before my travels and we decided we were going to keep in touch and we were going to stay close and that we would see where it goes and we'd pick up when we got back. Now, I will be totally honest. I think my feelings for him were growing and I wasn't fully communicating those. I was figuring it out as I was going along too, right? Life is messy. Nobody's perfect. We're figuring this out as we go. Well, fast forward a few weeks. I don't hear from him for a while, so I just assume I'm getting ghosted and I deal with that and all of those feelings of being left hanging and being disappointed and learning how to let go and move on, that's a normal process. Then I hear from him and he tells me that he is going to be dating somebody else.
(03:52)
So not only was I ghosted, I was also rejected. This is all a part of life. I'm not saying this for anything like, oh, woe was you, Sarah, life sucks. This is so hard or he's awful. It's not that at all. It's not even about that. It's about I want you to know if you've been ghosted and if you've been rejected, I'm there too. We learn these tools so that we get to respond to these things in our life in a different way than we would have before, and here's how I did it differently. This time, I noticed all those feelings that were coming up of feeling rejected and feeling like I wanted him even more and I didn't obsess about him. I didn't over fantasize or over romanticize. Did I do a little bit of it? Yes, but I was able to catch it and redirect it.
(04:47)
I was able to see myself through any kind of feelings of disappointment and sadness and honestly regret of I wish I had done some things differently and I processed all of it so that I could move through it faster than I have in the past without hanging on, without anger, bitterness or resentment towards him and truly just let it go and let it be a thing. In the past, this is a huge improvement for me because in the past we'd still be here months later where I haven't talked to him, but I would still be obsessing about him. I'd still be thinking about him, but now the only reason I'm thinking about him is because I'm using him to teach other people who go through similar situations. So there is another way is what I want you to know, that yes, you can get rejected and yes, it's going to hurt, it's going to suck.
(05:47)
Nobody likes getting rejected, but there is a different way to go through that process and it doesn't have to take you out of living your for weeks and weeks and weeks. So if you are at this place that you can relate to either being ghosted or being rejected and you feel like you can't stop thinking about that person, you keep focusing on all those good times and you just can't wrap your mind around how they could just end things and let it go and throw you out like yesterday's trash. Or maybe if they cheated on you and you're feeling really ashamed that they picked this other person over you and that maybe you should be stronger and move on and you shouldn't still be thinking about them and you're hanging on to all the good memories. Maybe that's you may also, this happens from time to time where you feel stuck in limbo and you don't know how to move forward, and so you are scanning their social media for any clues, any pieces of information that could bring you closer to that person.
(06:54)
Again, does any of this sound familiar? You're here because you want to feel better. You don't want to keep obsessing. This isn't making you feel any better, and what you really want deep down is you want to feel that connection. You want to feel closeness that just happened to be the most recent person that you experienced that with, and you're hoping that things will change and they'll go back to the way that things were to, but that is living in denial and it's not working because keeping you stuck in the past, but the past has already happened, and where we are today is a very different place. We have new information today that you didn't have in the past. The information that you have today is you have more information about how this person lives, their life makes their choices, how they communicate with you and what their preferences are for how they want to live their life. That's new information and we can take that information and we can choose how to respond to it. Now, if you are in the place where this rejection is leading to obsession, here is my hunch on how you are choosing to respond to the rejection. You are making the rejection mean something personal about you.
(08:40)
Now, you might be thinking, how can I not make it personal about me? It's literally about me. It is personal, but actually it's not because it's very little about you and it is mostly about them. This person is choosing how to live their life and who they want to live it with or not live it with, and that's the information that you have and the information that you also now have is that this person isn't compatible with you as much as you wish that they were. The sheer fact that they are choosing to not be in a relationship with you automatically disqualifies them from being in the compatible category.
(09:34)
In order for there to be compatibility, they have to want to be in a relationship with you. That's like criteria number one. It's like unspoken criteria. So that is new information and it's not about you, it's about them. My other hunch is that deep down you are putting this person on some kind of pedestal, something along the lines of, well, they must know better if we're thinking they rejected me, I must be worthless. That's giving them all the power of they're the ones that's defining worth. Guess what? They don't get to define your worth. Your worth is inherent because you are a human being who's alive on this planet today. Nothing can change that. You actually can never become more worthy or less worthy than you already are. Your worth is never in question.
(10:43)
You are always worthy and it does not change no matter what anybody does. So stop giving them the power and stop letting that be your mirror that is telling you if you're good enough or not. It's a faulty source. It's like a fun home mirror. It is giving you back on all kinds of distorted image. Again, they're not a trustworthy source because they chose not to stay in your life. That is not a source of love and compassion or light. Therefore, it cannot be a good mirror and even if there were things that you did in the relationship that you regret or ways that you behaved that maybe you're feeling a bit ashamed about or that you weren't your best, that's okay. You're a human being. You make mistakes, you did a bad thing, but that does not mean you are a bad person. Sin your behavior does not define who you are.
(12:00)
So here's what I want you to know about what's happening on a brain level. When you go through rejection, your brain, the main assignment that your brain takes on as like this is my purpose in life, your brain is trying to keep you safe. Your brain is trying to keep you alive. That is how it interprets its entire job in this world. Rejection, it perceives is a threat to your safety because it can cause pain, right? It's emotional pain, but it's still pain. It's not pleasant. So when this is happening, your brain goes into overdrive mode to figure out why are we in all this pain? How do we make it stop?
(12:51)
Hence the obsession, right? It's working on overdrive to make the pain stop except it's not going off the best plan. It's acting kind of like, I don't know, like old school Looney tunes where they're running around kind of crazy without any direction. The way that it is trying to get you out of pain is it's clinging to old information about old memories or the way things used to be, and it is clinging on to an unhelpful form of hope that is not grounded in reality. It is grounded in fantasy, which means it's not grounded at all if it's in a fantasy, it's not grounded.
(13:42)
So it is valuing these old images that's replaying in your brain and this idea of a future that could possibly be, but actually probably won't ever be. So those are two things that your brain is focusing on. Another reason why this happens is that rejection triggers a scarcity effect in your brain. That idea of not having enough triggers, the sense of scarcity within you, which is almost like a primal reaction if we fear that there's not enough, we go into overdrive. If you think about our cave people, ancestors, and they were afraid of not enough, what did they do? They hoarded, they held onto, they would store up extra food, they would cut down on expending any excess energy. They went into survival mode, and isn't that kind of how it feels when you're in that phase after being rejected? It kind of feels like you're back in survival mode, right? You're not thinking at your highest level, you're not really functioning all that well. You're probably making some not great choices. That's the scarcity effect of like, oh my God, this great thing is gone. I might never have it again.
(15:13)
Just be aware of that. We're going to get to that again, okay? It is also when we go through rejection, it's also bumping up against our ego and our identity. So it feels like I was saying, it feels like your worth is in question. We don't like this as human beings. We don't like to have our ego feel like it's been lessened or lessened has been made lesser, has been reduced. Let's say that we don't like having our ego be reduced and we don't like having our identity threatened, your identity. Maybe you were identifying as I am a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a husband or a wife, right? That's an identity and now that's been taken away. I was a part of a couple. I was so-and-so's person, and we also frame all kinds of identity things around that of like I nurture them, I take care of them, I love them, I look out for them, I protect them, and when that's gone, that feels like a rejection to who we are because in some ways it is, right? Our identity was put on another person who was put on a basis of another person where we need to create an identity that is not based on another person.
(16:42)
So these are all the things that are happening in your brain when you go through a rejection. It is a nasty, nasty cocktail of it can be really complicated to move through that, but we're going to choose how to go through this differently because just by listening to this, you're raising your awareness that this is happening for you, and when you have awareness, that means you also have the option of making a different choice. What happens if you keep doing what you've always been doing? You keep getting the same thing you've always been getting. It's the same thing that you're experiencing right now.
(17:17)
However, you can make a different choice. You don't have to engage with your rejection by going into a point of obsession. So what you're going to do instead is you are going to set your own rejection protocol and all that. That is, it's going to be a set of guidelines that you're going to follow. So when you get rejected, instead of checking to scroll their social media and you're doing that because you want to feel connection, what are you going to do instead to feel connection, solve the real problem, right? The problem is I want to feel connection. Can you connect to yourself in a meaningful way, maybe by journaling or meditating or dancing, connecting through your body also counts, putting on some music and moving doing yoga, or can you connect to another person or a pet?
(18:22)
Alright, so that can be guideline one. No more checking their social media for connection. I am going to do X instead. And tell yourself what are the things you're going to do? Notice you hear Skyline two, notice what identity or ego is running the show and where do you want to create your identity from instead, which really gets to the question of who are you? Who do you want to be outside of this relationship? And I have some past episodes that you can go back and listen to about this of redefining who you are after a relationship ends because you get to decide and also defining what is my future going to look like? I definitely have a recent episode about that and instead of letting it trigger scarcity thinking, we can go to the opposite abundant thinking, what are all the various sources of love that are already in your life that you can notice? What are the ways that you have other places of connection? What are all the places you have other sources of friendship?
(19:42)
What are all the other relationships that you've already had and you've survived through them, right? So you show yourself. Look, I thought in the past probably, I probably thought my life was ending after that one relationship ended, but it didn't look at all the relationships I've had. And if you're one of those people where sometimes I get this, if somebody says, we were high school sweethearts, I've never dated anybody else, great. You have other relationships that aren't just your romantic relationship. Where else are you in relation with other people? Look at all the people in your life who like you, coworkers, your Starbucks person, your kids, your family, and as another part of your protocol. Finally, I want you to put in some ground rules for yourself of how you want to comfort and calm yourself. When you notice your obsession spikes, this might mean taking a moment to ground with a few breaths.
(20:51)
This might mean saying some really nice things to yourself of it's all going to be okay. This might be reminding yourself of they aren't my person by definition because they walked away, right? You're going to choose to ground yourself instead of going with the high spike of obsession and anxiety, which is a huge spike of energy and it's really like an upward feeling, right? It's very high. It feels like it's all up in your head. I want you to ground down, bring your energy down, slow down, so notice the spike and bring yourself down. So by creating a protocol of how you'll handle your rejection and the feelings that you know are going to come and the obstacles that you're going to face with rejection after you've listened to all this, right, you're going to create this protocol for yourself. Why this works is that because it's going to create a lot more calm and safety within yourself and it's going to show you all the other ways that you can receive love and support and caring from yourself and from other people in your network. You are going to decrease how much you focus on that person and you're going to start looking at all these other sources and all these other ways, and you're going to be reminding yourself that you're safe. So we're taking all those natural things that happen to our body and our brain and rejection. We're going to answer all those problems and we are going to solve them in a way that ends up in the long run making you feel better.
(22:35)
And that is how I was able to move through my rejection while still letting myself feel my feelings. You're allowed to feel your feelings. You're allowed to feel the sadness and make space for that, and if that's still coming up for you, you can make it a part of your protocol actually, but you can feel all those feelings and then it's just the feelings. It's not the obsession on top of it. Alright, my friends, so what I want you to do is to get through this period. Let yourself feel through it and let yourself ground yourself through it and reach out for support because I want you to get to the point where you can choose healthy love, where you choose them and they are choosing you back in return.
(23:16)
This is all about breaking that cycle of obsessing over what's no longer there and obsessing over what's not available so that you become more available for someone who is worthy of you, someone who's compatible with you, someone who is on the same page as you. That's what I want for you, my friends, and that's what this is all about. I would love if I could ask you a favor, I would love for you to share this episode. I think this a topic I hear a lot of, how do I deal with all of my rejection and my obsessive thoughts after that? This is an episode I want you to send to a friend and pass along if I could ask a huge favor. Alright, so please hit that share button, send this along to somebody who could benefit from it and I'd love to hear back from you. Please feel free to reach out to me on social media. My Instagram is just my name, Sarah Curnoles, and I would love to hear more from you if this meant something to you, if it resonated, if you could also take a moment to give it five stars and a review, I would be very grateful. Alright, my friends. That's it for this week. I hope that you have a beautiful week and take good care of yourself.