Has this ever happened to you? You are living your life and then you decide to withdraw into yourself for a couple of days.
To retreat into your thoughts, into your own experiencing, into personal matters and hobbies; you simply got carried away with life, the whirl of events picked up and for a few days you dropped out of society. Has that happened to you?
It happens to me)
And in a way, never mind, so long as you are on your own or with a partner who knows you and is aware that this sort of thing can happen to you.
But if this is the beginning of a relationship and your partner carries the "rejection wound", then that is it, you can forget it.
A person rejected in childhood is doomed to see rejection in everything.
For them it is deeply frightening to be rejected, misunderstood, unaccepted. Hence the wild fear of coming close, of opening up. It feels as if you are going to be hurt again. And there is the experience to back it up, it has happened before, more than once. You end up once bitten, twice shy. Just to avoid a fresh wound.
In just the same way a humiliated person is doomed to see humiliation in everything, in every action, in a word, in a gesture from another person...
So there you are, not answering texts for two days.
That is it.
The stream of thoughts begins: he has left me, he has stopped loving me, he never loved me at all, he only used me, had his fun and dumped me. He, he, he. And not a word about myself.
It is as though the person had been seized by a dark fog of feelings and thoughts.
Tunnel thinking, a plunge into the childhood trauma of rejection.
Any attempt to talk them round is useless: coldness in the voice, ice in the eyes, no chance of a thaw. The counter-dependent script kicks in — "I never bloody needed you anyway" — read between the lines, or said straight out.
Devaluing what there was, as a way of not feeling the pain of the break-up.
Everything just as it was in childhood with a mother who gave no authentic closeness, love or acceptance.
She was cold, functional or unemotional.
At this point the reader is bound to want to make excuses for the mother)
Come on, she is such a good person and she had a hard time of it too.
But that does nothing for the perception of a child's psyche, which has already recorded everything deep down.
The rejection script is ready.
And I will carry it from one relationship into the next.
It can be played out anywhere, even at work with colleagues.
Is there really no way of getting rid of this script, of stopping it?
Am I really going to act on autopilot from now on, exactly the way my childhood memory recorded it? Is there really no way out?
Well then, I simply will not act that way!
Oops,... some time passes and it all happens again....
Unfortunately you cannot manage this on your own, and the rejection wound cannot be sorted out and put right quickly in short-term work.
Do not believe anyone who promises to fix this for you in 10 sessions.
Or simply to swap one feeling for another. That heresy does not work.
In cases like this longer work really is needed.
But that is for the brave, for those who want to change their script.
Or you can drop the whole thing and keep running round the familiar circle, blaming the world and your partners for being imperfect ..
Suffering and getting your pleasure out of it, going numb, withdrawing into solitude .
The well-worn rut feels more like home.)
