Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries

by Guy Winch

The answer lies in our evolutionary past. Humans are social animals; being rejected from our tribe or social group in our precivilized past would have meant losing access to food, protection, and mating partners, making it extremely difficult to survive. Being ostracized would have been akin to receiving a death sentence. Because the consequences of ostracism were so extreme, our brains developed an early-warning system to alert us when we were at risk for being “voted off the island”

Many of us find it difficult to talk ourselves out of the hurt we feel when we experience rejection. One of the reasons rejection is often so devastating is that our reason, logic, and common sense are usually ineffective when it comes to mitigating the pain we feel. For example, when scientists told participants who had been excluded in a computerized version of the ball-tossing experiment (called Cyberball) that their exclusion had been rigged, finding out the rejection wasn’t even “real” did little to ease the pain they felt. Scientists are a tenacious bunch, so they told a different set of participants that the people who’d excluded them were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Surely rejection would hurt less if we despised the people who rejected us. But nope, it still hurt just as much.

Even if the person we plan to reject is a model of kindheartedness, our Hummel figurine collection might still be in grave danger.