REFUSE REJECTION!

Do you remember "The Night Gallery" series on TV? It aired in the early 70s. In one episode, (The Fear of Spiders, Oct 6, 1971 season 2 episode 4 written by Rod Serling) which I will never forget, a man sees a small spider in his sink and (like you and me) flushes it down the drain. However, in a few moments it crawls back up out of the drain...a little larger. This is strange! The viewer must be seeing things! So, upon seeing the spider in his sink again...he runs the water and flushes it down the sink. He busies himself in the bathroom...I think he brushed his teeth or something...and sure enough - the spider re-emerges out of the sinks drain larger! He once again turns on the faucet and flushes it down the sink. A bit harder to do now since the spider started the size of a penny and re-emerged to the size of a silver dollar now. Each time he flushed it down it came out larger and larger. Soon he couldn't flush it down the sink. I cringed as I observed it emerge out of the drain the size of a tarantula!

He is infuriated! The spider would not die...it took revenge of his attempts by growing larger and larger...emerging repeatedly despite his attempts to kill it. In his last attempt, he finds something to scoop up this hand size arachnoid and flushes it down the toilet! The spider doesn't emerge...he is relieved, I am relieved, and the viewer is relieved. The man goes to bed. In the middle of the night he hears a high pitched "squeaking" sound coming from his front door. He turns on the light and approaches the door, slowly opening it to investigate the sound that cannot be identified. It is then that at the door he observes with great horror... a giant hairy spider seven feet tall filling the entire doorway which reaches out grabs his with its front legs and has him as a midnight snack. Needless to say...to this day I hesitate to flush spiders down sink drains anymore!

I have felt that coping with rejection has some similarities with this scene. The more I try and repress it, push it down, flush it out of my mind...it always com

es back to the surface a little bit bigger and harder to deal with. Left unchecked it will consume and crush your self- confidence. Therefore, we must learn the art of refusing to accept rejection so we can move forward with the life we always wanted.

Let’s put things in perspective. People who reject us are the minority. Think about how many people you have met in your entire life. Count the number of people who have severely rejected you. Divide the second number by the first, and you'll see how the result rarely exceeds 1%. Extreme rejection is usually the exception.

The difficult part is that some of these "under 1%" of people are those that might have played an integral part in our lives, but in the grand scheme of our life that leaves 99% of the people we encounter don't reject us. I've met only a couple of people that have rejected me in such a way that seriously challenged my self-identity. We seem to forget this because the rejection we experienced has grown over and over in our minds over time and become larger (though not less painful) from our perspective.

When we learn that the majority of our rejection is in the minority of our lives it becomes easier to reject its influence over us. We can be aware of the unpleasant experience, but if we don't focus on it, we will take away its power.

This excerpt is from my book "Let Go & Live Through" on sale now on Amazon for the Kindle price of $2.99. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089DQFRX4

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