A person
who has a root of rejection in his life is usually handicapped in
relationships. In order to sustain healthy, loving, lasting relationships, a
person must not fear rejection. When this fear becomes the motivating factor in
the life of an individual, he will spend his time trying to avoid rejection
rather than building healthy relationships.
Nobody goes through life totally escaping moments of feeling rejected.
Everyone experiences some rejection. However, if there has been enough of it to
leave scars, it may cause the individual not only to function abnormally in his
relationship with others, but also in his relationship with God.
He may come to believe that he is loved conditionally. Feeling that he
must earn the love of others, he may devote his life to trying to please them.
He may fear that if he does not please them, they will withdraw their love from
him, reject him, or even abandon him.
Memory of the pain of such experiences often prevents personal liberty
in relationships. People who have a fear of rejection, and the resulting
loneliness and abandonment, usually end up
allowing themselves to be
controlled and manipulated by others. Since they believe that acceptance is
based on performance, they are consumed with doing rather than being. Because
they are afraid of simply being themselves, they spend their lives
pretending-pretending to like people they detest, pretending they enjoy going
places and doing things they hate, pretending that everything is fine when it
is not. Such people live in continual misery because they are afraid to be
honest enough to confront the real issues of life.
Pretending! Pretending! Pretending!
Since people who fear rejection do not believe that they are lovable in
themselves, often they will use the world's standards (money, status, clothes,
natural talents, etc.) to prove to themselves and others that they are
valuable. They live a life of misery, always trying to prove that they have
worth and value.
No matter
how much outward success a person may enjoy, he is not truly successful unless
he knows who he is in Christ. Philippians 3:3 exhorts us to "exult and
glory and pride ourselves in Jesus Christ, and put no confidence or dependence
[on what we are] in the flesh and on outward privileges and physical advantages
and external appearances." It is important to remember that appearance is
only the way we look, not the way we really are.
A person who is rejection-based
is unable to receive
love even when it is being freely offered to him. If he is able to
accept love at all, it is only when he believes that he has earned it by
behaving perfectly.
I
remember a woman who once worked for my husband and me. She had grown up in an
atmosphere of performance-based acceptance. When she did well in school, her
father showed her love; when she did not do as well as he expected, he withheld
his love from her. He behaved this way not only with his daughter but with
other family members as well; therefore she learned that love was given as a
reward for perfect performance and withheld as punishment for mistakes. Like
most people, she grew up not even realizing that her feelings and belief
systems were in error. She assumed that all relationships were handled in this
same way. Since she was an employee of our ministry, there were occasions when
I would ask her how her work was progressing, if she had everything caught up,
or if there was any job that she had been given that she was unable to get
finished.
I began to notice that whenever I inquired about anything that this
woman had not yet completed, she would begin to act very strangely. She would
withdraw from me, avoid talking with me, and appear to work at a frenzied pace-
all of which made me feel uncomfortable. Actually, I felt rejected.
I knew that as her employer I was entitled to the privilege of asking
about her workload without
having to go through a traumatic ordeal each time. So I finally
confronted her about the situation, which only caused our relationship to
become more strained and confused. It was obvious that neither of us really
understood the root of the problem.
This was a woman who truly loved the Lord. She was intensely serious
about her relationship with Him, so the situation provoked her to pray and ask
God for some answers about her behavior. Too often we blame our bad behavior on
someone else instead of seeking the Lord to get to the root of the problem so
we can be set free.
The woman
received a revelation from God that changed her entire life. The Lord showed
her that because her father had rejected her when she did not perform
perfectly, she mistakenly believed that everyone else was the same way. If any
of her work was not fully completed by the time I inquired about it, she was
convinced that I was rejecting her because I no longer loved her; therefore she
withdrew from me. I had not stopped loving her, but she had stopped receiving
my love,and so I too ended up feeling rejected. We often do this same thing
with the Lord. His love for us is not based on anything we do or do not do. In
Romans 5:8, Paul tells us that God loved us when we were still in sin; that is,
when we did not know Him at all-or even care.
God's love is always flowing to all those who will receive it. But like
this employee who could not
receive my love, often we reject God's love when we feel that we do not
deserve it because our performance is less than perfect.
Fear of Being Rejected Causes Rejection of Others
If you
cannot believe that you are basically a lovable, valuable person, you will be
unable to trust others who claim they love you. If you believe that you must be
perfect to be worthy of love and acceptance, then you are a candidate for a
miserable life, because you will never be perfect as long as you are in an
earthly body.
You may
have a perfect heart, in that your desire is to please God in all things, but
your performance will not match your heart's desire until you get to heaven.
You can improve all the time and keep pressing toward the mark of perfection,
but you will always need Jesus as long as you are here on this earth. There
will never come a time when you will not need His forgiveness and His cleansing
blood.
Unless
you accept your value and worth by faith through Christ, you will always be
insecure and unable to trust those who want to love you. People who have no
capacity to trust suspect the motives of others. I know this is true because I
had a real problem in this area. Even when other people told me they loved me,
I was always waiting for them to hurt me, disappoint me, fail me, or abuse me.
I figured that they must be after something; otherwise,
they would not be nice to me. I just could not believe that anyone would
want me just for myself. There had to be some other reason!I felt so bad about
myself, was so full of shame, condemnation, self-hatred, and self-rejection,
that whenever anyone tried to show me love and acceptance, I thought to myself,
Well,if this person likes me now, he won't when he gets to know the real me.
Therefore I would not receive love from other people, or from God. I deflected
it by my behavior, which became more and more obnoxious as I set out to prove
to everyone that I was as unlovable as I believed myself to be.
Whatever
you believe about yourself on the inside is what you will manifest on the
outside. If you feel unlovely and unlovable, that is how you will behave. In my
case, I believed that I was not lovable, so that is how I acted. I was very
difficult to get along with. I believed that other people would eventually
reject me, and so they usually did. Because my attitude was manifested in my
actions, I could not sustain healthy, loving, lasting relationships.
The "Prove-You-Love-Me" Syndrome
Whenever anyone did try to love me, I heaped great pressure on that
person to prove it to me-continually! I needed a fresh fix of positive
"strokes" every day just to maintain a good feeling about myself. I
had to constantly be complimented about everything I did; otherwise, I felt
rejected. If I did not receive the reinforcement I craved, then I felt
unloved. I also had to have my way about everything. As long as other
people agreed with me and gave in to my desires, I felt good about myself.
However, if anyone disagreed with me or denied my requests, even to the
slightest degree, it prompted an emotional reaction causing me to feel rejected
and unloved.
I placed
impossible demands on those who did love me. I frustrated them. I was never
satisfied with what they were giving me. I could not allow them to be honest
with me or to confront me. My entire focus was on me, and I expected everyone
else's focus to be on me also. I was actually looking to people for my sense of
self-worth, which is something that only God can give.
I have since learned that my sense of worth and value are in Christ, and
not in things or other people. Until I learned that truth, however, I was very
unhappy and totally incapable of maintaining healthy relationships.
Receiving the love of God is a key factor in emotional healing, as I
mentioned in an earlier chapter. Once a person genuinely comes to believe that
God, Who is perfect, loves him in his imperfection, then he can begin to
believe that other people might love him also. Trust begins to develop, and he
is able to accept the love that is being offered to him.
Since I have believed and
received God's love for me,
my most basic needs for love and a sense of self-worth have been met. I
no longer require other people to keep me "fixed" all the time, that
is, feeling secure about myself. Like everyone else, I do have needs that I
want people to meet; we all need encouragement, exhortation, and edification.
But now there is no need to look to other people for affirmation of my value.
Now if my husband fails to compliment me on something I have done, I may
be disappointed-but not devastated-because I know that I have value apart from
what I do. Everyone likes to be recognized and complimented on what he does,
but it is wonderful to be able to keep from falling apart if I do not receive
that recognition and those compliments!Once I learned that my value and worth
are not in what I do, but in who I am in Christ, I no longer feel that I have
to perform for people. I have decided that either they will or will not love me
for who I am. Either way, I am secure knowing that God still loves me.
It is
important to be loved for who we are and not for what we do. When we know that
we have value in our identity rather than in our performance or behavior, we
are able to get our minds off what others are thinking about us all the time.
We can focus on them and their needs, instead of expecting their focus to be
continually on us and our needs. This is the basis of healthy, loving, and
lasting relationships.
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