Rejection
My experience with it, and how it led me to "emotional self-harm"
For those of you who watched Virgin Island on Channel 4 last night, you’ll know that I had another rather bad experience with rejection. In this instance, I volunteered for a mock date exercise during a group workshop (ironically centred around the theme of “confidence”). To my dismay however, I discovered that no one else in the group wanted to take the plunge and do it with me. The therapist Celeste then kindly stepped into the breach, but by this point I was so crushed by what I felt was another in a long line of rejections that I barely even remember anything of our “date”. Once I sat back down, I felt so dejected that I couldn’t even pay attention to the rest of the session, and eventually had to step out for a bit. When asked on camera later to describe my experience I summed it up in one word: “crap”.
In fairness to the rest of the group, many had already been up before me to try their own awkward and stilted dating scenarios with each other, so with that in mind it’s perfectly understandable why nobody volunteered. It really was nothing personal, and many others in the group were at pains to stress this afterwards.
In truth, the anguish etched onto my face during this workshop was not a reaction to the dating exercise, or even my unreciprocated interest in Charlotte a couple of days previously, but rather a culmination of a lifetime of romantic rejections. This workshop simply reinforced what I already believed to be true about myself: that I was repulsive, ugly and undesirable.
As I detailed in my previous post, these feelings of low self-worth stemmed from bullying at school and an adulthood littered with numerous dates but achingly few successes. Indeed, in addition to the 40+ different women I’ve dated over the past decade or so, there at least a dozen others who I have asked on a date but been rejected, or whom I have tentatively courted before deducing that they probably weren’t interested in me “in that way”.
While it’s true that many of my dating experiences have petered out with mutual disinterest, and on a few occasions it has been me that’s taken the active step of ending things, a significant portion have ended precisely because I wanted to take things further but they didn’t.
On their own, most of these rejections I’ve taken fairly well. After all, it’s hard to get too invested in somebody after only a date or two. Unfortunately, the cumulative impact of these rejections had a dire impact on my self-confidence, merely making those negative feelings I had about myself louder and more pointed. As I said on the show, I’m a fairly analytical person, and to me these failures were hard evidence that there was something seriously wrong with me.
Back on Virgin Island, I undoubtedly reached my lowest point in the aftermath of that workshop. The rest of the group are a lovely bunch and of course tried to console me, but there wasn’t much they could do. It was at this point that I asked to see Abby, a clinical therapist and the only one of the experts on the island who offered absolutely no “hands-on” help whatsoever.
I had already done some very useful work with Joy, who helped teach me how to think less and feel more during intimate situations, and you will probably see more of that in later episodes. However, I felt a session with Abby might be useful in helping me to get past these self-confidence issues I had.
The session itself with Abby did not feature at all in Episode 3 (understandable given the immense time constraints), but for me it was actually the moment where I felt I started to turn a corner.
From the get-go, I think I benefitted from the knowledge that this session would involve talking and strictly nothing else. I like to talk about everything and nothing, as my constant ramblings on Twitter are a testament to. I didn’t therefore have to worry about any potentially intimate acts that I may or may not get involved in and could instead focus solely on my thoughts and feelings.
Like all good therapists, Abby has a knack of asking the right questions and leading you to a place where you can make the breakthrough yourself, and that’s precisely what happened. At Abby’s prompting, something inside me clicked, and I realised that what I’d been doing all these years in response to rejection was essentially beating myself up for no good reason. I would be rejected, usually because they simply weren’t feeling it, and I would turn that rejection inwards and come to all sorts of negative assumptions about myself despite these women having said or implied nothing of the sort. I called it “emotional self-harm”.
At this point, I should stress that never in my life have I ever physically self-harmed nor had any desire to. In fact, I have always seen the prospect of physically harming myself in response to trauma to be profoundly pointless (I of course understand that this is not the cause for everybody, and I do not mean to judge those who do self-harm or have self-harmed in any way; I am simply talking about myself).
Since I had always seen physical self-harm as something that was pointless for me, the realisation that I had been practicing a form of emotional self-harm drastically and instantly changed my entire perspective on things. Suddenly, the deep emotional cuts that I had inflicted on myself again and again seemed irrational and illogical. “Why am I doing this?” I thought.
And so the compulsion I had always had to put myself down inside (as far as dating and relationships are concerned anyway) simply melted away. I’ve had a fair few women, including ex-girlfriends, tell me I’m cute or attractive, or at the very least certainly not the repulsive ogre I seemed to think I was. But I never truly believed it; I always felt they were lying to protect my feelings, or that they were simply blinded by their friendship with me.
Now? I genuinely do believe it when women tell me I’m not repulsive or ugly, and I can remember the exact moment the script was flipped. The rejection scars are still there of course, but they’re fading with time. More importantly, I’m no longer adding to them.
A few months after Virgin Island was filmed, I inadvertently got the chance to put my new mindset to the test. I had gone on a couple of dates with a woman I had met on a dating app and I really liked her, but unfortunately she didn’t feel the same way. She wasn’t feeling it, “our values weren’t aligned” etc. Although I was still quite down about this rejection for a few days, it is worth noting that I didn’t once turn that disappointment inwards on myself. Feelings of self-loathing that I would’ve certainly had otherwise now manifested themselves in a much more healthy form - “modern dating is really crap” I thought.
