Anonymous wrote: Have you ever been in a situation when you reach out to a friend to help him/her only to be rebuffed or misunderstood to such an extent that you are not sure you can trust your emotions again?
My dear friend,
You can get away with mistrusting your friends, mistrusting your enemies, mistrusting your family, mistrusting your neighbour and her dog. But never mistrust your own emotions.
"Above all, to thine own self be true." Ninety per cent of the world's problems would be solved if we all just stayed true to ourselves and our own emotions. You wanted to communicate. The other person didn't want your communication. There is no one to blame. So why do you hold yourself responsible?
Believe in yourself. Your heart said, "I care for this person, I want to reach out to them." You believed in your heart and acted accordingly. That's fine. Then the other person did not trust you, and acted true to HER (or his) feelings. But that's fine too.
The conflict is not whether your can trust your feelings again. That is default. Feelings are to be trusted. Feelings are YOU talking to yourself, telling you what you are thinking and doing wrong or right. Feelings are signals: RED I am thinking angry thoughts; BLUE I am thinking sad thoughts, BROWN I'm all jumbled up, et cetera. To change our feelings, we have to change our thoughts. Simple. There is no question of not trusting your feelings. It is like saying, "I do not trust the thought I just had." How can you not? It is there because you thought it! And since you thought it, you felt it.
So the real conflict is elsewhere. It is in the relationship; you wanting to reach out, him or her not wanting to be touched. There is a rejection.
There are two reasons this person has rebuffed you (or chosen to misunderstand you, which is the same thing): (1) He/she doesn't like you and so doesn't care if your feelings get hurt. (2) He/she doesn't trust you and wants to be away from you and has hence created friction so that you stay away.
It would be very easy for me to say, "To hell with them. You mind your own life and get on with it. Don't care about it." But being human, we always care. Rejection hurts. It nags us at the back of our heads, itching and whining away softly at first, and then the whine just grows louder and louder till one day our head explodes and we go and do something unexpected and drastic, maybe destructive.
Rejection needs a resolution. Resolution comes with acceptance, and then action. Accept that you have been rejected. But don't blame yourself for it. You are who you are, you did what you felt like doing. If the other person did not reciprocate your feelings, it is not your feelings to blame. It is the situation. Call it anything: your destiny, your karma, your circumstances, your mother-in-law. Whatever. Shit happens to the best of us. It is how we deal with the shit that defines us.
So deal with it; take appropriate action. If you need to talk it out with someone, do that. If you want to dwell within yourself, meditate, breathe, pray, indulge in that. There is plenty of material on dealing with rejection, read that. If you need reiki, pranic or any other healing, get that. If you want to simply let it go, gift yourself that.
The solution to any problem we face lies within us. You alone know what you want. As some wise person said, just do it.
3 comments:
Thanks, this really helped me to get past the "why was I rejected??" stage.
Coincidently, same friend called me yesterday and made small talk without any reference to this painful incident.
Should I take it up or push it under the carpet?
How lovely that they called! Obviously they don't HATE you or anything like that. It was perhaps some sore point with them that you brought up. So the problem was not so much with you but with that particular topic.
Let it go. It's not worth wasting any more time over it. Build on the other aspects of the friendship.
im in love with a married man. you may think that i am one stupid woman. but i am seriously in love, except that im also married. i have kids and he also. this is not a fling. it has lasted 7 years and we are getting to a point where it is getting difficult to live without eachother. my marriage is okay. i have been on the receiving end of my husbands perversion relating to sex, but that's not the reason why i am in the other relationship.
im in the other relationship because he makes me love living life. even when i cannot wake up in the morning after an awful night with the husband.
i want to scream to the world about him. i want us to be legit. i want us to have a life. his wife and kids my kids, its too complicated but i look for a future with him.
what should i do?
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