Many adults walk around in life repeating a cycle of rejection they once had to go through in childhood. The cycle is as follows:
- child has an interest he wants to share with parent
- parent rejects the child for their interest
- child experiences pain and sorrow
We look at people who are “dejected” and we rarely think of the source of this trouble. They have internalized a parental voice of rejection. This voice becomes present in their conscience anytime they are presented with a growth opportunity. Their hobbies flounder and they turn to “safe” interests, usually those that will shield them from the pain and sorrow of parental rejection.
It is wrong for parents to reject their children.
The most common hobbies for people who experienced a lot of rejection in childhood are:
- video games (first and foremost)
- drug addiction
- people-pleasing
Video games are the easiest path for males because they are an underground for achievement where some measure of validation is baked into the games themselves, via “achievements unlocked” and even NPC characters telling the gamer what a good job he’s doing. As more and more psychology is written into video games by women, video games have lost their hardened male appeal and tend to influence men to become dependent upon praise and sexual gratification from women (or men). It is in this manner that men are conquered and become “paypigs” for e-girls and regime bootlickers.
Drug addiction is a way of getting relief from voices of dejection. Oftentimes parents will influence their rejected children to join them in drug addiction, especially social drinking, as this makes the personality of the child less threatening and breaks their contact with hobbies that could lead them away from the family. Alcoholics must break from their families to restore themselves.
People-pleasing often comes from when rejecting parents redirect their children to hobbies that the parents find pleasing. This is the old Jordan Peterson mantra of, “Never let your children do anything that displeases you.”
This parenting style amounts to the maturity of a 1.5 year old who hasn’t figured out that not everything bends to their will.
People pleasing is a way of ameliorating parental rejection, which is essential for staying in the family and staving off outright abandonment. Those with a people-pleasing streak will seek out authority figures in their social environment to suck up to. They almost always pick bullies who will override them the way they were once overriden by their rejecting parent.
It’s perfectly okay to want validation. A pathological need for it can be described as higher in intensity to the point where it disrupts relationships. This can be the guy who writes walls of text of expertise in response to a basic query. Or the person who always needs to milk a laugh out of a situation. Or the woman who cakes on layers of makeup and watches men intensely to see if they will notice and appreciate her. Again, these behaviors are jarring but it is okay to seek validation in this life.
If you have an INTENSE need for validation, you will need to find a way to give it to yourself in large quantities. This means rehabilitating the parental voices of rejection in your conscience. With self-knowledge and in a focused journaling session, you can ask these sides of yourself what they are protecting you from. Sometimes they will say they are protecting you from even greater rejection and humiliation. Sometimes they will assert a fundamental conclusion about you, such as, “You are unworthy”.
From this point, there is plenty more you can do but to learn more you will need to contact me for my consulting services or, for a lesser but still worthy solution, purchase and read a copy of my book Make Self-Knowledge Great Again.
The thing with validation is that abundance will sort you out. It costs nothing to validate a person if you are in a value for value exchange. But you never want to make a person dependent on you for validation. It is a nice thing to gift to people now and then but philosophy is about de-escalation and long-term solutions.
Validation conveys, “You can do this”. It points a person back to their Self. And the truth is that a child could NOT do it on their own. They did not possess an adult’s intellect. They did not have networking and job skill abilities that an adult has. It was the parent’s job to empower their child with these essential, instead of lashing their child with the cruelty of rejection.
There is a great tragedy at the heart of those who have been habitually rejected. They walk around in a “dejected” state, eliciting ire and annoyance from others. This happens when the “dejected” person acts out their history. They influence the other person to feel suddenly and totally roped into an insecurity that was not present moments ago. Being rejected by your parent is like drowning. But you cannot put that onto other people (projection).
Instead, bring your insecurities and feelings into your own care. Reclaim your emotions from your childhood. I call it “first feedback” or RTRing, as I have learned from Stefan Molyneux.
Feel free to contact me for consulting if you are curious to learn more (and are willing to pay and show up on time!)
Take good care and you will see results.
