What is a Rejection Mindset?

Experiencing rejection is incredibly painful. Yet there is nothing more deadly to relational health carrying a rejection mindset. Masses of people do not realizing they are infected. Meanwhile, a it is behind just about every relationship breakdown and the drama that ensues.

It’s important for you to understand that rejection is not just something that happens to you. It is a mindset that will infiltrate your every thought, perception and motive. I have never met a person who has not had to face this monster and do business with rejection-based perspectives in their life. It’s tentacles will slither into any opening in your life, wrapping itself around your thinking and leave you defeated by the circumstances in life.

Relationship Breakdown

Look at every broken relationship, church split, divorce, midlife crisis and nervous breakdown and you will find a rejection mindset there. It will leave a trail of destroyed relationships and divided communities in its path.

Rejection will keep us in a vortex of our unaddressed brokenness, repeating the cycles until we allow ourselves to engage personal healing. Unless we recognize rejection’s deception and remove its patterns from our life, we will always live under a limited story. What makes a rejection mindset dangerous is that it follows you until you kick it out.

Identity struggles abound in our society, showing the rampant work of rejection based thinking. Generations of people wander through life disconnected from love and from who God says they are.

Meanwhile, so many of us have struggled in what it means to be loved and feel affirmed. Relationships become challenging when you have not been solidified in love and healthy connection. Rejection teaches you to earn love and acceptance or to not bother trying at all. Most people ping pong back and forth between the two.

A Personal Wrestling Match

A major aspect of my personal transformation involved wrestling a rejection mindset out of my life. It took hunger and honest assessment to see the influence it was having on me. Over time, I realized the majority of my life was actually influenced by rejection. Rejection has been in my family tree as far back as I could see.

Ask a couple questions and you will find rejection’s deception:

Do I feel the peace of God’s love? Do I love myself? Am I connected to healthy love in my relationships?

How do I go about feeling loved today?

How do I get my value on a daily basis?

What is the thing that people do to me that bothers me the most?

Most people live their life according to a lower identity. Their confidence is low and many of their styles of relating can be very dysfunctional. The problem is we are content with just getting by that we never see the mindsets that hinder us.

Rejection’s Mission

Rejection’s number one mission is to create a sense of separation from the Father’s love. If you have ever felt far from God, rejection is behind those thoughts and impressions. If you feel distant from the love of God, you will also lack a sense of identity, because the only way to know who you are is to be connected to the Father’s heart.

When rejection operates in someone’s life, it will give a person a false sense of reality. A swarm of lies envelop that can make a person believe God does not love them, people do not love them and life is always working against them.

A Root System

A rejection mindset creates a root system of thinking which branches into many areas of relationships. We waste time chasing symptoms unless we address the root of the problem. When a rejection mindset is recognized and healed, we can enter into a whole new world of freedom.

When the rejection lens gets taken off, a whole new vision opens up. We become free to let our true identities shine through authentically, with less drama and little torment. We become free to love without any conditions or toxic attachments. In addition, the greatest gift of being free from rejection is that we can truly live as ourselves.

Two Main Targets

There are two main foundational issues that rejection seeks to corrode. The first is to prevent the unconditional love of Father God from being experienced. Knowing about God’s love does not bring the change. Experiencing it does. To possess a heart connection with the love of God is the greatest experience available. Those who struggle in any way to know, feel and experience the love of God often have a rejection mindset at work.

The second key area that rejection attacks is our identity. Knowing who we are as sons and daughters is what we stand on in the midst of battle. You collapse in battle because you are disconnected to who you are. A rejection mindset will train us to find identity outside of God’s love and acceptance; driving us to seek success, societal affirmation or achievement.

Rejection Mindset Quiz

You may be reading this far and wonder if you have rejection working in your life. Here are some basic questions to help identify where it often contaminates people. If you answer them honestly, you can position yourself to recognize rejection’s work and step into greater transformation. Take a moment to mark which ones you believe could apply to you. Remember, this only helps if you are honest.

  • Struggle with feeling far from God? Do find yourself saying, “I feel far from God’s presence” or “God seems far from me?
  • Feel uncomfortable in social settings, where you either put on a mask or stumble through interactions all together?
  • Do you anticipate rejection from new people you meet? Do you feel like if people knew the real you, they would not like you?
  • Is your life with God filled with performance based Christianity?
  • Are your relationships rules based? Do you become easily hurt and offended by people? Do you change relationships often?
  • When someone questions you or disagrees with you, do you become deeply irritated, angry and argumentative?
  • Feel a need to be right in discussions?
  • Do people say you are “super-sensitive?”
  • Find yourself “over-talking” in social settings?
  • Do you repeatedly feel compelled to tell others about the accomplishments you have achieved or flash your resume when you talk to people?
  • Is your worth and value based on how well you do something?
  • Do you do things to get attention from people?
  • Struggle with addictive habits?
  • Battle with being strong in your identity?  
  • Compare yourself to others a lot? 
  • Do you have a hard time figuring out where you are headed in life?
  • Or on the opposite side, are you highly driven, performance based and achievement motivated?
  • Do you constantly deal with fear in the form of anxiety, stress and worry?
  • Anger issues continually rising up? 

If you answer yes to any of these questions, then welcome to the rest of the world! Everyone has to come to terms with how they process love and relationships. Rejection gets itself into any and all the above.