Experiencing rejection is incredibly painful. Yet there is nothing more deadly to relational health than when we carry a rejection mindset. Masses of people do not even realize they are infected with it. Meanwhile, a rejection mindset is behind just about every relationship breakdown and the drama that ensues.
Rejection is a Mindset
It’s important for you to understand that rejection is not just something that happens to you. It is a mindset that will infects your every thought, perception and action. I have never met a person who has not had to face this monster and do business with rejection-based perspectives in their life.
The only difference between those who overcome and those don’t is the personal willingness to see rejection’s influence and to take new action for freedom. 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.
A Core Problem for Relationships
Look at every broken relationship, church split, divorce, midlife crisis and nervous breakdown and you will find a rejection mindset there. Rejection will leave a trail of destroyed relationships and divided communities in its path. While you may be immediately tempted to see rejection in other people, odds are you have hooks of it inside yourself. The quicker you can see how rejection keeps you from walking in the fullness of love and relationship fruitfulness, the quicker you will experience breakthrough.
A Rejection Mindset and Brokenness
Rejection will keep us in a vortex of our unaddressed brokenness, repeating the themes continually 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.
[shareable]A rejection mindset will follow you around until you kick it out.[/shareable]
Identity struggles abound in our society, showing the rampant work of rejection based thinking. Generations of people wander through life without tapping into the full power of 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.
[shareable]Too many wander through life without tapping into the power of who they really are.[/shareable]
My Own Personal Recognition
A major aspect of my personal transformation involved wrestling a rejection mindset out of my life. I am still eradicating it from my family’s framework. It took humility, self-awareness and honest assessment to what it was doing to my beliefs. I also had to address many defense mechanisms that kept a rejection mindset intact.
[shareable]Are we willing to address our defense mechanisms so that healing can engage? [/shareable]
At times, rejection nearly took me out. Over the years I have watched it destroy the potential of so many brilliant people. I have witness first-hand the destruction of churches, families and businesses because of a rejection mindset infecting the people involved. Some of the most gifted people with amazing potential can be completely sidelined because they never confront their rejection issues.
It took some time for me to become aware that the majority of my life was actually influenced by rejection. The more I saw it the more I could observe the pattern in my whole family tree.
I also find this true for most people. They live their life according to a lower identity and lack relational health. Their confidence is low and many of their styles of relating are dysfunctional. The problem is we are content with just getting by that we never see the mindsets that hinder us.
Most never open their eyes to see how their thinking distorts or blocks wholeness in their life. Rejection-based thinking will create a deep root system of beliefs about God, ourselves and others that are incredibly detrimental to living fruitful.
I know for certain that if you want to live powerfully, you will need to expose and eradicate this deadly mindset as well.