Dear Rocco:

This is my understanding: you are greatly afraid of rejection because you already experienced it and it did hurt a lot. What you have feared ever since is that pain you already felt when rejected as a child.

Find that original experience (or a series of experiences) of rejection early in your life, sometime in those formative years of childhood, process that emotional experience, and you will connect your fear now to the past, freeing your present time from the fear. It will take months of hard work to accomplish this, with some help from a quality professional psychotherapist, for you to see significant, lasting progress.

*Young children experience emotions intensely. You may think now, as an adult, that the past event of rejection must be a huge event, so to explain how intensely you feel about rejection. But what happened can be something as “small” as this: a parent attending to another sibling repeatedly while ignoring you.

anita