Rejection Therapy: Oxymoron or an Antidote to Social Anxiety?
“Rejection Therapy”: it sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Isn’t therapy usually needed after the rejection, not rejection needed for the therapy! However, this growing trend of going out of your way to ask make never heard of before requests in the hopes of getting rejected (or having peculiar, tubular experiences if not) is changing lives for the better and boosting confidence levels more than any self-help book or silent manifestations ever could—
But let’s rewind for a second, did you perhaps cringe when I wrote “tubular” (or maybe when I did that 2000’s trope of rewinding things for a second?) Well, fair enough if you did because that slang isn’t used anymore, right?
‘Cringe culture’ is quite complex, you see, it is a constantly revolving door of what’s cringe and what’s not, and Gen Z will be the first to tell you and the harshest critics too.
When it comes to cringe, it manifests in a generational war, and its bread and butter are arbitrary rules, dictating your life, behaviour and language as if the secret cringe police will watch your every move…Well, rejection therapy embraces the cringe, it accepts the freedom of embarrassment, and it rejects the notion of humans as a ‘behaviour-police-force.’
But anyhoo, what exactly is rejection therapy? Who’s big on it, what does it entail, how can you bring it into your life, and what benefits will it procure? All of this and more shall be answered in the article.
“Personally, embracing embarrassing situations has actually changed my life,” says TikToker Sophie Jones, who does something out of the ordinary each day and feels all the better for it. Whether she is walking a teddy bear for a dog, dancing in ques, requesting to try on strangers' shoes or visiting Tesco in a wedding dress – it’s less about the experience itself and more about realising that “life is a playground" and letting embarrassment become liberation. Feeling the judgement of others is a human instinct…and a fear of rejection leads you to analysing every stare, step and cough from others as a slight against you. However, by placing yourself in such wacky scenarios as Sophie does, those little conflated signs you used to always overthink quickly deflate to their reality. Embrace the silliness of other people's stiffness and see that there’s always a way to be more embarrassed than you are right now.
Meanwhile, accounts like ‘dailyrejection’ (on day 382 at the time of writing this article) show that more often than not…you actually get accepted, leading to moments of belonging and humanity.
The requests of ‘daily rejection’ usually stem from a curiosity about the world and its facets that most people would feel are ‘not-the-done-thing’ to ask. For example, he goes to restaurants and asks whether they will show him how to make a dish, goes to fire stations and asks for a tour of the fire engine or goes to trampoline parks and asks to enter freely for just one single jump. In each of these examples, the request is accepted, and we see that he collaborates with a chef about their cooking process, learns all about how the fire engine works and jumps up into the air, all because he asked. This handful of examples evokes how more often than not, these random requests will lead to unique human interaction, moments of learning and memorable shindigs which, for most, would have been trapped in the hypothetical. In this respect, rejection therapy is in opposition to an increasingly digitalised world where real human contact is filtered and random hellos or impromptu fist bumps are seen as ‘alien’ when in reality, they are the most human thing of all.
So, the process of bringing rejection therapy into your life is similar to most things: baby steps. Start small by asking the bus driver how their day was, or simply what time it is to random strangers. When you feel more confident, start seeing if strangers want to go catch a film in the cinema or visit the library and ask for some librarian knowledge. Moreover, commit to your hobby or profession; if you are in the arts, you have to get used to rejection, even though it can be emotionally devastating. So, start submitting things here, there and everywhere; often, yeses only come within a sea of no’s.
But remember, be safe; don’t do anything too dangerous or offensive to get rejected (that’s just not the point), and personally, I don’t think asking for free stuff or money just to see what you can get is the right way to go about it either. Earn real change rather than cheap change.
So, rejection therapy helps to celebrate this all-too-common part of life. It emphasises authenticity and takes the power back from people who may try to embarrass or shame you, as resilience to this is built day by day. Self-improvement becomes simple when you do your supermarket shopping in a wedding dress; sending that job application, asking someone out on a date, or finally taking the risk you’ve always lingered on becomes less horrifying and more attainable. The world becomes a playground; so climb the monkey bars of life.
Written by Ben Lynch (ben_lynch__)
Edited by Shaunamay Martin Bohan @f4wnfatale
