BSB Ep 87
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I want to have you imagine this scenario. What would it feel like if you were scrolling on social media and you saw your friends having a night out, posting about it and you weren't invited? How would that make you feel?
Would you feel rejected? Would you feel hurt? Would you feel some kind of way? Well, I wanna get into that today because that is exactly what happened to me. I was on social media and then I saw my friend group, they had gone out, but I never got the invitation. I'm gonna tell you what I did do and what I did not do, so that if something similar happens to you, you don't get up all in your head and you don't take rejection personally.
Let's get into it. [00:01:00] So first I'm gonna tell you what I did do. When I saw the pictures of my friends having this amazing looking time, I mean, everybody was smiling and toasting. My first thought was,_ "I wonder why they didn't invite me"_. Now I'm human. That is a natural first thought to have. But there is a difference between having that thought from a place of curiosity or having that thought from a place of pain. And I'm gonna set that aside for a second because we will circle back. So what I did do is I had this thought, _"I wonder why they didn't invite me"_, and here's what I did next. I clicked "like" on the post and kept scrolling, and that was the end of it. Here's the truth, because they are my friends, I do enjoy seeing them have fun. I'm not a crappy friend. I want them to go have fun. What I'm gonna teach you today is about [00:02:00] separating fact from fiction, from theories in your mind so that you don't make an experience like this mean something about you. So let's jump in. Okay. Here were the facts of that scenario.
Fact number one. They went out. Fact number two, I was not invited. . That's the facts that I know. But here's another fact. They were not obligated to invite me. Wanting to be included is a natural desire for connection. What I see people doing sometimes is putting expectations on other people based on your own inner manuscript of what you think is appropriate behavior.
You might want to be included, you might want to be asked, and you might want this because they are friends of you, so you have a certain expectation attached with what being a friend means. But [00:03:00] if you look at the facts of reality. They're allowed to go have fun, and you may or may not be included in that every single time.
They were not obligated to include me in their plans. That is a fact. It may not be a fact you like, but it was a fact. Another fact is you are able to ask for what you want. Something like this happened with the friend group when I first moved here. So in my friend group, there were a couple people I knew from high school, and the rest of the friend group is made from their friends.
So friends of friends. And I have since gone on several outings with them and I love the entire group. But when I first moved here. Something like this happened on social media. I saw the posts and I commented below. I was like," _oh, I would've loved to have gone with this, but I didn't know about it"_. And then they sent me a message that said, "oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, we had a group text, and we hadn't [00:04:00] added you to it yet".
That was the reality. There was no negative intent. Nobody rejected me. Nobody meant to exclude me. It was just an accident that I was left off the group thread. So now I'm gonna get into fiction verse theories. This scenario could have gone a thousand different ways. If you don't have a firm control on your thoughts and emotions, and you do have the power to do that, then they will become like , a runaway train for you, and they will start connecting to painful memories and stories from your past.
So when I had that thought, _"I wonder why I wasn't invited". _My reality was I took it from a curiosity place because I do this kind of work. But if I hadn't, if I took it from a painful, traumatic place, my next follow-up thoughts would've been, [00:05:00] _"They don't like me. There must be something wrong with me. Maybe they don't think I'm good enough to hang out with them, or maybe they're mad at me and I must have done something wrong"._
Your brain will make up all of these stories, which are absolute utter fiction. Why? Because we don't know the reality of why you didn't get the invitation. Remember I stated the facts first. The only facts I know for sure is they went out. I wasn't there. Anything else is just stories that my mind might make up, and I have the ability to stop that.
This is what I teach my clients how to do in my Bespoke Brain System, and if you would like to learn how to do that for yourself, then go to my website, aprildarley.com and book a free consultation and you can learn how to stop this runaway train of pain. and if [00:06:00] you listen to last week's episode about retraumatizing yourself, that is exactly what these fiction stories are doing.
They are connecting your present situation to some sort of painful event of your past. And your subconscious cannot tell the difference between past and present. It only reads thoughts and emotions. And when you have a thought of pain, your brain does what it was designed to do. It takes you back to a memory that was similar.
So you pull that memory up, you pull all the emotions up attached to that memory. And then you've got a thought, emotion, pain cascade going until you step in to stop it, and you can do that. This is something I also teach my clients how to do in the Bespoke Brain System, is how to stop that pain cycle so that you are not re-traumatizing yourself.
The fiction, the stories that you tell yourself [00:07:00] are like theories. The fiction is you're telling these painful stories of the past, but then you're gonna go into theorizing. It's maybe they would've had a better time without me there, and that's why I didn't get invited. Maybe they didn't think I'd like that place that they went, so they didn't ask me.
Maybe they left me off the list on purpose. Maybe they left me off the list because it was a text thread and it was an old text thread, and I haven't been added to that text thread. That's logical. It, happened before it could happen again, or I just didn't cross their mind. Also possible, but that's a theory.
Some of these theories can be based on logic, and some of these theories can be also based on pain and trauma if you choose to let your brain go into theory land. But if you keep it in [00:08:00] facts, then you're not creating this emotional storm where you feel bad. Now, what you can do is if you would've liked to be included, learn to ask for what you want.
It's totally appropriate to go. "_Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you guys had fun. It looks amazing. I have been wanting to try this place out. Can you let me know the next time you go because I'd love to go with you"._ Because they may not know that you wanted to go to this place. And I see so many of these situations happen because people don't clearly communicate with each other.
They don't communicate their wants, they don't communicate their needs. They just sit and fester in pain, and there's no point in you doing that. Ask for what you want ask to be included if you wanna be included. Now I know what some of you are thinking."_ What if they didn't invite you on purpose"?_
And that may [00:09:00] absolutely be true. And here's what I see a lot of times as well, do an audit of your friend group because sometimes people have friends that are more like frenemies than ride or die kind of people, or they're fair weather friends. Where they're friendly to you when things are going the way they like, but if you're having any kind of difficulty in your life, they disappear.
So if you audit your friend group and you like them and you believe that they are true friends, then this is what you need to hold onto so that those painful stories don't take root. I believe my friends are true friends because I am not the type of person that suffers through fake people in my life.
These are solid people, which helped me stay in a curiosity place and not a pain place. Like I love these people and I also want them to have fun. So the [00:10:00] fact that I saw them having fun made me happy because good for them, they deserve to have fun. Next time, I hope I'm there too, but I have been a lot because they're not obligated to invite me to everything.
But I am invited to lots of things, and I know that these people are real and honest and true, and I can trust them. And if I was excluded, it doesn't mean anything about me. It doesn't mean I was rejected. It doesn't mean I wasn't good enough. I just didn't get on that list for whatever reason, and that is okay 'cause they're not obligated to include me every single time.
And when you get to that place where you can detach from pain and personalization, because let's face it, you're human, we all have memories that we could pull up where we felt rejected, neglected, abandoned. These are core childhood wounds and we all have them. But when you learn emotional [00:11:00] resilience, when you learn how to surf these different levels of your brain, this is what I teach in the Bespoke Brain System, then you can use your brain state to your advantage and not let it victimize you, not let it traumatize you.
So if you find rejection a very difficult situation to handle, just know there are techniques to get you out of that. Some people, especially neurodivergent, there is something called rejection sensitivity. Some people have a heightened sensitivity to the feelings of pain as it corresponds to rejection.
Your brain from a neuroscience perspective, processes emotional pain, with much the same intensity and circuits as physical pain. And they've even done studies where they asked people, _"Would you like to go through the pain of a breakup or losing someone you dearly love or get this _[00:12:00] _electrical shock"?_
Most people chose the electrical shock. They actually chose physical pain as being the easiest pain to feel versus this intense emotional pain because we try to avoid it that much, but we also do it to ourselves. We traumatize ourselves through our own thoughts and feelings when we don't disconnect from stories and memories of our past, and that my friends is in your control.
A hundred percent. It takes practice because it is a skill to learn how to do this, but I can teach you. So if you wanna learn how to surf the waves of life resilience, how to use your brain as your best competitive advantage so that you can stay in this place of facts and curiosity and not be swallowed by your emotions, let's chat.
[00:13:00] Aprildarley.com. Book your consultation. And what I really want you to take away from this is rejection isn't about you. Unless your brain makes it that way. There are a lot of real life reasons about why you may not have been included, why you weren't a good fit, why you got passed over. And there are so many blessings that can sometimes come with not being included.
But you have to teach yourself to learn how to see those things too. . You're preserving your peace when you learn how to depersonalize some of these things and just look at it as it's an event. That's it. It was data, it was an event. It was a moment, but really focus on the right things.
Do you love these people? Yes. Do you wanna still hang out with these people? Yes. Is there anything that could've changed? [00:14:00] Yes. You can ask for what you want. You can do a friend audit, or you can also start taking the lead and design experiences so you are the leader. If you wanna go to this place, you don't sit around waiting for someone to invite you, you invite them.
And I see that also sometimes they're like, _"I just wanna be included",_ but they're not stepping into a leadership role of going, _"This is what I want and I'm gonna advocate for it, and I want everyone to join me on that ride". _Sometimes it might be an indicator of you need to be the one reaching out more instead of taking an invitation or waiting for one.
All right, well, rejection is never fun, but there are ways to minimize it and not make it about you because most of the time it really isn't. It's just a perception. It's just your brain's way of trying to keep you in old patterns and old stories and you don't have to stay in that place. I am wishing you a [00:15:00] week of empowerment and feeling good my friends, and I'll see you next week.
Bye-bye.
