Beating fear of rejection

Every day I focus more on things that are important and less on the trivial

Fear of rejection is a strong emotion that often caused me to binge in the past. The cycle would be: a perfectly normal event occurs - I twist it into a rejection - decide to binge - blame the fantasized rejection on my fat - eat even more.

Mostly now I choose not to binge over those things. Now that I’ve got binging under control, I notice that I still have some irrational fears around rejection.

“I tentatively accepted this meeting, but since I’ve been away for 2 days, I have to make sure there aren’t emergencies of a higher priority.” Look at that. Perfectly normal statement from a perfectly normal person. But I found myself turning it into a medium-sized rejection.

This time I caught myself before I let it completely go into a panic or depression. As I went to bed, I wrote the following affirmation to guide my thoughts around this non-rejection:

I don’t have to take the worst point of view for every thing that happens. It is not a rejection when this guy doesn’t have time one day. Both you and he know that you are working on a very important project - it just isn’t always the most urgent thing on his agenda. That’s a fair and reasonable perspective to take.

That made me feel much better, and I was able to sleep without worrying about this, without feeling like a failure, and without binging.