Rejection Sensitivity, Sad Feelings, and How To Hold Your Own Hand Through Both #181

You can be sad about one thing and genuinely happy about another — at the exact same time. If that's ever felt confusing or impossible, you're not alone. In Daily Dose of Dawn #181, resilience coach Dawn Super gets personal about rejection sensitivity, the silence that can follow pouring your heart into something, and the metacognition strategies she uses to comfort herself through hard feelings without lying to herself, shoving anything down, or losing sight of what's real. This is what "feel your feelings" actually looks like in practice.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

You can hold more than one emotion at a time. I never used to understand that and it was very confusing for me and I really feel like it slowed down my personal growth.

Four decades of sleep deprivation interfere with my executive functions which interfere with my emotional regulation and sprinkle on some trauma from the past. And just thinking about things can be challenging. Thinking about your thinking, metacognition, thinking about your feelings, taking the emotions out of your feelings and transmuting that pain and squeezing the lesson right out of it so that you don't repeat it. That's where the magic of life lies.

And if that sounds like something you want to think about for the next few minutes, welcome in to your daily dose of Dawn at Dawn — videos designed to expand your thinking.

They say feel your feelings and don't shove down your feelings, but there really is no "how to feel your feelings 101" that you can take online and figure out what to do with this sadness. So today I'm going to talk about how I taught myself and how I teach myself through all of these things. Using thinking about my thinking to get around it.

This specific topic is about me being sad about something while also being happy about other things. And I'm going to get really specific about my own personal life here so that you can really get an understanding of exactly how a process like this can look.

Nobody likes rejection, but people with rejection sensitivity have to spend a little more time processing rejection than other people might have to. I was bullied and picked on for seven of my formative years. I didn't really have any friends. I didn't really like myself until I was 35 years old. So rejection is something that feels natural to me, but that's not a reality. I have a very full, robust life with tons of people who love me and listen to me and invite me places. And it's just the past telling me a story to keep me from stretching, from being more creative, from moving out of my comfort zone.

So I'm doing this blog. This is like the 179th episode that you're watching if you're watching this right now. And I got sick last week and I didn't do the blog for a couple of days and nobody noticed. And I was already run down from being sick and tired from having narcolepsy and all my other health issues and having rejection sensitivity from the life that I've lived up to this point. I had to hold my own hand and create strategies to comfort myself through these feelings of being rejected — because it's just old programming whispering in my ear.

My blog is new and I'm not paying for advertising to promote it anywhere and these topics are deep and it's sensitive and people aren't always into that kind of stuff. So it's here for me first because this is how I heal. This is how I process. This is how I grow as a person. And it's here for you if you're listening to this and it's helping you — cuz sometimes listening to other people's stories helps us heal ourselves.

So I keep my feet out of the fire and I feel my feels and I let myself feel sad that it's not bigger and remind myself that it's too young to be rejected about that. And I'm not lying to myself. I'm not deluding myself. I'm living in reality and comforting myself because it takes a lot of effort to put this out. And when no one sees it, of course, that doesn't feel great.

And if you just lie to yourself about that or shove those feelings down, then you don't learn anything and you don't grow. But if you take it out and look at it and feel the feels without beating yourself up about it, then you grow.

So just the fact that you're still listening to a personal growth metacognition video means that you're trying. And you can give yourself credit for that.

👀 Want to go deeper? Comfort yourself with self-soothing:

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