Rejection and Abandonment
... an excerpt from The Other Side and Back: A Psychic’s Guide to Our World and Beyond by Sylvia Browne.
These two are so closely related that they are not easily separated. Both can be deeply painful, and both can leave us feeling as if we somehow failed, or fell short in someone’s eyes and we were discarded because of it.
The fear of rejection and/or abandonment can interfere with relationships throughout our lives. We may refuse to let anyone get too close to cause us that much pain. We might hold on too tightly to someone, inadvertently suffocating them, so that we cause the very rejection or abandonment we fear. We might even seek out those we subconsciously know will reject or abandon us, either to prove the fear is justified or to see if just once we can prove it isn’t.
Depending on your experience, you probably have your own opinion of the difference between rejection and abandonment. I’ve always defined rejection as someone saying, “Go away,” and abandonment as someone saying, “Good-bye.” You can be rejected by a stranger or by someone you love, in the workplace or at home, or by a friend. Abandonment, on the other hand, implies that love, or the appearance of love, is given and then taken away. In both cases, though, the result is a sometimes devastating sense of emotional loss.
There’s a very good, very deeply rooted spiritual reason why rejection and abandonment have such a profound effect on us, and understanding that reason is a huge step toward putting our fear of them in perspective:
The pain of rejection and abandonment is already familiar to us from the moment we’re born, so every time we experience it on earth we’re reopening an existing wound.
When we make the decision on The Other Side to return here for another incarnation, we’re put through a desensitizing process to help ease the spiritual shock of the transition. In a way, it is the opposite of the orientation we’re given when we leave this life and return Home. As part of that desensitizing process, the entities on The Other Side, from our loved ones to our chosen Spirit Guides to our soul mates to our countless other friends and co-workers there, emotionally distance themselves from us. It’s an act of kindness purely for our benefit, their way of preparing us for our journey.
Imagine being surrounded every day by a happy, stimulating, productive, openly adoring family, with friends who offer absolute trust, compassion, and an unending supply of unconditional love. Your beloved pets are with you, and the very air you breathe is alive with the power and presence of God. You’re living in a state of blissful perfection. But for reasons of your own essential growth and progress, you have made a commitment to your soul to go away to college, or an important job. You know it’s the right decision, and everyone who loves you agrees completely. You have been on this journey before and so have they, so you’re all aware that, as part of your preparing to leave, they have to pull away from you. If they don’t, the departure will be unbearably painful for you, and you won’t arrive at your destination as independent and open as you should.
So out of necessity, you start your trip away from The Other Side feeling abandoned and rejected, and every time you experience abandonment and rejection in this lifetime, you are subconsciously reliving the profound sense of loss, emptiness, and separation that made it possible for you to be here in the first place. It’s perfectly natural to assign all the pain of earthly abandonment and rejection to the event that triggered it. But the majority of that pain is coming not from that event but from the spirit memory of a far greater loss — and a purely temporary loss — than we will ever experience here.
This isn’t to diminish the very real trauma that earthly abandonment or rejection can cause and the importance of reaching out for help to get you through it. I am simply reassuring you that it is not a fresh new wound you are feeling but the aggravation of an old wound that you’ve already survived. The most effective treatment, of course, is to tend to the original wound — our devastating but essential distance from Home.
The key to that treatment is spirituality. The more energy and passion we invest in our spirituality while we’re here, the more connected we feel to everything and everyone we left behind for this brief trip away from The Other Side. It’s the surest way of keeping in touch with those we miss the most until we can all be together again. By keeping that spiritual connection alive and well, no one who abandons or rejects us here on earth can possibly inflict pain too deep for us to bear. ■
The Other Side and Back: A Psychic’s Guide to Our World and Beyond was published by Dutton in 1999.