Overcome Fear of Rejection With a Taoist Holistic Approach

Experiencing fear when facing truly dangerous situations or events helps us survive by discerning the risks and selecting appropriate reactions. Frequently, however, our actions — particularly in interpersonal situations — are guided by some type of unreasonable fear that incapacitates our ability either to connect with auspicious opportunities and people or to evade or transform predicament or wrong persons.

What is the psychological cause for an unreasonable fear in human interaction (e.g., fear of rejection)?

A dominant explanation for the fear suggests that low self-esteem is responsible for the feeling of insecurity. Thus, efforts to increase self-esteem should provide the solution to overcome the dysfunction.

Some research has investigated the issue. For example, a study by Ravary and Baldwin (2018) showed that exposure to words associated with low self-esteem and specific self-insecurity domains, such as social anxiety, failure, stupidity, and obesity, heightened people’s attentional biases toward rejection-related stimuli.

On the other hand, many myths regarding self-esteem have been discredited (e.g., Baumeister & Vohs, 2018). Their research indicates that high self-esteem as an overrated belief carries only two benefits: feeling good and making the persons more willing than those with low self-esteem to reject advice or to initiate interactions, including engaging in social deviance and aggression.

Additionally, one’s unilateral belief about effectiveness of his or her communication does not guarantee its actual validity in human interaction, because all human interactions involve minimum at least two living systems (e.g., self and others in interaction) who are able to process, evaluate, explain, judge, validate and/or invalidate each other’s communication by employing their own perceptions and standards (Sun, 2019).

The current discussion examines how the Daoist/Taoist psychology (e.g., Sun, 2019) views the issue, explaining why the self-concept is not an independent cognition and how fear of rejection, like low self-esteem, represents a symptom caused by one’s false mental standard(s) in the holistic cognitive mechanisms. The solution includes understanding Taoist axioms “Transcending yourself is true power,” (Lao Tzu, Chap. 33), and “He who claims the self as the standard of truth is unclear about truth” (Lao Tzu, Chap. 24).

First, the Taoist model maintains that self-esteem and other types of self-evaluation are determined by our holistic cognitive structures.

Within this, the self is defined in relation to our cognitive standards or mental “Tao,” which functions as a type of mental/behavioral traffic light.

Clinical observations and research have revealed that all people must use one or more mental standards to guide their evaluations, explanations, decision-making and predictions of validation and invalidation in both the mental and interpersonal domains (e.g., Sun, 2009, 2019). The examples of the perceived standards can be classified into two types of criteria or principles:

1. Value-based standards or rules, such as perceptions of morality, love, violence, social status, physical and other kinds of perfection, and wealth
2. Cognitive representations and comprehension of evolving reality, such as one’s accurate, limited or false knowledge of human behavior, the social and physical worlds

For example, our positive assessment of ourselves (e.g., self-confidence) arises from the perceived consistency between our attributes and the guiding principles to which we subscribe. In the same way, our negative evaluations and related emotional suffering (e.g., low self-esteem, depression) are decided by our perceived aberration from those rules.

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Although the contents of the mental standards or norms may vary among individuals, they are assumed to be objectively and universally valid or powerful for interacting entities (the self, others, and contexts), with the transcending power for both the self and others in interaction.

Namely, if we view the self as defective according to the standards, we assume the others also see us in this way. Similarly, when we communicate to others about our judgments about them according to our perceived standards, we assume the messages will have the same validity, revealing to them about their consistency or inconsistency with the standards/norms (e.g., Sun, 2009, 2019).

Second, unreasonable fear results from attributing the experience of frustration or invalidation in human interaction to the self’s deviance from some value-based standards.

Most incidents of frustrations and invalidations are generated and sustained by the cognitive misrepresentation of human reality and the contexts. That is, there is a mismatch between the mind (of the self and/or others) and interpersonal reality and the person(s) still apply the distorted cognition to guide their evaluations, explanations, and prediction.

Rather than discerning and adjusting the misconception of reality, however, people tend to attribute the experience of misfortune to their or others’ violation of value-based standards (i.e., what ought to be, such as positive and negative; right or wrong). For example, seeing the self as unworthy arises from viewing self’s attributes as a violation of the standard of social desirability or physical perfection. In addition, experiencing guilty feelings tend to be generated by viewing the self as having breached a moral code (see Sun, 2019).

People tend to employ value-based standards to evaluate, explain, and predict their experiences, in addition to their benefits for self-regulation, because value-based standards seem to provide easy, simple yet superficial answers to the complex problems of human psychology and interaction, as well as the issue of responsibility and blame. All internalized standards or rules are assumed to carry the power of validity. Namely, people believe conformity to the rules will fulfill their needs for connecting with resources of wellbeing and avoiding misfortune or transforming conflict.

However, value-based standards are different from the true law(s) governing interpersonal interaction. The fact that some people who hold decent values does not imply their perceptions of others and the social/physical worlds are accurate. In most human interactions, either side or both suffer some unawareness of the discrepancy between the mind and reality. Internally-valid value judgments may be totally invalid if the perceiver's cognition about the interpersonal reality (including others’ expectations, needs, feelings, and mental activities and how and why there is validation or invalidation of interpersonal communication) is inaccurate, distorted or false.

Furthermore, attempt to expurgate fear by focusing on positive aspects of the self or self-achievements or other motivations cannot elevate one’s level of cognition about reality or transcend one’s cognitive limitation about reality. One’s distorted cognition of interpersonal reality can only be reduced by the mind’s interaction with a new reality in the process of falsification (Sun, 2019).

In short, the power to overcome fear results from applying the standard/norm based on the mind/reality interaction for evaluating, explaining, and predicting the experiences and actions of self and others. This approach views each individual represents a being of awareness that is capable of growing and all individuals in interaction represent part of perceived reality and resources for one another. Because misfortunes are created by the mismatched interactions between the mental system and evolving human reality, utilizing the process of interaction as the ultimate rule can create and maintain peace (Sun, 2019).