Rejection, Why Does It Keep Happening?
Hypnosis Leicester Alexia Elliott
You know the feeling you have been here before. You ghosted, or someone pulls away, a relationship ends, an opportunity vanishes when you dont gt through another interview for your career. Maybe t beneath the sting of the immediate loss there is something older waiting for you, a voice that says: of course.
‘Of course this happened this always happens’
When rejection arrives, it is painful and when it arrives again and again, circling back into your life with different faces and different circumstances but the same essential wound, then something else is happening. Something in you is in a conversation with this pattern, and until you understand what that conversation is actually about, it will continue.
This is what I want to explore with you, what hypnotherapy, shamanism, and Jungian depth psychology each reveal about why rejection repeats, and how understanding that repetition is the beginning of something genuinely different.
The Trance You Are Already In
In hypnotherapy, we speak a great deal about trance the ordinary, constant, largely invisible kind the trance of your expectations, the trance of what you believe to be true about yourself and the world around you.
You have been in this trance for a very long time, and it is so familiar that it no longer feels like a state; it feels like reality.
Somewhere in your early life, an imprint was laid down. Perhaps it was a parent who was too preoccupied to see you clearly. Perhaps it was the sudden withdrawal of love when you behaved in a way that was inconvenient, or too loud, or too much. Perhaps it was more overt a direct message, spoken or unspoken, that you were not quite right, not quite enough, not quite the child they had hoped for.
The unconscious mind is considered to be extraordinarily loyal and literal and will received that message and filed it as truth. N from that filing forward, it began to do what it always does: it sought confirmation.. The mind that already knows it will be rejected does not have to be surprised by it. It can prepare. It can protect.
This is the trance of rejection: the body moving toward situations that feel familiar before the conscious mind has caught up, the choosing of people who carry a particular quality, the reading of ambiguity as abandonment, the pulling back just at the moment of closeness. None of it feels like a trance. It feels like perception. It feels like knowing how things are. But it is a programme running, and programmes can be changed.
Where the Soul Went
In shamanic understanding, there is a concept that has no good equivalent in Western psychology, though depth psychology reaches toward it: soul loss. When we experience something too painful, too overwhelming, too shattering to integrate and for a small child, many things are precisely that a piece of our essential self leaves. It goes somewhere safe. It waits.
That first great rejection, the one you may not even consciously remember, the one that happened before you had language for it was, in the shamanic framework, the moment the soul began to fragment. The child who was not seen, not held, not welcomed as they were, sent a part of themselves into hiding. And that hidden part does not know that time has passed. It does not know you are grown. It knows only that it was sent away, and it is still waiting to be found.
What looks like a pattern of rejection in adult life is, from this perspective, the soul circling back to the place of the original wound. Not to punish you. To find you. To return something that was left behind. Every rejection that echoes the first is the psyche's attempt to go back to that moment and this time this time do it differently. To be seen to stay whole to be chosen.
This is why the pattern feels so urgent, so disproportionate, so much larger than the immediate situation warrants. Because it is larger, It was never only about this person, this job, this friendship. It has always been about that first fragmentation, and the long, faithful search for wholeness.
The Complex That Runs the Show
Jung gave us the concept of the complex , a cluster of emotionally charged material gathered around a core wound. Complexes are not pathological everyone has them. They are the psyche's way of organising experiences that were too charged to be fully integrated at the time they occurred.
A rejection complex forms when the early wound around not being wanted, not belonging, not being enough, becomes a gravitational centre in the psyche. Around it collect all the subsequent experiences of rejection, all the interpretations, all the strategies developed to avoid feeling it again. And because complexes operate largely outside conscious awareness, the ego does not experience the complex as a part of itself. It experiences it as the world. As how things are as the truth.
The complex looks for evidence and colours perception. It can cause a person to behave in ways that actually elicit the very rejection they fear pulling back before connection is established, testing relationships past the point they can hold, choosing people who are fundamentally unavailable, interpreting neutrality as hostility. This is not self-sabotage in any judgmental sense. It is the complex doing what complexes do: confirming its own reality, holding its territory.
Jung observed that we do not so much attract our experiences as we are arranged around our wounds to receive them. When the wound is rejection, the arrangement of the psyche creates conditions in which rejection becomes the most probable outcome. Not inevitable but probable, until the complex is brought into consciousness and the arrangement begins to shift.
What Self-Esteem Actually Is
Self-esteem is a word we often to mean something like confidence or self-belief. But in its deeper sense, self-esteem is not a feeling about yourself. It is a knowing. It is the settled, unquestioned sense that you have a right to exist, that your presence is not an imposition, that you are worthy of care, connection, and belonging simply by virtue of being here.
That knowing is not built in adulthood. It is built or not built in the earliest years of life, in the quality of attunement between a child and their caregivers. When a child is held with consistency and warmth, when their needs are met with sufficient reliability, when they are seen as a person rather than an extension of parental need or a problem to be managed, they develop what we might call a secure internal ground. A place inside themselves that holds. A sense that the world is broadly safe and that they belong in it.
When that attunement is unreliable, or absent, or conditional when love comes and goes without clear reason, when the child must earn their place rather than simply inhabit it, the internal ground is shaky. And a person with shaky internal ground does not enter relationships as an equal. They enter as a supplement, hoping, without quite knowing why they are hoping so hard, that this time they will be chosen. That this time the love will stay.
Low self-esteem and the pattern of repeat rejection are not cause and effect in a simple linear sense. They are the same wound, seen from different angles. The trance that says I am rejectable, the soul loss that happened at the first fragmentation, the complex that arranges the world around that core belief — all of these are expressions of the same early experience: I was not unconditionally welcomed. I had to earn my place. And the earning never felt quite enough.
The Hand That Is Already Reaching
Understanding the pattern does not heal it. You can map your wound with extraordinary precision and still live inside it. Insight, on its own, is not medicine. It is the beginning of finding the medicine. The trance needs to be entered and reworked at the level at which it was created not in the rational mind, which came later, but in the body, in the feeling-tone, in the place where the original imprint lives. This is where hypnotherapy works mot by implanting positive thoughts, but by accompanying the unconscious back to the moment the programme began, and offering the nervous system a genuinely different experience. A felt sense, not just a thought, of what it is to be enough.
The soul loss needs a different kind of medicine, one that acknowledges what was fragmented and creates the conditions for its return. This is ritual work, relationship work, the slow and patient practice of building the internal ground that was never built. It asks us to go back, not to relive, but to retrieve. To bring the hidden parts of ourselves back into the body, back into life.
The complex needs consciousness brought to it, not the forced light of willpower, but the gentle, sustained attention of someone willing to sit with what they have been running from. When we can name the complex, witness it, understand what it has been trying to do for us all these years, protect us, prepare us, keep us safe from the devastation of hope something shifts. The complex does not disappear, but it loses its grip. The ego is no longer recruited into its agenda without knowing it.
And underneath all of this holding all of this is the work of building, for the first time or rebuilding where it crumbled, a genuine relationship with yourself. Not the performed version of self-esteem, not the affirmations repeated at the mirror without belief. The actual settling into your own skin. The knowing, bone-deep, that you do not need to be chosen to be whole. That your belonging is not conditional on anyone's approval. That you were always, already, enough.
A Final Word
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in these pages, I want you to know: the pattern is not a verdict. It is a map. It is showing you, with faithful accuracy, exactly where the wound is. And that means it is also showing you where the healing lives.
The part of you that keeps going back to the same place, hoping for a different answer , that part is not broken but It is loyal. It has been looking for something real: to be seen, to be held, to be told that you are welcome here. That search does not have to continue in the same direction forever. It can turn inward. It can find what it has been seeking in the place it has never quite thought to look.
Love the Love, Alexia x