The powerful impact of rejection for Adoptees

Rejection and the Adult Adoptee

After 14 interviews, 5 rejection letters, 2 rejection phone calls, and zero job offers, I felt compelled to blog about job rejection. Since I am an adult adoptee, and after extensive soul searching and therapy, I have found the issues I have with rejection are directly related to the fact that I was adopted. I take rejection as a personal attack on my sense of self.

Nancy Verrier, a psychotherapist and adoptive mother, briefly wrote about her experiences with adoptees and their issues with work and rejection. In her book, the Primal Wound she states:

Now while many people would just go on to the next interview and keep pursuing it until a job was found, the adoptee will often feel paralyzed by that initial rejection. It is felt, not just as failure to have the necessary skills or training for the job, but as a rejection of the basic person. He was not good enough for the job. He was a failure. This makes going out and facing the next interview seem like a monumental task.

I really connect to Verrier's words, like she is personally speaking to me. She goes on to describe how the fear of rejection may be connected to a sense of unworthiness felt by the adoptee, ending in self-sabotage:

The fear of rejection in the workplace is often accompanied by a fear of success or an inability to believe in one's competency or expertise. There is a kind of self rejection of one's own talents and capabilities, which sometimes results in a sabotaging of one's success.

Many people can recall their first experiences of rejection; getting picked last in gym class or not being able to play with the "cool" kids on the playground in elementary school. For adoptees, on the other hand, we cannot remember our initial reactions to our abandonment at birth (unless you were adopted at an older age). We, as adoptees, don't have a reference point for our early experiences with rejection. What often ends up happening, is a belief develops into thinking that one's personal value is the reason for the rejection. In my personal experiences with rejection, particularly in regards to jobs, I often think I was not "good enough" as a person or that I was "unworthy" for the job.


However, everybody experiences rejection throughout the course of their life; whether it is through significant others, school, sports teams, and in the workplace. So, if everybody encounters rejection some point in their life, why do some react more strongly than others?

In opinion, the answer to that question comes down to how each individual deals with loss. Adoptees, like myself, were faced with the loss of her biological mother at a very young and vulnerable age (in my case, in infancy). Being unable to mourn with the loss of one's biological mother, the person may not be able to effectively cope with later losses in life. In dealing with rejection, the inability to cope comes in many forms, including; personalization ("I must have said something wrong during the interview"), catastrophizing ("I'll never find a job," "I am going to lose my house," etc.), or even denial ("I didn't even want that job in the first place").

So how do we get over the negative beliefs of ourselves and stop taking rejection so personally? We first need be aware that there is a problem and we need to be motivated to change how we think about ourselves. The biggest challenge for me is to remind myself that it wasn't my fault. It was nothing I did or did not do... I am who I am and the best employer for me will realize this. My day will come...