Research indicates that being rebuffed causes actual pain and can affect health.
Has rejection by family members hurt your feelings? Neuroscience suggests that the language we use to describe emotional distress is more accurate than we imagine.
If you’ve learned that a parent isn’t a biological parent, there are multiple points at which you might be vulnerable to feeling rejected. Perhaps you search for and reach out to biological family, full of hope and enthusiasm, only to be disavowed. You find that your family doesn’t wish to communicate with you at all, let alone to have a relationship with you. Or you may enter into reunion, only later to be rebuffed. Even if you haven’t been rejected in these ways, you might be preoccupied with the fear that you will. And if you have experienced early life trauma, as may occur with adoption or other disconnections from biological family, you may have lived your entire life with feelings of being unvalued or cast out.
Everyone knows rejection hurts. If you were ever chosen last for a team in grade school you remember that being excluded is painful. But most of us believe the pain is in our head. It turns out it is, but not in the way we think. Hurt feelings isn’t a figure of speech. Scientists have theorized that the pain of rejection, also called social pain, travels on the same neural pathways in the brain as does physical pain and produces the same release of endogenous brain opioids — natural painkillers.
When she was a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Naomi Eisenberger was inspired by the language we use to describe rejection, such as having hurt feelings or being brokenhearted. She wondered if it were more than a matter of linguistics. In a now famous experiment known as Cyberball, she and her research team had participants play a virtual ball tossing game at the same time their brain activity was being measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). When participants perceived that they were being excluded — that other players were failing to toss them the ball — the regions of the brain where physical pain is processed lit up on their MRIs, indicating that the neural circuits that cause injury to be perceived as pain are the same circuits that cause social rejection to feel like physical injury. It appears our brains process emotional and physical pain in the same way.
These effects were replicated by other research. In one study, for example, when individuals who had a recent romantic breakup were shown photos of their former lovers, the regions of their brains associated with pain fired up. In addition, the mere memory of rejection also activates those neural circuits — a phenomenon that doesn’t occur when we remember physical pain. When study participants were asked to recall an experience of having been rejected, the same pain processing centers of the brain fired up, as shown by MRI.
If rejection causes actual pain, Eisenberger and her colleagues wondered if it could be treated in similar ways. In a follow-up experiment, they gave one group of participants Tylenol twice a day for three weeks and gave another group a placebo. Participants recorded their feelings in daily self-reports during the test period, and those taking Tylenol noted fewer feelings of rejection than did those taking a placebo. Their brains showed less activity in the pain centers as recorded by MRI.
Eisenberger and other researchers theorize emotional pain due to rejection is a holdover from evolution. Individuals, like most animals, have always depended on social relationships for safety and survival. Being cast out of one’s tribe left a hunter-gatherer vulnerable. Experiencing emotional pain came to serve as an alert that one was drifting from the tribe, a warning to do what was necessary to stay within the fold and survive. At all times in history, individuals have depended on others to meet their needs, and even today, those who lack a social safety net struggle for survival and those who lack adequate social connections experience depression and negative health outcomes.
Because the need to belong is fundamental and foundational to our existence and ability to thrive, it drives a great deal of our behavior. The need for inclusion is inextricably linked to many of our aspirations. We seek love and acceptance. We join clubs, teams, and fraternities. We network. But for many people, the family is the primal source of a sense of belonging.
Wanting to be received, valued, and accepted by our biological families is a natural desire driven by this universal need to belong. It’s little wonder, then, that meeting an immovable obstacle to the fulfillment of such a primal, fundamental need — being spurned by family, for example — may lead to especially acute feelings of rejection.
This vestige of evolution affects our neurobiology and can have a detrimental effect on our health. Just as physical injury results in inflammation, so too, it appears, do psychic injuries. Eisenberger and colleagues, studying neural sensitivity to social rejection, observed a significant rise in markers of inflammatory activity in response to exposure to laboratory-based social stressors. Their research suggests that social pain may make individuals more susceptible to the development of diseases to which inflammation contributes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain, certain cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
Rejection has also been shown to increase such negative emotions as anger, sadness, and jealousy. It can result in aggression, lack of concentration, impaired decision-making ability, and diminished thinking performance. Social pain erodes self-esteem and self-perception, which can negatively affect other relationships. When we experience social pain, it seems we can’t think straight, and research has shown that, in fact, we can’t. Participants in a study at Case Western Reserve University demonstrated a significant drop in both IQ and the ability to reason after being subjected to rejection.
When rejection continues — as when, for example, months and years go by when you don’t get a response from biological family or you feel ostracized by your social family — your ability to recover from the emotional pain may diminish, and not only may you be at increased risk of illness, but you also may feel depressed, isolated, even helpless. And, counterintuitively, for some it results in an emotional numbness, as if the mind’s ability to cope simply shuts down.
Further, when we experience rejection we tend to blame ourselves, even when at some level we know we’ve done nothing wrong. Still, we take rejection as a personal failure and believe it’s a response to our behavior or to some inner flaw in our character. And while that may sometimes be true, in many cases — as when a birthparent refuses contact —it has nothing at all to do with who we are or how we behaved. Nonetheless, we may internalize it, which only intensifies the pain and depletes our ability to withstand it.
If this weren’t challenging enough, others may not offer the same empathy and compassion for your social pain as they would if you suffered from a broken leg, possibly leading you to feel still more isolated.
If this paints a grim picture, consider this. Understanding the very real nature of pain that results from rejection and the potential detrimental influence it may have on your health can motivate you to take steps to eliminate or minimize the pain, just as you would with the pain from a physical injury. It’s not necessary to live with acute pain from rejection. Look for articles coming soon on a variety of strategies, including self-compassion and mobilizing resilience, that can help soothe social pain.