You can feel shame.

Shame manifests itself into the lining of your chest, making you feel sluggish, slow, and heavy.

It buries itself into your shoulders and makes you toss and turn at night. You can feel shame when you walk, step by step, trudging along in the rain just to get to your next destination. You can feel shame in the deep bags underneath your eyes from lost sleep.

I can feel it drip through my blood, making me weak and exhausted. 

You can feel it. Not many people are aware of that.

And the root of shame? The source of the exhaustion, sadness, depression, and self-hatred?

Rejection.

A 2011 study conducted by the National Institute of Health has demonstrated that rejection literally hurts. Forty individuals experienced thermal stimulation (hot water) on their forearm while brain activity was monitored via an fMRI in order to understand which parts of the brain were activated when experiencing physical pain. Then, another fMRI was analyzed as each individual was shown a photo of a former partner who had broken their heart within the past six months. After deep statistical analysis of the neural overlap between the two brain studies, the results showed that intense social rejection activated the same somatosensory regions in the brain that are associated with physical pain.  

Intense rejection literally activates the same part of the brain that physical pain does.  

It’s physical. Anyone who’s been rejected before, by a friend, partner, or family member, especially by someone who they care deeply about, knows that the body’s reaction to rejection is physical. You unexpectedly cross paths with them, see their photo, or hear their name? You immediately feel your stomach turn over. Your chest flushes red, your heart starts pounding, waves of nausea roll over your body, and you start to feel dizzy. There’s no way out – deep breaths help, but not much. Tears come.

This is such a physical response to such an emotional hurt, indicating that emotional pain can be just as intense as a physical wound. People have been saying this for decades: heartbreak feels like your heart is literally tearing in two. Now, there are studies and experiments that provide sound data to back this claim up.

I would cautiously describe this physical reaction to an utter devastation or loss a part of our sympathetic nervous system.

Rejection activates our fight or flight response.

When I’m pressing both hand to my heart as tears stream down my cheeks, desperately trying to keep my chest from bursting open from grief-stricken panic, it can’t just be about losing a romantic partner. It’s something much deeper than not being able to hold someone’s hand or kiss goodbye.

It’s the shame of being rejected – of feeling not good enough. Of feeling truly seen as my authentic self and being dismissed; of utter betrayal from a true friend. Feeling powerless and vulnerable at the hands of another person. Your soul is stripped naked and laughed at. We drown in it. After a prolonged amount of time – hours, days, weeks of being flooded by intense feelings of rejection, we slip into shame, which then switches on our fight-or-flight response.

We enter survival mode.

Survival mode is about what I like to call “emotional budgeting”. I calculate how much emotional energy it will require to get up out of bed in the morning and change into clean clothes. Can I emotionally afford to talk to someone in the elevator today? What will it cost me to raise my hand in class and contribute to a conversation? Often, the simple act of getting back to my room after a class zaps my emotional energy budget for the rest of the afternoon. Walking to the dining hall for dinner? Ha, don’t even think about it. We avoid everything that reminds me of whatever or whoever caused such deep feelings of shame and rejection – places that we used to go, things we used to watch, music we used to listen to, friends we used to have. There is no room for grief in survival mode.

There is no room in the budget for deep anguish.

When you’re actively emotionally budgeting, you cut the most important things necessary for wholehearted living. Connectedness, empathy, vulnerability, and courage are always the first to go. Meeting new people and learning about their stories have always been a source of significant fulfillment for me. It gives me intense satisfaction to crack someone open and understand what has shaped them into the person sitting in front of me. It is such a core part of who I am.

Brokenhearted and struggling, I lost all interest in getting to know new people. I could care less about their siblings, their relationship with their parents, their grief, their successes, their joy. I no longer asked the people sitting around me in class about their day – there was absolutely no room for connection because it took too much of my emotional budget to sustain. I leaned on people I already knew well – friends who I knew like the back of my hand, family, my therapist. People who required no “first-date” questions.

I half-heartedly went on a first date with a guy I barely knew a few days after a breakup. It lasted five hours, during all of which my brain was screaming at me to get away from this stranger. I forced myself to laugh at the jokes I didn’t find funny, smile through the awkward pick-up lines, and ask the "right" questions even though I didn’t care about the answers.  When I finally walked into my room at nine o’clock that night, I closed the door, climbed into bed, and sobbed myself to sleep, fully clothed. I had no capacity for first-date conversation – I had pushed myself past my limits and paid the price for it. I went home the next day and slept until late in the afternoon. My emotional budget was at an all-time low, lower than it had been in many years. 

There is no easy how-to, step-by-step process for emotional budgeting. It helps us survive intense emotional pain, but at what cost? If I have a good day, does that mean I'm done budgeting? When I'm emotionally exhausted and allowing myself space to be alone, am I sinking into depression or pulling myself out of it? What does shaking off sadness look like? 

These are the questions that I'm trying to answer. I have no idea how to climb out of deep shame and back into the light. Maybe as I keep writing, I’ll put together some ideas that I find helpful for letting connectedness and vulnerability back into the driver’s seat.

However, I’m still on the journey myself – in no way am I at the end destination. I’m struggling - the road ahead is shrouded in fog and I am driving down it very, very cautiously. In a sense, that’s what this project is about for me; documenting the pain, the process, and the progress as I heal. I’m excited to see where it takes me. Thank you for joining me.

Kross, E., Berman, M.G., Mischel, M., Smith, E.E., & Wager, T.D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(15), 6270-6275.