No — it’s a small word at the center of a growing social media trend. It’s called rejection therapy, and some experts said it may have some health benefits.
Based on a card game, rejection therapy was popularized by Jia Jiang — an entrepreneur who’s TEDx talk on its efficacy has reached nearly 11 million views. As of Oct. 28, the top seven TikTok videos related to rejection therapy have garnered more than 51 million views combined.
“I invite you to join me in this amazing, transformative world of triumph over fear,” he wrote on his website, explaining the intent of rejection therapy. “My journey has revealed that the stings and slights of rejection are universal among us as humans, but that with conscious intent we can turn rejection into enterprise, insult into ambition, and regret into courage.”
Psychologist Elisabeth Morray spoke with PureWow wellness director Sarah Stiefvater about how the practice can act as a form of exposure therapy. Participants must place themselves in situations where they feel emotionally vulnerable to rejection. By exposing themselves to that feeling, they might become more comfortable with their fear.
“This is a process that happens in almost every psychotherapy session, whether clients (or even therapists!) realize it or not,” Morray told Stiefvater. “Therapists are constantly encouraging clients to talk about and explore what they might otherwise avoid, including fear of rejection, and to engage in behaviors other than avoidance in the presence of this kind of anxiety. Over time and with practice, people ‘desensitize’ to their anxiety — they are able to do all kinds of behaviors other than avoiding it, including risking rejection if doing so will be workable in terms of their lives and values.”
Morray is not the only mental health expert who believes rejection can be beneficial as a form of exposure therapy. Psychologist Taylor Wilmer specializes in exposure therapy and spoke with CNN Health’s Taylor Nicioli about social media’s growing fad.
“Feeling nervous about rejection, and feeling anxiety or feeling fear in general, are totally normal human experiences,” she said. “... Those emotions in sort of small, manageable doses actually help to keep us safe.”
“It’s just when that fear or anxiety gets so big that it gets in the way of us living our lives and doing the things that we want to do, then it can be helpful to get some outside support,” Wilmer added.
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