Search Here

Jason Comely, a freelance IT guy from Ontario unknowingly used a standard psychotherapy trick to help him overcome his fear of rejection. Just after his wife left him, Jason slipped into withdrawal and developed of fear of social interaction, especially with other women. However, it hit him one day that this needs to stop when he realized that he has an inherent fear of rejection. "I had nowhere to go, and no one to hang out with," Comely says. "And so I just broke down and started crying." He realized that he was afraid. "I asked myself, afraid of what? "I thought, I'm afraid of rejection." This simple realization got him thinking about an intense military training regime, Spetsnaz. "You know, I heard of one situation where they were, like, locked in a room, a windowless room, with a very angry dog, and they'd only be armed with a spade, and only one person is going to get out - the dog or the Spetsnaz." It is this training that give him an idea that he needs to employ a rigorous approach if he wants to overcome fear. His solution was, "I had to get rejected at least once every single day by someone," NPR Reports.

As the realization hit him, he started experimenting at a parking lot of a local grocery store, his mission, get rejected once every day. Jason used the rules of psychotherapy and changed the fear of rejection into a game. In fact, it made him feel good every time some one rejected him. "And it was sort of like walking on my hands or living on my hands or living underwater or something. It was just a different reality. The rules of life had changed." The exposure therapy used in the game of rejection therapy is when you are forced to expose yourself to the things that you fear. Eventually, you realize that the things that you are scared are not hurtful. Soon you become numb to the feeling, according to NPR