Dr. Paul Conti

I'm not interested.

Now the person can say, oh, that that that hurt.

It stung.

So then the next time the person sees someone who could be a relationship partner, the person avoids.

That person, it's the same mapping to where something really aggressive happened, right?

But here we're misusing anxiety.

It's too much anxiety.

We might be better off if we could say to ourselves something like this of, hey, it takes, you know, you have to ask somebody out, a number of people out maybe before someone says yes.

So like, it's okay if someone says no.

It's not a litmus test on my value as a person or as a relationship partner, right?

So like, it's okay that that didn't go the way

I wanted it to.

You know what I need to do is do it again.

And if the next person says, I'm going to go towards this person.

And if that person says no, then I'm going to do it again, right?

You know, this is different than where anxiety equates to real threat and I want to keep myself safe.

Here, the anxiety is I want to keep myself safe from something that doesn't feel good.

You know, rejection doesn't feel good or I feel ashamed if we're rejected.

So I want to keep myself safe.

But as I said, if we really want to keep ourselves safe, we'd never get out from under the bed.