Anxiety is a natural human emotion that plays a vital role in survival, alerting us to potential threats and motivating caution in uncertain situations. However, when anxiety revolves around the fear of rejection, it can lead to behaviors and emotional responses that hinder our ability to establish and nurture relationships. The roots of rejection anxiety can often be traced to early developmental experiences, where unmet needs, insecure attachments, or internalized representations of others set the stage for future relational patterns.

Anxiety can be understood as a response to internal conflicts and fears rooted in early childhood. Initial experiences of neglect, rejection, abandonment, invalidation, unmet needs, or unfulfilled desires may linger as unconscious sources of fear in adult relationships.

Sigmund Freud used the term “signal anxiety” to refer to a kind of warning that a painful or traumatic situation is imminent, so that we can defend ourselves against that possibility. Social rejection can feel that threatening. Moreover,

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