Resolution Podcast

S02E08: Kait Warman - Moving Past Rejection

September 06, 2021 Resolution Season 2 Episode 8
Resolution Podcast
S02E08: Kait Warman - Moving Past Rejection
Show Notes Transcript

Ben Bennett sits down with Kait Warman to discuss rejection and its many forms - romantic, childhood experiences, and even self-rejection. They talk through what can happen when we don’t heal from the pain of rejection, and give practical tips on how we can experience true freedom.

Kait Warman is an author, speaker, relationship coach, and the founder of Heart of Dating. She helps thousands of people on their dating journeys, through conversations on the Heart of Dating podcast. Her recent book “Thank You For Rejecting Me” is a national bestseller.

Connect with Kait at heartofdating.com

Subscribe to Kait’s channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeartofDating

Visit the Resolution Movement website: resolutionmovement.org

Follow us on Instagram @resolutionmovement

(upbeat music)- Welcome to the Resolution Podcast, where we believe it's possible to overcome struggles and thrive in life. Here, we discuss mental health, trauma, brokenness, healing, and ultimately how we can experience a thriving life with Jesus and others. These conversations are informed by my new book,"Free To Thrive" coauthored with Josh McDowell. I'm your host, Ben Bennett. Welcome to season two.(upbeat music) Welcome back to the Resolution Podcast. Ben Bennett here and today I'm joined by Kait Warman and we're gonna be talking about moving past rejection. Come on, Kait is an author, speaker, popular relationship coach and the founder of The Heart of Dating. She helps thousands of men and women on their journeys through the conversations on The Heart of Dating Podcasts. And I'll just add her latest book,"Thank You For Rejecting Me," phenomenal. It's so, so good, it's one of the best books I've read in recent years on identifying pain in her life and how to heal from trauma and find purpose. So, so good, pick it up. Kait, thanks so much for being with me today.- Ben, this is awesome. I'm so happy to be here, thanks for having me. I am pumped for this convo.- So, so sick, so excited for this. I know you and I have so many mutual friends and finally, we're getting to meet over zoom.- (laughs) Wish it was in real life. But I love this and I love finding out all the mutual friends we have, this is so fun. The world always gets smaller and smaller, and I'm grateful for virtual connection, even though I wish it was in real life. This is so fun.- Yeah, virtual saved everything during quarantine. Well, this topic of moving past rejection is such a crucial one because whether or not we realize it, we all experienced rejection, whether it's from our friends, from our family, from romantic partners and even from ourself. And so often I think we can struggle to figure out how to heal and move past those experiences of rejection. But Kait, that's what I love about you and what you're doing and your story, how you've navigated that. You've been through it in your own personal life, and now you're helping thousands of other people. So let's go ahead and get into the first question. Kait, as we begin, will you share how you got started with The Heart of Dating and ultimately how you started helping others move past rejection?- Yeah. Well, the story goes that I am a part of the queen of rejection, meaning I've been through a lot of it. I don't think you can talk about a topic unless you've been through it significantly or who's gonna listen to me, right? But the funny part is the Heart of Dating, I never thought I would be a dating coach, never thought I would talk about dating, especially talk about my story when it relates to dating publicly, that would have been five years ago. If you asked me my worst possible fear would have been like me sharing my dating stories and some of the trauma and pain that had happened to me in front of people. And now I'm doing so in front of thousands and thousands of people. And now I written it in a book that is evergreen, I can know takes backs. It is out there in the world. And so that really in and of itself is a picture of how God has empowered my heart and healed my heart and given me the courage to talk about this subject that I'm actually so deeply passionate about. Funny though, that we're talking about rejection because Heart of Dating itself really started in the wake of a very big rejection in my life. I write about this specific rejection, which was the rejection of heartbreak in chapter five of the book called "The Ugly Cry." And this was a relationship that at the time I really thought was it. This is now several years ago, but I thought this was it. It was a good Christian man, we had support from friends, family, mentors, pastors, and I was like, we're on the track to marriage. And you know, we were talking about engagement and all of a sudden he had a conversation with me, I didn't see coming and he didn't have peace about moving forward and eventually he ended it. That rejection sent me into a tailspin of like I had already been through so much, and yet here was another failed relationship. The one that was finally healthy, I thought I was quote unquote, finally doing it right. And so I asked God so many questions. I pressed into the healing. I started writing about rejection, and the beautiful part about that season is God started showing me that rejection could be protection. And to be honest, I didn't really know why I just felt it in my heart, but I didn't understand why it was protecting me. I was like, this was supposed to be my guy. And that's one of the things in rejection we get wrong, we think we need to know why this happened, but oftentimes we won't know why it happened. We may never actually know why it happened truly. But I think through time, if we really trust God, if we really surrender the healing to Him, and if we keep pressing forward in what to do to keep moving forward, to keep healing, things will start getting clarity through time. But in that season of healing from that breakup, it was when God started putting it on my heart to start Heart of Dating. And here's the kinda cool thing about it Ben, if that breakup hadn't happened, I genuinely believe that I would never have started Heart of Dating. Like I truly believe that. Because a passion for talking about dating wasn't on my heart in a big way before that relationship. It really wasn't. Again, my worst possible fear, but it was in that breakup and healing from that, that I started developing this passion. And so, yeah, that's how Heart of Dating was essentially birthed. And then through that process, how I started helping others move past rejection was I realized so many people wanna just like get on a date. They wanna know where to find them and how to find quality people. But as I started coaching people later on in my journey, I realized we can't talk about how to date someone, unless we talk about how you're showing up for yourself and inadvertently how then you're showing up in the relationships that you're having. And most of the issues I saw there came back to rejection. Two fold, rejection of themselves, self rejection. So many people feeling unworthy. So many people, not feeling competent. So many people not aware of what they actually bring to the table. And then also the external rejections that plagued them and ultimate fear of rejection because of some kind of rejection that's happened in their past. And so often in my coaching, I started spending a lot of time with people, mainly talking about those things before we ever got to, this is how you get out there and date. We had to talk about how do you address your own internal rejections with yourself? How do you heal from some of those in the past? How do you heal from your perspectives of God and maybe thinking that God's rejecting you? So we spend a lot of time in those buckets and I realized, man, this is where we have to start before we just get out there. I can give all the practical advice of putting yourself out there, but we really have to start healing from these, the fear of rejection.- Ooh, so good. As I listen to that and what God's doing through you and whatnot, I'm reminded of that, so often God wants to do something in us before He's gonna do something through us. And it's just, like you said, had you not experienced that intense heartbreak and pain, who knows if you'd be helping thousands of people move towards healing today. I wanted to press into, you talked about a couple of ways that people can experience rejection from others or for themselves, but can we press into, what are the common ways rejection can show up whether it's in childhood, whether it's in adult life that you see in your world?- Yeah, so I separate the book and I really feel like there's, first of all, two different main kinds of rejections, there's internal self rejections. And those really show up in the ways that we criticize ourselves, the ways that we feel insecure, our lack of confidence, our lack of worthiness, the lies that we believe about ourselves and even in ways self hatred. And a lot of those things stem from early childhood years. And they're things that were said to us or things that happened to us that implanted some sort of belief or some sort of lie that then grew through time. And we didn't know we were young when those things happen. So we didn't have the awareness to even know that thing wasn't true, that lie, that belief isn't real about us, but we started believing it. And then through time it's formed and shaped how we think about ourselves, potentially how we talk about ourselves and then how we show up in our lives around us. So self rejections are very, very important to address because without that, without addressing it, you can find any person on the planet, but they're never going to heal those self rejections. Like no sense of human love or human affirmation is ever going to fully conquer those, your own inability to love yourself. So we really have to work to love ourselves first so that we don't lose ourselves in the face of other people. And in the hands of other people or in the hands of the world, which is very unpredictable. So that's the first area in which we really have to work through rejection, self projections. Other ways that rejection can show up, have to do with, obviously the obvious one as we talk about dating would be heartbreak. But then there's so many others, there's abandonment. And a lot of people experience abandonment, especially early in their childhood life. And I just wanna open up the lens here that it's not just your dad suddenly left and you never see him again. It could honestly, abandonment could look like you were emotionally abandoned or you were emotionally neglected as a child and you didn't exactly get all your needs met as a child. And that can be a sense of rejection and abandonment from a very small, young age. Other forms of rejection would be things like abuse, that's one in the book I talk about that's very horrific and that is part of my journey. We can also feel rejected through people in our lives. So not only through dating, but through friendships, through developing community, feeling a lack of belonging and who are we in the mid of all these other people. And so rejections ultimately, and often, there's even more that we go into the book, but oftentimes they're not just the ones that happened yesterday, last month, last year, oftentimes it's things that have happened early in your life that then get compounded by other things that happened that then reinforce the same beliefs. And what does it all lead to? It leads to fears. It leads to really crippling fears of like, this thing can not happen again or else all die or else I don't know if I can survive or else this belief of me feeling unworthy will cripple me. And so we do whatever we can to mitigate those rejections from happening. But ultimately we can't mitigate any rejection from happening. But what we can do is we can hear from the ones in our past. There's so many people that are walking around with a limp, and what I mean by this is, they're walking around, not knowing that things that have happened to them in their past are completely affecting how they're showing up in their lives today. And I think that we just need to debunk the whole faith and mental health thing because having faith, loving God, knowing the gospel is so powerful. And combining that with knowing that there are actual neurological things, psychological things happening in our bodies and our minds, we need to know these things, to be able to have tools, to actually rewire our minds, actually start practically healing in a way that's more than just a Christianese form of just pray about it and it will be better. You know what I mean? Like, yes, pray about it. And we need to actually search through and heal strategically through some of these things. And it takes a lot of action, a lot of effort, a lot of consistency. And I believe doing those things, recognizing our past rejections, healing from them, can truly lead to transformation.- Come on. So, so good. I think when we talk about rejection, so often we focus on what others have done to us and how they've hurt us or not met our needs growing up. But what's interesting is this idea of how often we can reject ourselves, whether it's through our thoughts or whatnot. Why would you say so many of us end up rejecting ourselves? And what does that often look like?- Yeah, so I think self-rejection is the most crippling form of projection, to be honest with you. But the beautiful part about it is that's the one that we have the most control over. Because nobody's forcing us to believe those things about ourselves. So I will say that again, nobody is forcing you to believe those things about yourself. So what's freeing about that is you may have all these self-limiting beliefs or these thoughts, but the great part is you can change them. Like you can't actually transform your mind through action. But if we don't actually admit that, and we're not even aware of them, then we will continue to either overly self-protect, try to live in our little bubble, never get out of our comfort zones. When it comes to dating, that looks like, I'm never gonna step out, I'm never gonna talk to somebody I like, I'm just gonna stay here and just hope that God magically, then we move on. But it doesn't work like that. You have to be vulnerable. You have to be courageous. You have to talk to people. Oh my gosh, what a novel idea? You to talk to people to actually date, and you have to endure hard conversations. And when it comes to dating, which is a big thing I talk about, rejection is always a part of the equation. Like you get online, you're gonna be rejected tomorrow. There's gonna be somebody that you swipe right on, you're excited about, that is not gonna swipe right on you. That's just the math , it will happen. And so that's a small rejection. Oh, that's a bummer, that guy didn't swipe right on me. I was excited to talk to him. How are you going to handle that rejection? Are you going to demonize that person and be like, well, all men suck and dah, dah, dah, or are you going to, which isn't helpful at all, because that's not creating a helpful narrative, or are you going to conversely take it personally and say, there must be something wrong with me, I must not be enough. Oh, I know I'm not pretty enough for a guy like that. And those are the thoughts out of the self rejection. And so I think that really being aware of our own internal self projections and working to heal those things, which we have the power to do in partnership with the holy spirit, brings us into fuller alignment of who God really calls us to be. And I wanna say all this without shaming anybody, because we all have things that we believe about ourselves that we're working through. I would just say the question is, are you working through them? Are you aware of them? Are you willing to work through them? And are you willing to continue to work through them for the course of your life? And because as you do that, you will see, oh my gosh, like this was a lie I used to believe. And now when it kind of comes up again, I have a tool to deal with that lie. So that lie doesn't have to hit me and land and suffocate me anymore. I have a tool to say, I see it now, and now this is what I'm gonna do and pivot into instead. But if we continue down the same self fulfilling prophecy, nothing will ever change. And we'll continue to just feel so negatively about ourselves every time any sort of external rejection does happen. What I also hate about self rejections is that, it just really limits us from so much beauty and experiencing connection and opportunity. If you don't believe you're worthy of something, you're not gonna step out into it. But at the same edge of that coin is if you don't step out into the unknown, you're never gonna know what God wants to do with you and that unknown. And so you can live a very safe life, but I believe it's CS Lewis who says an amazing quote that I don't have memorized off the top of my head, but it's like, "We can keep our hearts in a box and we can keep it there and pardon it and put all these guards around it. But then what you've done is you've just completely hardened it, that nothing can penetrate it, nothing can pierce it." But therefore you don't feel anything. And what is life truly being able to feel, to experience the heights of joy and the depths of sadness. That's what God designed us to be. And you can do that, you can try and protect yourself to that extent, but you're gonna also miss out on so much of what God actually wants to bring you into.- Come on, I think there was about five mic drop moments, there out the past couple of minutes.- Oh my God.- So, so good. When I think of self-rejection, thinking about it in my own life for probably 15 years, I was rejecting myself, feeding myself lies, it was all I knew. And I believe that I was basically worthless. And I think for so many of us, it can become all we know. We don't know that we actually aren't worthless. I was reading in, I think it was Psalm 10 earlier today. People love to quote the verse that says,"Who are we Oh God, that you were mindful of us." But then the next verse says,"Yet you made them us only a little bit lower than God." We're made in the image of God. If we could only get God's sights on us and see ourself the way he sees us, as people made in the image of God, redeemed by Christ, that we would, I mean, the stuff like the way we reject ourselves, like it doesn't even come close to belonging. I mean, that's downplaying the image of God whenever we're rejecting ourselves. What is our commentary about the created say about the creator? I think it says a lot. So if we have a low view of people, we're gonna have a low view of God. And if we have a high view of God, we'll have a high view of people and in ourselves. And that's what we need to get. I love that awareness piece that you were talking about. I think it's so hard for us to be aware of the pain that we've gone through, of how we reject ourselves, of how we've been rejected by others. One of the things we do in my new book with Josh,"Free To Thrive," is we lay out all of the needs that we have in how we can have unmet needs, how we can experience abuse, how we situation after situation, story after story, circumstance of what we've learned in our own lives. And one of the things we get at is that, whether it's just a lack of loving words from a father over the course of years, or one moment of intense abuse. The impact can be the same. And in your recent book,"Thank You For Rejecting Me." Kait you've laid out something called shame scarves that I thought was so powerful. That was kinda a similar concept. Will you share more about shame scarves with us?- Yeah. And I love that you just detailed it out. It can be a big T trauma, little T trauma built through time. And we can look sometimes, especially when it's little T trauma, I find that people are like, my life's pretty good, I'm fine. Like, I don't have shame, I don't have trauma from my past. But the thing is that it could be small moments of trauma that have built upon themselves throughout time. So you still have trauma, it's just moments of it that's been piled on top of one another. So when we were created, you said it so good, Ben, but we are created in the image of God. We are perfect and pure and innocent and gorgeous in His eyes. And we were created also with unique DNA and footprint. And when you think of yourself as a child, like you didn't fear that kind of rejection as you do as adult, right? So something along the way it happened, like most of the time we just went up to a stranger and like, hi, can I pat your dog? Or like, whatever it was, we had such less fear in those days, especially fears of rejection. And so what happens is that pure innocence, us at child birth and as children, small things are happening. And so in the book, I detail out an exercise I went through with a therapist that was really powerful for me, where I actually pictured myself as a little girl. And then I pictured just one moment from my childhood that I could remember a painful memory of some kind, whatever that came to my mind first, the earliest memory I could think of. And one of the earliest memories that I could think of was one of my aunts telling me that my smile looked fake. And now this was like a passing moment. It was like for her, she probably is just like trying to give me, in her mind, she'd probably never even remembers that she said that, right? It's a small moment, but I already felt insecure. I had already hit puberty at a very young age. And so her saying this about my smile hit me in such a way in that moment where I was like, somebody is actually pointing out the awkwardness and insecurity that I've already started to feel. And so there's a shame scarf that was thrown over me that created a line of insecurity about myself and specifically my attraction, my body image. And it I'm telling you what that moment created a four year stint of me feeling incredibly awkward about my body and it went on and on. But my puberty phase of the awkwardness, we all have some form of that for some guy or girl, it went on for four years for me. I had a four year awkward phase, okay. And I just couldn't get comfortable with myself and my skin. I felt so weird, I felt so gangly, I felt just out of touch. And so there was that moment. And then you think of another moment, I think of a another story I told in the book of being bullied when I was in the sixth grade. And that's another shame moment. And seems like maybe a bigger team trauma for me. Whereas my aunt commenting was maybe a smaller moment, but it's piling up again. I'm not wanted, I'm not liked for as I am, I'm not accepted. So there's some sort of lie there. And so then you continue to think about these moments throughout your childhood. And what happens is, as these shame scarves are thrown over you, the first one that's thrown over you, you can still see the child underneath. You could still see the innocence, the purity, who God created you to be. But over time, if you could picture it in your mind, like literally picture it scarf upon scarf, upon scarf, eventually you can't even see that child underneath. It's just a pile of scarves. And it's so sad to think about. That's literally what we are. So often as adults. We are adults walking around with tons of shame scarves, like covering our bodies in such a big giant weight that we just can't seem to shake. And functioning, some of us have developed some tendencies in our life that are actually admirable. One of mine was performing. And if I really think about that, my performing, well, that was impacting the world and to others, I looked like I had it all. And I was on top of things. And top of my class, top of my career, blahdy, blahdy, blah. So to others, they're like, this girl is killing it, right? So you think about it, we look on social media, we're like, oh, look at all these people killing it. But I'm like, okay, but what's behind that? Like, is their performance coming because they need that as a part of their identity? Or are they in one, have they worked through their staff? And they're performing outwardly because that's a gift that God has given them to do and be called to that specific area. There's a difference. One is needing the validation of the world and doing it out of shame. The other is by walking into your calling and knowing your giftings while staying grounded to who you truly are. But we think we're over here when we're acting in something like performance, but we're not, if we haven't sorted through those shame scarfs. And so I think I don't care who you are, I think so many of us are walking around with the shame scarfs that we're afraid to admit that we have, because even just the idea that we have shame scarves or shame from our past feels shaming in and of itself. We're like, I don't wanna think about that. I don't want to think because I wanna seem like I'm a person that has it all together. The reality is so many of us are people who don't have it all together. Like I wrote this book, I still got it all together Ben, I still work through things all the time. My therapist knows, I see her every week. And so I think that there's a humbleness and recognizing, Hey, there's things I'm working through. And even today, as I continue to work through those moments, there are still things that come up. Oh, there's another scarf that I haven't addressed yet. Let's address that moment, and that thing in that lie, that started like being created at that moment so that we can unravel it. I can get to the root and actually really unroot it and start transforming back to who God created me to be.- Come on, love it. You know that picture of the shame scarves and them stacking up, especially starting as a little kid is just, to some extent, it's devastating to think about like this, in our lives, like we can be these joyous kids, like no fear and whatnot, like you talked about, but then the shame scarf, another scarf, another scarf to the point where we can't see anymore, because we're so covered with those scarves. And we've probably gotten so used to it. It's like, like me right now, it's like I don't even realize that I'm wearing a hat. It's I've gotten so used to wearing it today. The same thing can be true with those shame scarves in our life. And that's why the awareness and trying to figure out how am I being held back from these things that Jesus really wants to heal in my life. So we've talked about so far, a lot of identifying the different kinds of rejection, how it can show up in our lives. Big question, how do we begin to heal from rejection and trust people again?- It's such a big question. Man, it's hard to unpack it in a short time. So I'll give you just like the top things that come to head. But I think we already addressed the first step. The first step is awareness. and we have to have some sort of breaking point, heck no moment. Where it's like, you know what? Heck no, I'm not gonna live with those shame scarfs. Heck no, I'm not going to live in the fear of rejection happening. Heck no, I'm gonna continue to live with these limiting beliefs or the self hatred that keeps showing up every single time I try to put myself out there. Like if you can have a heck no moment. They say for addicts, like you need a breaking point low moment. You need to reach some moment where you're like, I could continue on doing like little things here and there to try to mend these issues. But if you really want the true transformation, you have to have a major heck no moment. I'm not gonna live like this anymore. Like I will not live like this. I see how it's ruining my life. I see how it's taking me away from God's calling in my life. I see how it's taking away from who God really created me to be. And I will not continue to walk in that former, the identity I'm walking right now. So having that heck no moment, starting to get aware of the past things that happened, which means going through those layers, which is really painful. I would just recommend giving yourself a whole heck of a lot of grace in that process. Because the last thing we wanna do in that process is shame ourselves more for the things that have happened in our past. As you sort through the layers, there can be a tendency to be like, oh my gosh, why did I show up that way? Or why did this thing affect me so much? Like me thinking back to my aunt who said that thing about my smile, it would be easy for me to be like, gosh, Kait, like why did that affect you so much? It was just one comment you should've got over it. That's such a shaming way to treat ourselves. So in this process, as you start getting aware and you start going through the layers, make sure that you are treating yourself with the same way God would treat you in these moments. Which any pain we should be able to and can bring to God, without Him having an ounce of judgment or not issue to me. No, He cares about all of it equally, right? And so each moment of pain that we've experienced is real. And we have to allow ourselves to know that that was real for us and really hurt us at that time. So have no judgment as you get curious with your past. And then I would start identifying some trends and working through the specific trends. Like if it's a lie you believe, or this specific tendency that you have, now it's an moment to start taking radical ownership around some of those pieces. One area of my book, I talk about the VBS, which I call it's my short form for the victim belief system. And so we can continue to live as though the world is out to get us, but that's never gonna serve us in actually transforming our mindsets and walking in freedom. So what are the areas? What are the buckets of things that you wanna start transforming? Identify it and start working slowly through each one. I don't believe that you're gonna transform every ounce of pain and every bucket of pain in your life overnight. And I don't even think that you should try to do it all at once because it will be way too much of a crash course and you'll probably burn out. We wanna take things slowly, have a lot of grace for yourself and know that it takes time. Within that time, I would bring in a very few amount of incredibly close people that know you, that see you, that love you for just as you are. And that can continuously remind you of who you are as you walk through this process. It's so important, one of the things I recommend for people to do is like, ask somebody why they're friends with you. Because that simple question, even though it may feel awkward will bring you so much clarity on what value you bring to other people's lives. And it's so important that we start clinging on to those unique things that we bring to the world as we start healing from our pain. Because sometimes those painful moments we can start seeing, well, that painful moment led me to become an empathetic and compassionate person. And now I hear my friend telling me that they're friends with me because I'm empathetic and compassionate. Wow, I can see how going through that pain and healing through that pain has brought me this gift of being compassionate and empathetic, which is why people want to be around me. So in essence, no, I'd never want to go through that pain again, but now I can be firm and confident that God is using some of that pain to create beautiful things within me. So that's just, man, that's just part of the process of going through the, recognizing the rejections, being curious with it and actually moving towards the healing.- Man, love it, Kait. I mean, just like, those scarves that you talked about, shame scarves develop over time. Why would we think that healing is gonna happen in an instant? Maybe we it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion, where maybe we be gracious and kind to ourselves. I think of how what's that Romans 2:4 that says,"It's His kindness that leads us to repentance to change, to change our mindset. May we have kindness towards ourself, like God has towards us. As we seek to change, as we seek to heal, as we seek to grow." And may we really just stop shooting on ourselves. Stop saying, I should be there, I should be over this, I should be finally healed it, shouldn't take this long.- Yes.- It's a process as you know, so well Kait. And that's a process that can be so hard to even want to get into because it can be so painful to visit those places of past rejection. Kait, why would you say it's worth it to move past rejection to face that stuff and is a better life possible on the other side?- I think the beauty of pain is that it gives us the opportunity to have such a flavor for life that we may never have known without the pain. And not to say like, oh my gosh, like, yes, I wanna go through abuse again. Like that's not what is happening. But I think that is as we experience pain, we start appreciating all the things of life, way more. Like going through such as situations I've been through, like abuse, has made me now just appreciate when somebody hears me or listens genuinely. Like in that moment, I am so appreciative. after two and a half years of being gas lighted and being discounted and being told that I was crazy. Like when somebody actually is like, thank you for sharing and I hear you. I'm like it literally, it doesn't just pass by me. It actually is like a gift to my heart. And I wanna thank that person and bless them. And that continues them wanting to then do that more to other people, right? And so it's the depths of the pain allow you to also experience the greatest joy possible. And so I think that that's part of the gift that pain brings us. It also gives us the ability to, like I said, come alongside other people and ways that can transform other people's lives. The one thing I wished in my specific abuse situation, I'm just bringing that up again is, I just wish back in the day that there was somebody that just listened to me and said, Kait, what you're going through, I understand. And what you're going through makes sense. And what you're going through isn't crazy, it's not outlandish. Like I believe you. I trust you. I see you. And you as a person that have been through pain, you can be that voice for somebody else that may get them out of the ultimate shame pit that they're in. And as I think back to those moments like, man, we just need more of that in the world. We need more people who have experienced pain who are willing to heal from the pain and then seek to be not like the heroes, but to come alongside of people, walking with them arm and arm, as we do life together. Because we aren't promised a life without pain. And I actually don't believe that would be exciting. I don't believe that it would create dynamic human beings if we didn't have pain. And so, yeah, I believe that it really transforms how we show up in the world, how we see God and how we can really love other people.- Powerful. And that's hard to get to see the beauty that can come from the pain especially in the moment. But you know it's like in the depth or as we go into the depth of the darkness, we appreciate the light, all the more. Because we can see the contrast and there's a way forward and you've seen it. And all the people you're ministering to, speaking to, coaching are seeing it. As we begin to wrap up today, Kait, where can people get your latest book and where can they stay connected with you, and all the happenings?- Yeah, I would love to stay connected. We have a fun community through Heart of Dating. We have the pod cast every week. We have a private Facebook group. We hang out on Clubhouse. We hang out on Instagram. You can go to heartofdating.com to find out a lot about that. You can join Facebook, facebook.com/heartofdating. Instagram, Canus and Heart of Dating are where we hang on the Gram. And then the book is anywhere books are sold, you can get Amazon Prime to you and that would mean a lot to me. It has flowers on the cover, but guys still read it. It's a great tool for both genders. So yeah, I would love to stay connected.- Yeah, and I'll say as a guy, it does have flowers on the cover and I read it and it's phenomenal. And I posted about it and I said, guys, don't let the cover, don't read a book by its cover. Don't let this distract you, it will rock you.- We all need some flowers in our life anyway, okay.- And men, let see the beauty, come on. To those watching and listening, can I say this gently, if we don't deal with rejection in our life, if we don't deal with our stuff, other people will have to. So may we, as hard as it is, maybe we move towards those uncomfortable areas of our life, of our past, to work through them, to press in, to heal from rejection. I believe what you will find that I found that Kait has found, so many other people have found is that rather than avoiding it, which when we avoid it, it's affecting our beliefs, our actions, our behaviors rather than avoiding it we engage it, it actually will lead us to greater purpose, greater satisfaction in a better life here and now where we can help so many other people, because we're all experiencing rejection. So Kait, Hey, thanks for what you're doing. Thanks for your latest book. So, so good. And thanks for having this conversation today.- Thank you, Ben. This has been a gift and I love what you're doing over there.- Thank you.(upbeat music) Thanks for checking out the Resolution Podcast. To go deeper on today's topic, get my new book "Free To Thrive" at resolutionmovement.org. As well as access a variety of free resources. If this episode encouraged you, please take a moment to rate it, share it and subscribe. You can listen to us wherever podcasts are found, as well as watch the visual version of each episode on our YouTube channel. Connect with us by searching Resolution Movement on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. See you soon.(upbeat music)