Regrets about Oxbridge rejectiin...bought up by New Edwards

[mids2019]

So part of Huws apparent mental health struggles was apparently feel seated low self esteem partly by failure to get into Oxford when perhaps he was expected to and he was surrounded by Oxbridge educated peers at the BBC.

Moving away from. The odious crime do you think spoke can have such a deep seated reaction to Oxbridge rejection and does it least??

Yes, I think people can have strong reactions to things that can last a long time and may not make sense to others.

I don't see that it has any relevance to viewing images of CSA though. It's a pathetic excuse, even if the pure fact that he's affected by the rejection is accurate.

Standard Narc thought process. He is special and amazing, others should recognise it and if they don't, there will be consequences.
Any bad behaviour is someone else's fault.

The thing about his wife/"intimacy" is entirely predictable too. By intimacy, he means a shaggy. Poor neglected penis needs.

(And as if he turned to gay men because of his wife. Get real).

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

Narcissists prayer by Dayna Craig

And that’s really the key point here. You can’t always help what affects you but you can choose how you respond.

I do have slightly more sympathy for issues that develop during childhood and the way they can impact adult behaviours. But by 17 and as someone intelligent enough to be a contender, he ought to have developed a little more contextualisation.

It only occurred to me after posting earlier that I'm the same age as Edwards, grammar school kid...and I was rejected by Cambridge. The system was unfair back then if your school didn't help with entrance exams and certainly not with 'seventh form entry'. But it's so completely and utterly unimportant now that I'd temporarily forgotten! 😂 (I'm in a field with plenty who have PhDs from oxbridge, Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc).

I know a highly successful professional who is often featured in the media because of their expertise who suffered a huge debt to their self-esteem due to being rejected by Oxford/Cambridge.

They are still bitter about it over 30 years later, putting the rejection down to snobbiness as they were working class with the wrong accent who went to the wrong school. (And they are probably right about that.)

I don't understand at all why being rejected from oxbridge back then, when the system was very unfair would damage anyone's 'self esteem' - meh, so you go to a redbrick, get a first, maybe do a higher degree, carry on. The unfairness might rankle for a while but surely you'd know it was the system rather than the fault of your abilities? Maybe if you were from a privileged background and had a sense of entitlement then rejection could affect your self esteem... but only because it had been unrealistically inflated to begin with?

And I don't really get why it should now, when anyone applying to Oxbridge surely knows that whatever your background and talents the most likely outcome is rejection because there's too many able applicants for the number of places and there's an element of luck.

This actually happened to my Dad and it did leave a lifelong scar of rejection, however he managed to never become a paedophile in response 🤷‍♀️

I don’t think any of those excuses should even be allowed to be spoken during mitigation. It should be a banned defence/mitigation like the accidental strangling during sex is banned as a defence or mitigation.

I remember when I was quite young reading a news story about a man who raped a 10 year old boy in the changing village of a swimming pool. His wife was back in their home country, he had arrived here and his defence/mitigation was that he felt it was a sexual emergency as his wife was in a different country so he hadn’t been able to get intimacy. I was disgusted that it was even allowed to be voiced in court as some kind of excuse.

@UnimaginableWindBird

I think it's brave of you to say that and I certainly don't think you are alone. My personal thoughts about being in a similar position is that restrictively there was no mental health support. I am hit talking about a while series of counselling sessions but a simple acknowledgment you tried your best, you didn't fail and your future is not wasted. That didn't happen but ai think it was a certain type of school at a certain time.

I think you can look it at as a 'sliding doors' moment, a bifurcation of two possible futures. As the Oxbridge graduates I am aware of are all high profile in society or on a personal level quite happy to discuss their successful lifestyles in FB you get a skewed perspective I guess.

Again, leaving Huw Edwards aside and answering the OP's question, yes, I think rejection at a relatively early age can have very long lasting effects, whether that is from Oxbridge or something else sought after. But I think it's often the wider context that matters more than the actual rejection itself.
I'm an Oxbridge reject, but I came from a school were very few people went to University at all and was in the first generation of my family to go to be educated beyond 16, never mind do a degree.The fact I was going to medical school was viewed as a huge success by everyone around me and the Oxbridge rejection was neither here nor there. I do have some negative feelings about it though, and it's over 40 years ago now, but it's more anger about how massively unfair the process was at the time - I was totally unprepared and clearly had next to no chance. I don't think it's impacted on me significantly though and the disappointment at the time was offset by the overwhelmingly positive response from the people who mattered to me regarding what I had achieved.
However, I know people who were expected to go to Oxbridge and who experienced massive pressure from their parents and/or school to do so who still obviously carry the scars of that "failure" into adulthood. Hasn't turned them into criminals mind you, but you can see that it's influenced their feelings of self worth. I think it's a lot more about expectations and the response of the people around you than the actual rejection itself though.

Sorry my post did not leave the crime aside, I was so !

So yes I think oxbridge rejection can be painful and leave a scar, but that's because it has been built up into such a big thing. I did go to Oxford, and I think it simultaneously gratified and pissed off my mum, as she hadn't got in. But was it right for me... no not really. At least back then, it was very traditional, uptight, old-fashioned and infantilising to students IMO - and far from full of geniuses. Lots of utter fuckwits and very rich people behaving badly. Some good things of course but I think many people who feel upset long-term about not going, didn't get the chance to see through the mystique so they don't realise they may well not have actually missed out.

And yes all rejection can hurt, most people carry wounds, scars or even grudges of some kind, but that really is what life does. You can't avoid it, some are more unlucky than others but learning to cope with let-downs is part of growing up. The idea that it's got anything to do with paedophilic exploitation of sex-trafficked children makes me furious.

I was in the academic friendship group at school and all my friends went to Oxbridge. I didn't think twice about it or applying. I went to a 'normal university' and actually had a much better time than my friends My child is applying now to Oxbridge. It is super competitive and I think there is about a 15% chance of getting in. I have seen lots of parents lose the plot with applying. It really doesn't matter whether you get in or not. I think some people 'assume' they will get in particularly if they have had family members go. I think that Hew Edwards is pretty despicable using this as an excuse for his behaviour which was just beyond awful. I feel so sorry for those who have been affected by him.

How dare he chuck his wife under the bus by bringing her mother's illness into it. What an absolute bastard. It's literally all about him, isn't it.

I don't understand at all why being rejected from oxbridge back then, when the system was very unfair would damage anyone's 'self esteem' - meh, so you go to a redbrick, get a first, maybe do a higher degree, carry on. The unfairness might rankle for a while but surely you'd know it was the system rather than the fault of your abilities?
I think my main response was anger @ErrolTheDragon and it does still gall me a bit. Maybe in part because I know that now my application would probably be looked at quite differently. But then I knew that although I had at least, if not better, academic results than the private school pupils I met at my interviews but that I didn't look right, sound right, ooze the same kind of confidence that they did etc. Now I think people would think "Wow, she got those results from that school...impressive" but then they were, not very subtly, making fun of me.
But that did knock my self confidence for a while as it was the first time I had experienced being judged on who I am, not what I can do. Up until then I hadn't realised quite how I'd be perceived because of my background. And it's real. All through my career I have experienced sometimes unspoken sometimes very obvious sense of "you may have the qualifications but you're not really one of us are you". Now it's me who looks down on people like that and I think and occasionally say "Well you're a bit of a wanker aren't you" when I encounter that kind of attitude. But as a teenager, not so much. I felt inferior. It was the first time I personally experienced being judged on my class and it did have some effect, fortunately offset by the support of a lot of good people.

Maybe brining Huw into the original post was a bit of a mistake as his excuses are bollox.

However for non criminals I do think there is a self esteem issue that may effect some but not all of Oxbridge rejects. I think rejection hurts and through obviously we all have to gain resilience in life but at the same time maybe be supportive of those that didn't make it

Not Oxbridge related but I am aware of man who were released from premier league football academies at the last minute and quite ruthlessly with real psychological impact (their dreams were in dust). Possibly you do need a little school support on these occasions

Totally agree. It's a pathetic excuse.

If it is true (which I don't think it is) he has has several decades, and lots of disposable income with which to seek therapy to address this issue, yet he has failed to do so. As adults we have a responsibility to sort our own shit out.

The way football academies treat the unsuccessful kids isn’t even vaguely comparable though.

@TarantinoIsAMisogynist

In what sense?

The football academies intentionally take on more kids than will ultimately succeed, knowing full well that the ones who don't make it will essentially be unceremoniously spat out at the end of the process, having missed out on a lot of educational, social and other opportunities along the way.

Applying for Oxbridge is just an application. Those who don't get in simply go to another university. They haven't actually lost anything by applying, and they were never promised anything to start with.

@TarantinoIsAMisogynist

I agree but I think there is a parallel in terms of rejection. In reality the gulf in life course is obviously a lot greater for the footballers than the university applicant but there may be those applicants that perceived the rejection as life altering.

A little bit of support for all

@ErrolTheDragon Geez, I can't believe that. Surely needs harsher sentence.

No, there really isn't.

Oxbridge rejection is more akin to applying for a job and not getting it. You might be disappointed, and feel unhappy about it, but you haven't actually lost anything.

An academic child would be studying hard for exams regardless of the uni they end up at, so the fact that they go to e.g. York rather than Cambridge doesn't invalidate the work they put in previously, and it doesnt force them to rethink all of their plans for their entire future. The A-levels they earned are still valuable even if they didn't get the Oxbridge place.

(Also plenty of Oxbridge grads go on to have very normal/average lives. It's not a magic passport to high profile success.)

The football academy example involves the kids, and their families, giving up a large amount of their time through the childhood and teenage years - they lose out on a lot of the usual opportunities and experiences that most children will have. And at the end of that process, the time they invested holds no material value, because its only purpose was as a passport to a professional career, which hasn't materialised. They have to completely rethink their vision for their entire future - not just a question of studying at one uni vs another.

So yes, they may both involve rejection, but the impact/consequences are massively different.

Wow. If the worst trauma he can come up with is Oxbridge rejection and his wife not wanting sex while grieving - how smooth and privileged must the rest of his life have been?!

Scraping the barrel of excuses as a PP said.