What do you hear when someone tells you they don’t like something you’ve said or done? Me, I hear “I don’t like you.” I don’t hear the nuance, I just hear the negative, full, focused and painful. It’s always been the case, from my early childhood. All I heard was “I’m not good enough.”
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is something that is rife in the ADHD community, but that doesn’t mean it’s ADHDers alone that experience this. People believe it occurs as a trauma response, something I firmly believe. Though, it has me also questioning why I experienced this so early in life.
RSD comes in waves for me. It’s always present but there are times where it comes like a tidal wave and everything is impacted by this horrendous dread that I’m doing everything wrong, I look horrible and the world hates me. It’s debilitating and stops me leaving the house or doing things I would day to day. During these times, it massively impacts my relationships and I’m left feeling unsafe with my safest people and completely alone.
Rejection sensitivity can occur in a range of different situations. It was be both spoken and unspoken. For example, I can experience huge emotional responses to people asking me to change something about the work I’ve done or making edits on my reports. I will have meltdowns if my family tell me they’re upset with something I’ve said or done. If someone says something I’m wearing doesn’t look right or I’ve got a stain on my clothes, guess what? Meltdown. It can be over the most ridiculous things, like my partner laughing and telling me I need to shower after a long run, of course I need to shower but I’m not logical in that moment.
The worst of it comes when I over-analyse and misinterpret others’ non-verbals. I can convince myself that I’m hated by people just because they looked at someone else whilst I was speaking or their facial expression changed ever so slightly. I will ruminate about it for days or months and sometimes even years afterwards. Sometimes it’s accurate but most of the time it’s so far from reality. It’s an absolute nightmare navigating with world when you are constantly searching a crowd, reading every person who passes you by for signs they hate you. And for the people around me, it’s a constant state of walking on egg shells, wondering what they should say in every interaction just so I don’t experience RSD. It’s an exhausting process for everyone involved.
During a severe wave of RSD recently, I tried to explain what I was experiencing to my partner. He had said that he didn’t like the way I had been that day because I was highly irritable during to emotional dysregulation. I didn’t hear “I don’t like you being like that” I heard “I don’t like you.” To me, that didn’t mean in this present moment, it meant he didn’t like me at all. Before we could even finish the conversation, I was hysterical and trying to figure out how to cancel our wedding and sort out our living arrangements. I went from zero to separation from one sentence. Afterwards, I told him that whenever he critiques me in any way, even how the dishwasher hasn’t been on, it confirms every bad message I’ve ever held about myself, of which there have been a lot.
As a child, I quickly internalised everything and blamed myself for every single conflict in our household. I told myself I was only ever good enough if I got the best grades and everyone liked me. I felt I was unlovable, a burden and embarrassing socially. I couldn’t be like the rest of my peers, thus I was a failure. I felt the burden of this whilst in my early primary school years. I hated myself and so I thought everyone else would hate me too if they knew what I was really like. So now, every time someone rejects me, it confirms this internal narrative I have had since a young child.
When I experience RSD, it feels like a physical pain. It hurts me to my core and the feeling never leaves. I still feel as much pain from my social blunders as a child, as I did at the time. It feels like my whole world is caving in and I completely panic. I’m unable to have logic or use rational thought because my brain is offline and experiencing a trauma response. There’s not much advice out there for people who experience RSD, which is super frustrating. I’m not sure people know how to manage RSD just yet because there’s not enough research and it’s only recently become a topic of wider discussion. It’s something so many of us would benefit from further support and strategies though.
If you are experiencing RSD right now, please know you’re not alone. There’s so many of us and your response to criticism or rejection is valid.
