Rejection Sensitivity is a strong reaction to perceived rejection, possible rejection or actual rejection. Rejection Sensitivity is where you boost your normal learning method that is impaired by a resource deficit, by boosting internal drama to trigger, which often triggers Crisis Mode, aka the flight / fight response, panic attack, or anxiety attack, or melt down. Rejection Sensitivity can be triggered by the fear that you have something wrong and that the other person will act on it; and it can be triggered by feedback that is either perceived or actual negative feedback. Rejection Sensitivity can drive behaviours that you later regret, but in the moment you feel powerless to stop them. Rejection Sensitivity is often experienced as a secondary symptom by people with Social Anxiety, Autism and ADHD. Rejection Sensitivity is most commonly caused by biological conditions, and exacerbated by real life experiences.

Understanding Rejection Sensitivity

When you get a cold, are in pain, or some other biological condition, we want to rest and heal. To have space to rest and heal, we decrease what we are doing. That is, we do less by ceasing doing things that aren’t vital – we deprioritise things that aren’t vital to survival.

In an immediate sense, that means cutting out wants and decreasing social. Part of that social avoidance is an evolved trait to not pass on communicable infections. Our body doesn’t know why we aren’t feeling well, so it assume everything is contagious.

We are social being. We evolved in a time where being alone was deadly. To be in a social group means improved survival and happiness. An important part of being in a group is being valued by the group, not rejected when things get tough. Rejection Sensitivity taps into this fear of being ejected or neglected by the group to re-prioritise certain tasks when we are dealing with ongoing fatigue.

There are two pathways that occur, generally in tandem.

1. Fatigue triggers a compensatory strong adrenaline response to get certain things done
   • This is often mistakenly interpreted as anxiety or aggression.
   • The adrenaline allows us to continue when we should really be resting.
   • This can be triggered by fatigue not stopping, or something urgent needing our attention.
2. The need to learn, grow and do better (in the context of fatigue), requires shifting the priority of learning back to a ‘present need’ rather than ‘future need’ or ‘present want’.
   • This is done by mentally exacerbating the consequences, via faulty logic and heightened erroneous feelings.
   • That creates a perceived ‘urgent needing our attention’, that triggers adrenaline.

Fatigue normally triggers Recovery Mode which is essentially non-critical (vital) task de-prioritisation. Learning isn’t immediately critical, so is delayed. Long term, we compensate for ongoing fatigue by the use of faux urgency via drama, that is escalating the perceived consequences, to shift the priority of learning (especially social) so that we can reduce bad outcomes and maintain our social standing.

Solving this cannot be just a cognitive intervention. Mental Health talking therapies are the second integrated step of addressing Rejection Sensitivity. The first integrated step is addressing why you are so fatigue.

• With hard work, we can manually shift our mood a step or two on an imaginary 10 point scale.
  • If you are fatigued, you don’t have the spare energy to maintain this manual cognitive mood shift for long, if at all.
• If you are 3 or more steps out of alignment to your surroundings, it is probably a biological origin.

Biological problems need biological solutions. We cover that below under Biology.

Rejection Sensitivity Feels Like…

When we perceive rejection, or think it may have happened, we will feel a strong physiological and emotional response. Often the physiological response comes first, then we link it to a social explanation.

Rejection Sensitivity is a flavour of a miss-triggered Survival Response – Freeze, Fawn, Flight or Fight.

RS is Learning Mechanism Compensation

“The best way to get good at something,

is to start off terrible, note your mistakes, make changes, try again,

and do better.”

Joshua Davidson.

In Brief:

From birth to death, we continue to learn things. Learning is what allows us to grow and become greater than we were.

Learning is hard. Learning takes effort – and effort is energy – and sometimes we just don’t have the Spoons to do more.

Many psychiatric conditions, such as Anxiety and Depression, or neurological conditions such as Autism or ADHD, or biological conditions such as cardiopulmonary or autoimmune conditions, frequently have low problems with low energy. This leads to you having a resource problem.

When our resources are poor, because we are exhausted (no spoons), we switch to Recovery Mode. Recovery Mode is a natural process we use when we are ill, such as having a cold, torn muscle or some other biological problem that needs healing. When we need to recover, we do less chosen actions and do more resting & healing.

Learning is essential, so it is important to do. Yet when we are in Recovery Mode, we are driven to de-prioritise non-essential tasks so that we can focus on needs. Not learning a thing right now won’t lead to imminent death or harm, so we are likely to de-prioritise that too. Yet, delay too many times, and our conscious and or unconscious mind will realise that there is a problem here and seek to re-prioritise learning again.

How do we increase the importance of learning beyond the fact that it is essential for our growth and quality of life? We add drama.

Social, Regret & Guilt Drives Re-Prioritisation

Regret is a feeling, a signal your learning centre sends you to highlight that the outcome of your actions isn’t what you wanted.

The purpose of this signal is to irritate you into processing the event to identify what went wrong and what you can do to fix it. We often mistakenly employ the Hindsight Bias, a cognitive error, that blames your past self for not having the knowledge that you have learned now, not having the resources that you have acquired now, or the skills that you have developed now. Have faith that you did the best you could in the circumstances you were in at that time.

Often we are interacting with other people, which can add complexity to your intended actions, increasing the odds of the outcome being other than what you want. We fear losing social status due to a perceived error, whether we made a mistake or someone makes a false claim. Abusive people will hijack this fear to control and abuse us, often falsely claiming that we were malicious, or that our actions were harmful when they weren’t.

Guilt is a feeling, a signal from our social centre, that informs you that your action had an outcome that caused harm to someone.

The purpose of guilt is to push you to regret (as above) and then take action to make amends for your error. It is important to ensure that the claimed harm (whether your fears, the alleged victims claims or a third party’s claim) is fair, reasonable and evidenced harm.

Regret and Guilt are feelings that prompt us to learn better for next time, and if needed, to make amends.

Rejection Sensitivity will often hijack these feelings and ramp them up to drive us to learn.

Learning, Relearning & Rehearsal

As stated, Learning is Essential.

The best tool for Learning is:

• Review the past,
• Understand what went wrong (mistakes),
• Learn a new way to solve the problems,
• Practice and rehearse this new solution.

Once this Learning process is complete, if the problem occurs again, your regrets (and guilt) will prompt you to not want to repeat the past outcome and thus you will want to use the new solution that you have learned, and reinforced by repetition – the practice and rehearsal.

Pre and Post Scripting

Unlike a video game, it is very hard to repeat the same circumstance so that you can properly try and try again. By try and try again, I mean try new variants until you get through the level unscathed, then practice it until it becomes second nature.

How are we to learn without being able to reload form a save point? We enact virtual rehearsals.

Pre-Script

Prior to the event, we use pre-scripts. You’ll recognise this as pretending a conversation that you might have, trying to predict what they might say or do, so that you can try different sentences, explanations and actions, to get to the good place. The more accurately you imagine the other person and their probable responses, the more you can ensure that you can say what you need to say and do what you need to do, so that everything works.

Post Script

After the event, we use post-scripts. You’ll recognise this as going over the minutia of the event, searching for any mistakes you might have made, do over conversations where you get to say that thing you wanted to, or figure out how to re-direct the thing that went wrong through words or actions. So long as these are reasonable and possible words and events, and both the characters in your post-script analysis and real life people at the event are not abusive.

Abusive and Toxic People aren’t Reasonable

Toxic means a situation or person who is not compatible with you. Abusive is someone who benefits from harming you. For simplicity, we are going to just refer to toxic and abusive people.

The difference between toxic / abusive people versus people who make a mistake is in how they accept responsibility for their part in the harm, and thus whether they adjust in the future to decrease and cease harm. We can all make mistakes, but most people work hard to avoid making the same mistake. Abusive people don’t change to avoid harming you, because that was the point.

We cover this in far more detail in Understanding Abusive People.

“People who know better cannot help but do better”, often attributed to Socrates.

“Good people who know better cannot help but do better, concerning people won’t do better even if you help them know what is better – that’s how we tell who is who” – Joshua Davidson

Toxic and abusive people will constantly change the rules so that you cannot win.

In order to learn from an event means that some level of predictable extrapolation can be employed in understanding the event so that certain actions are highly likely to have a predictable outcome. If the people involved keep changing the rules without telling you, not strategy you can come up with to navigate that situation better can be expected to work. They don’t have good or stable reasons why they do what they do, making it very hard for you to come up with a reasonable strategy that will probably work.

We cover this a bit more below in Managing Rejection Sensitivity. It is important for you to be aware that you can develop a form of Rejection Sensitivity from being surrounded by too many harmful people.

Compensating with Drama

At some point, the fatigue has lasted too long and the delayed learning becomes far more important. We unconsciously know this, but the Recovery Mode part of our brain is struggling to figure out when to learn. Another part of us compensates by making shifting the priority of learning higher by dramatising the consequences of failure and judgement.

Rejection Sensitivity is that compensation

– shifting the priority of learning higher,

through drama to compensate,

for long lasting fatigue.

Biology – Threat Detection Errors & Anxiety

Anxiety is a natural condition of attentive preparedness for an anticipated stress / survival moment. Anxiety should be short term. Most people struggling with Rejection Sensitivity are also diagnosed with Anxiety, where Anxiety is a long term symptom. Anxiety is always secondary to some other condition (its more like a symptom in my opinion). We cover that in more detail in Anxiety.

Our brain is trying to predict what to do, whether that is to work out how to defeat a threat / problem, or to heal and prepare.

To do this, it looks at the current perceived situation, made of a combination of sensory input and understood context clues from historical patterns and making assumptions from interpolation (filling in the gaps); then it tries to identify what is going to happen next by applying prior learning to the current perceived pattern and extrapolating (extending the pattern) the next outcome. If you know what is coming next, you might change your actions to shift the outcome to be more favourable. This is true for all consciously awake people.

Interpolation: Filling in the gaps of a pattern.

Extrapolation: Extending the pattern to figure out what is next.

For Rejection Sensitivity, your Amygdala continually reports to you that you are “not safe“, but doesn’t specify why. Your prefrontal cortex looks for a clear and present danger, but usually can’t find it. Then it checks for subtle threats, such as signs of a predatory animal, signs of a predatory human, or some other disaster. If you convince yourself that this is not true, then the next likely threat must be societal. That is, ‘what if something is wrong with the people you think you can trust and who you hope love you – and maybe you caused it?’

There are several reasons why your Amygdala can’t confirm that you are safe.

The most common and likely is biological problems, most commonly with the Dopaminergic System. This can be exacerbated by historical conflict and or present conflict. Sometimes, this can be caused by a historical traumatic problem.

We’ll cover those in another section.

Rejection Sensitivity or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria?

Rejection Sensitivity is an umbrella term that includes both the specific experience of over reacting to actual, perceived or expected rejection; and the rest of the RS family (covered below). It was first described by Downey, Khouri, & Feldman in 1997 as a model to describe how prior rejection plus some physical aspects could lead to an over sensitisation to being rejected, leading to a higher reaction the next time a person perceives rejection.

Dr William Dodson, a psychiatrist, shared a paper “Emotional Regulation and Rejection Sensitivity” in 2017, where he discussed how ADHDers can often have a mood dysregulation especially around feelings to do with rejection. Dodson proposed that RSD, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, should be added as a selection criteria to the DSM for ADHD diagnosis, and that this trait had been deliberately not included “because it was not always there, it was often hidden by the person with ADHD, and because there was no way to measure rejection.” Dodson added the “dysphoria” to emphasis the extreme feeling of pain and aversion that this symptoms has over the typical discomfort from being rejected.

To date, RSD has not been added to the DSM 4 or 5, nor the ICD 10 or 11.

Amongst some sectors of mental health, there was push back about this new proposed initialism, as the existing Rejection Sensitivity definition isn’t just referring to a momentary discomfort from being rejected, it is referring to the sensitivity someone may develop to being rejected due to extenuating circumstances and how that may affect you. As an analogy, chronic pain rather than just pain.

Adding on “dysphoria” is like saying chronic pain max (we really mean it!).

Despite this redundancy, RSD has become the de facto standard in online communities.

Social Acceptance and Masking

Masking is a mechanism used by neurodivergent people, such as Autistic and ADHDers, to fit in with others. Masking is not evil. All people do it to some extent – no one is 100% themselves. Part of working with other people is adapting and adjusting, that’s part of civilisation.

Masking becomes a problem when:

• It is used to negate the authentic self (ABA).
  • This is beyond the scope of this page.
• You lose track of who you are behind the adjustments.
  • This is also beyond the scope of this page.
• Rejection uncertainty.
  • Covered below.

Why do we mask?

When we try to make new friends (or positively interact with strangers), we hope the other person is a good person who is worth being friends with. To help them like us, we want to “fit in” with them. What does “fit in” mean?

We are seeking connection with someone else because we need something. Humans are social creatures, we do poorly on our own. At the least we want to spend some time around reasonable people for our own mental health. Sometimes, we want specific help. Navigating the conventions of a different neurotype can be very hard.

The reciprocal aspect of us needing something from them is that we need to provide them something that they want or need. Our own low self worth often suggests that we are not enough in and of ourselves for them to seek us out for just human connection, so surely, our brains tell us, we have to give them something more.

We try to figure out what they want or need, and if we can find that, if we can fulfill that. To decrease the risk of immediate rejection from the group, we may offer gifts, services and work extra hard to compensate for our perception of our own low worth. It is not uncommon for us to put so much work in, that we are doing the work of 2 or more people (consider how many people it would take to replace you at work).

Every group has a set of rules of inclusion and exclusion that defines this group as different to another group. Some of these rules are explicit, written down for social clubs or clearly voiced by someone. Most of the rules are implicit, where you are expected to read between the lines, pick up on the standards by observing people or work it out after you have broken them and received scorn. We are terrified of rejection.

Me mask to fit in.

Rejection Uncertainty

If you are masking heavily, and you are not accepted by a person or the group we want to work out what went wrong.

We are uncertain about the rejection for various reasons.

• Was something was wrong with your mask?
• Did they see you behind the mask, and didn’t like you?
• Did someone else said something about you?
• Was it the Uncanny Valley?

Uncertainty is a huge trigger for anxiety. In not knowing, we often create so many scenarios that are far worse than what actually happened.

The Rejection Sensitivity Family

Rejection Sensitivity is an umbrella term for a host of feelings beyond just Rejection Sensitivity.

• Rejection sensitivity:
  • An over strong reaction to perceived or actual rejection.
• Imposter Syndrome:
  • A persistent inability to believe that your success is deserved, and or has been legitimately achieved as a result of your efforts or skills and the fear that you will get caught by someone at any minute.
• Fear of Betrayal:
  • Fear that people whom you trust and are vulnerable to will betray you sooner or later.
• Fear of Abandonment:
  • Fear that people will leave you behind, especially when you need help.
• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out):
  • The feeling you have when you think other’s are having fun or an experience, and you are falling behind them.
• Fear of Failure:
  • The worry about how people will react when you inevitably make mistakes
  • The fear that you are responsible for the consequences these mistakes will have to you or others.
• Fear of Being Alone:
  • Fear that you won’t have friends or anyone you can trust.
  • Fear that you will never have anyone be kind to you again.
• Fear of Conflict / Conflict Avoidant:
  • Fear of conflict that leads to avoiding people, anything that resembles conflict and can trigger People Pleasing Behaviours.

Compensatory Behaviours

To manage each of these, people can form People Pleasing and conflict avoidance behaviours, where you avoid ever pointing out someone else’s mistakes and take on far, far, far too much responsibility. You do this until you collapse in exhaustion and likely experience burnout.

• People Pleasing Behaviours:
  • The automatic “yes” you say when asked to do anything, which you often regret later.
  • The Faun part of the emergency system, Freeze, Faun, Flight and Fight.
  • People Pleasing tries to pre-empt the danger someone may pose to you if they are upset or angry by making them very happy with you at all times.
• PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance):
  • The automatic “no” you say when asked to do anything, which you often regret later.
  • Effectively the opposite of People Pleasing.

More on PDA, Pathological Demand Avoidance.

Managing Rejection Sensitivity

Once we know what Rejection Sensitivity is and what it is trying to do, the next big question is: what to do about it?

1. Deal with the biology to address fatigue and the fight/flight reflex:
   • Diagnosing the condition.
   • Medical intervention for the condition.
2. Relearn how to safely learn and RS becomes a thing of the past:
   • Toxic situations and abusive people:
     • Recognising toxic situations and abusive people.
     • Managing toxic situations and abusive people.
     • Learning not to be a victim to these.
   • Recognising biological drivers for escalation over social:
     • Learning reasonable boundaries (objectivity),
     • Adjusting one’s own responsibility back to ‘fair’,
     • Ending the thought / mood loops.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Ongoing fatigue does just come from nowhere. There is a reason for it. There is no Lazy.

Fatigue, like Anxiety, is a symptom of some other condition. This could be:

• Neurological:
  • Neurochemical:
    • Noradrenaline is the most common candidate.
  • Neurodivergent:
    • ADHD, (most common)
    • Autism. (most common)
• Cardiopulmonary:
  • Cardiovascular system (heart and blood),
  • Respiration system (lungs),
• Immune system:
  • Eg: Autoimmune.
• Poor Sleep.
• Malnutrition, can be low:
  • Iron (Ferritin serum) ,
  • Vitamin B6, B12, C, etc,
  • Salts.
  • Etc.
• Consequences of a medication to treat another condition.
• And more.

Once you know what the underlying condition is, you need to address that medically.

Medical Intervention

“Biological Problems need Biological Solutions”,

Joshua Davidson.

That often means some kind of medical intervention, the most common of which is medication. Talk to your doctor about trying to determine why you are fatigued and what you can do about it.

Sometimes, a short term medication may be enough.

Generally, a long term or life long medication is needed.

Sometimes an operation is necessary.

If your GP can’t figure out what is causing the fatigue, you may need to see a specialist. Sometimes you need a new GP to try a new series of tests. It can be incredibly frustrating to get to the bottom of why we feel fatigued.

Noradrenaline and Anxiety

Noradrenaline is a neurotransmitter that strongly affects how our Amygdala manages threat detection. Depending on if we detect a threat or determine that we are safe, our priorities and feelings (mood) will adjust. If our Noradrenaline is outside of the Goldilocks Zone (too high or too low), our Amygdala cannot correctly identify when we are safe, so it will continually erroneously report that we are not safe.

When our brain thinks we are not safe, our prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) will try to manually work out what the threat is. If there is a problem, it will be clear and present – that is, obvious. When we fail to notice a clear and present danger, as the feeling of unease has persisted, we begin to look for subtle, to explain why we feel unsafe. Subtle means the next most likely contender for a threat – other people.

We covered this in more detail above in the section Threat Detection Errors.

The two most common disruptors of the Amygdala are Dopaminergic problems, such as ADHD (and common in Autism, BPD, OCD and other conditions), and body adrenal complications common in cardiopulmonary conditions.

If your noradrenaline and or adrenaline is too high, you’ll need different medications compared to if your Noradrenaline and adrenaline is too low. There is no specific medical test for this, other than to trial the medication and see how you respond.

Medications to discuss with your doctor:

• Caffeine avoidant (likely high noradrenaline):
  • Guanfacine.
  • Clonidine.
  • Beta Blocker (Eg Propranolol).
  • Caution:
    • The above three medications need you to have average or higher blood pressure. May not be suitable for people with low blood pressure.
• Caffeine daily (likely low noradrenaline):
  • Desvenlafaxine,
  • Sertraline.

Mental Health Therapy

Toxic and Abusive People

Recognising Toxic / Abusive People

We have an extensive section on Toxic & Abusive People, from spotting them, managing / avoiding them, and escaping them.

When we do connect, we can mistake ourselves for the mask we used to fit in. This can feel empty, dishonest and false. We can lose ourselves in thinking that we are only worthy because we produce things, or do services, rather than recognise that all people have inherent worth.

These are all roles, and are not you.

Abusive people love to take advantage of this sensitivity and extra goods from the neurodivergent person.

Learning how to identify toxic people is very important. The odds are that if you have a high Rejection Sensitivity response and it is frequently triggered by certain people, then you are likely:

SBA: Surrounded By Arseholes – a ‘diagnosis‘ I sometimes give my anxious people when they respond appropriately anxious around hostile people.

Joshua Davidson.

The Traffic Light System I developed helps you to identify a system for who is and who isn’t a concern.

• Flags:
  • Green flag behaviours are what we would like to see. They are consistent, predictible and helpful.
  • Amber flag behaviours are when we aren’t sure if they are good or bad… yet. But we should become more alert to their future actions.
  • Red flag behaviour is concerning. If mild, a few red flags should alert you to a potential abusive person. If strong, you don’t need a few flags to tell you.
• Trust Zones:
  • Green trust zone is for people who are 98% + green flags. You can relax around these people.
  • Amber trust zone is for new people, or people who are doing some odd behaviours on a background of being in the green zone.
  • Red trust zone is for people who have shown they are untrustworthy.
• Toxic People Mind Toolset:
  • Adjusting your expectations of an individual based on their behaviours and response to reasonable engagement about those problems.
• 3 Pillars:
  • Green Pillar, where people learn from their misakes.
  • Amber Pillar, where someone is not too harmful, but there are a few concerning actions that need attention.
  • Red Pillar, where someone is making more harmful ‘mistakes’ than is reasonable, without improvement, or they do an action that is quite harmful (you only need one).

We also have a section on Testing for Toxic.

Once you’ve started to learn about how to spot the toxic / abusive people, and that their behaviour isn’t your fault or responsibility, you can start to yeet the toxic people (remove them from your social space).

Then, with a bit of retraining, your Rejection Sensitivity can calm down (if no other driver).

There is a strong caveat here. Even after internalising the above, you can still struggle with Rejection Sensitivity. Two main causes for that is:

• Past trauma:
  • Trauma counselling,
  • It is rare that your Rejection Sensitivity is due to trauma, but common that your social trauma can exacerbate Rejection Sensitivity.
• Biological:
  • Addressed above.

Managing Self Worth

We have a section on Anxiety and Self Worth.

The central error in this is mistaking your worth as your product – gifts, services and sacrifice.

Your worth is in you as a person, not what you do for others. You are a Human Being, not a Human Doing.

This reorientation of worth allows the Human to make mistakes without being a mistake, and from those mistakes, learn, grow and change.

This allows you to produce a reasonable amount, instead of a superhuman amount. After all, the person in the team who does the least is still getting paid just as much as you are.

This makes it easier to spot those who are abusing your generosity and cutting them off. This allows you to walk away from that toxic situation.

When a neurodivergent person begins to arc up with extra sensitivity from any of the above trigger situations, they can query themselves – am I experiencing Rejection Sensitivity? Then take a pause and separate the feeling of personal failure from the situation. You haven’t changed – the situation has.

Sometimes the neurodivergent person has made a mistake, and if so, it will be clear and obvious. We don’t lose friendships over subtle problems, and a person who claims we made a subtle or illogical and non-evidenced error is someone to be aware of – they are likely toxic and may also be abusive (take the opportunity to get out of that relationship). Once we have identified the error, what can we learn from it? Can we adapt and adjust our actions, plans etc to factor in this new information? How can we grow?

We have turned a mistake into a growth opportunity.

Managing Humble Theory

See our page on Beating Social Anxiety – Humble Theory.

Mostly social anxiety disorder is a side effect of a biological condition, mostly frequently errors in the Amygdala, secondarily various forms of exhaustion. While circumstances can contribute and exacerbate social anxiety, it is rare for a social anxiety disorder to be caused by trauma.

The biological condition should be diagnosed and treated to manage the underlying cause of the anxiety.

What is left is the Social Anxiety Mindset – the cognitive errors primarily caused by the condition. The fear of judgement and the Rejection Sensitivity.

The Social Anxiety mindset can be distilled down to “People’s opinions will focus on the mistakes I make, and that is going to cause problems.”

Objectivity: Reasonable Boundaries aka saying “no”

While there are no ‘lazy people’, there is productive laziness. There is no point in me doing the task you have just done, nor is there a point in me doing the task that you are expected to do – that is just a waste of resources.

There are many people who will use this kind of productive laziness to shift tasks to someone else, merely by stating or implying that it is expected of them. Wanting to belong and social conformity will push us to take on tasks that we don’t really need to do, and shouldn’t be expected to do in a cooperative social group. Sometimes this is them being fair in trying to compensate for their health, sometimes it is abusive.

There are times when we should say “yes”, “maybe”, “no” and “f@#$ off”.

Our challenge is to work out which time is which. As covered above, it is not uncommon for us to be involved with abusive people, who benefit from conning us for their gain and our own detriment. They will hijack our normal cooperative nature to abuse us, obfuscating when it is fair to say “yes” and “no”. We cover this in quite some detail in various sections of Conflict. Covering, even in summary, the massive amount of content there is beyond the scope of this article.

The very bare bones of this part of therapy is to learn what reasonable people have as reasonable boundaries, so that you can make reasonable decisions about your choices. Your choices need to be part of fair and reasonable Consent.

Once you are confident that you have a good grasp on what is objectively reasonable, we can easily detect when someone is contrary to that, alerting us to a potential abusive person, and we can assert our fair rights to not be taken advantage of.

Assert means to be bold, clear and or confident in your statements and behavior, and then standing to that definition unless you have a good reason not to (like new information, the situation changes etc). Effectively, the opposite to what politicians do 😉

Responsibility: Adjusting back to ‘fair’

Imagine two groups.

Group A (abusive) is self interested. The strong get what they want, the weak comply. Whoever is the strongest in this group gets what they want and need by exploiting those who cannot stand up for themselves. Not too bad if you are the strongest, pretty awful if you aren’t. Eventually, this group will fall apart and everyone loses, as the weakest members fail to keep their own health, and this rot makes its way up to the top.

Group B (benevolent) is cooperative. Everyone gets what they want and need, by sharing the resources. Either everyone eats, or no one eats. Sometimes that means that everyone goes without, or with less than they want, but no one is worse off than anyone else. Everyone is seen as having the same intrinsic worth – equality. If someone has a particular need that is unique to them or their subgroup, that need is met by the whole group – this is about equity, rather than blind equality.

Abusive people prefer to be in Group A, as they are inherently self interest and indifferent to the suffering of others. They may mouth that they care, but their actions do not match their words.

“Words are cheap. The true worth of a person is in the actions they take to improve a situation.”

Joshua Davidson

Good people prefer to be in Group B. While we all like to feel special, do we want to be special if it costs someone else, or do we want a uniqueness specialty? For example, I would like to be recognised for the skill and ability that I have put hard work into developing – when I do, that positive recognition helps reward the effort I put into acquiring that skill and ability. It helps me feel good – special. Not better than you as a person to person comparison, just that I have this skill / ability, and perhaps you don’t. You will have some skill / ability that I don’t. I’m not more special than you – I a have a special skill.

In Group B, if I make a mistake, I will happily own that error and do what I can to fix it (see Humble Theory above, or click the link to get the full version). Often, others in the group will help me, because in doing so, the group benefits, which also means the people who helped me benefit. This benevolent self interest is quite different to the selfish self interest of the abusive people.

“Benevolent self interest helps all people, not just the self, and costs no one.

Malicious self interest helps only the individual at the cost of everyone.”

Joshua Davidson

In a cooperative group, such as Group B, it is fairly clear who is responsible for tasks, fixing problems and so on. We all know the tasks that need to be done, and we do it as we see the need to do so. Some things we will assign to certain people to avoid overlapping both of us doing it redundantly. If I make an error, I’ll fix it, maybe with some help.

Abusive people are the heroes or the victims in their story. They aren’t the ones who created the problem, and they aren’t the ones who honestly did the tasks, although they want to take credit for it, and they aren’t the ones who made mistakes. See Narcissism and NPD to learn more about this malicious self interest.

Abusive people will hijack your sense of responsibility and tweak it so that you will be responsible for their feelings, their thoughts, and their actions. They will try to con you into believing that you are responsible for them, ironically wanting you to treat them as a better than average person, while you are responsible for them as if they were a child.

In my Quick 6 Relationship Tips, the last item is key here.

1. Tell them that you love them in several different ways – be open to their expressions of love.
2. Honesty: clear, transparent and timely communication – it isn’t surveillance, you have the right to privacy.
3. Hearing them, not assuming them – using the Principle of Charity, not the Assumption of Malice.
4. Adult expectations – if they are adults, don’t infantilise them.
5. What is good for the goose, is good for the ganda – no double standards (separate rules) without a medical condition need (eg gambling).
6. Own your sh!t – don’t own theirs.

* Be kind

When you have a more objective, cooperative view of the limits of your responsibility, it is easier to tell when your learning algorithm is becoming erroneous, or an abusive person is hijacking it, trying to falsely claim that you are more responsible for them than you should be (caveat for medical conditions). While each specific situation is a specific case, there are many generalisable elements to human interactions that allow us to be reasonably accurate in estimating where “right” and “wrong” are.

Ending Thought & Mood Loops

Is stated many times in this page, we want to learn from our experiences, or anticipated experiences, so that we can do better. T

References

Early interpersonal trauma and later adjustment: The mediational role of rejection sensitivity, Downey, Khouri & Feldman, 1997, APA PsycNet. (n.d.). Psycnet.apa.org. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-36663-003

Emotional Regulation and Rejection Sensitivity, Dr William W. Dodson, 2017, https://chadd.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ATTN_10_16_EmotionalRegulation.pdf

New Insights Into Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Dodson, W. (2020, July 29). ADDitude. https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-adhd-emotional-dysregulation/

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