Rejection Sensitivity is a strong reaction to perceived or actual rejection. It can often be triggered by fearing having done something tenuous wrong that another person will then act upon, or by the perception of negative feedback. This can drive behaviours that later cause regret, but in the moment you felt powerless to stop them. Rejection Sensitivity often is experienced by people with Social Anxiety, generally secondary to various neurodivergent and biological conditions.

Understanding Rejection Sensitivity

Rejection Sensitivity is primarily a consequence to biology.

Rejection Sensitivity often starts as a result to poor masking. Masking is a mechanism that neurodivergent people, such as autistic and ADHDers, use to seem like others, to fit in with the crowd and be accepted. The problem with this method is that neurodivergent person is not actually accepted, only their mask is.

When this fails and the person is rejected anyway, it triggers a spiral of “was it me”, “was it my mask”, “did they see the real me?” and “what do they want from me?”. Being seen behind the mask, not knowing how to fix the mask, and not understanding why you’ve been rejected is terrifying.

When it works, neurodivergent people can mistake themselves for the mask, or always feel empty, dishonest and false. Neurodivergent people can feel that they are what they produce and lose themselves in their identities such as work, rescuer and provider. These are all roles, and are not you.

When entering a group, the neurodivergent person wants to know what role they fulfil to “fit in”. What do you, the group, need? How will I be able to add value, so that you will value me? To decrease the risk of immediate rejection from the group, the neurodivergent person may bring gifts, services and work extra hard. It is not uncommon for the neurodivergent person to put so much work in, that they are doing the work of 2 or more people. Just don’t reject me!

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

RS or RSD?

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 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 Sensitivity 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.

Amongst some sectors of mental health, there was push back about this new proposed initialism compared to the prior one as Rejection Sensitivity 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.

However, RSD has become the de facto standard in online communities, even though the D is superfluous.

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.
• Conflict avoidance
  • Fear of conflict that leads to avoiding people, anything that resembles conflict and can trigger People Pleasing Behaviours.
• People Pleasing Behaviours
  • 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.

To manage each of these, people form “People Pleasing” behaviours, avoid ever pointing out someone else’s mistakes and take on far, far, far too much responsibility. Until the neurodivergent person collapses in exhaustion and experiences burnout.

Managing RS – 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 RS – Toxic People

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, then you are likely “surrounded by arseholes (TM)” [a ‘diagnosis’ I sometimes give my anxious people in hostile social situations].

I find the red, amber, green flag system useful for doing evaluations of the person/people who trigger the Rejection Sensitivity.

Red flags are “red alert” style behaviours (double standards, moving goal posts, claims of error without evidence, faulting you for not reading their mind).

Amber flags are “wake up and take a close look” behaviours, where something seems off, but it isn’t clearly a red flag, but it might be. This is the time to take the rose tinted filters off our eyes and take a cold hard look. Is this odd behaviour an anomaly, or is it actually a trend? Everyone has the right to a bad day.

Green flags are indications that our relationship (work, intimate, friend) is on the green – aka good. Things like “does what they say”, “informs you of the important bits in a timely fashion”, “asks for reasonable things”, “believes you”, “has a single standard”, “understanding”.

Once you’ve started to learn about how to spot the toxic people, and that their behaviour isn’t your fault or responsibility, you can start to yeet the toxic people.

Then, with a bit of retraining, your Rejection Sensitivity can calm down.

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 – get some trauma counselling; and an adrenaline/mood problem – investigate medication.

Managing RS – 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.”

This leads us to two erroneous solutions:
1. To avoid judgement, you must be perfect all of the time.
2. If you can’t be perfect, don’t be seen.

These lead to a host of unhelpful behaviours.

*Humble Theory* focuses on the basis for the fear or people –
1. The fear of being judged for making mistakes, and thereby hurt or controlled, and
2. The inability to tell who is trying to be helpful versus who is being harmful (toxic).

Embracing being Humble assumes that we will make mistakes at times, and that growing is a good thing.

Embracing being Humble enables us to welcome being corrected and give opportunity for other’s to be a part of our growth.

Humble Theory also helps toxic people (who want to use false claims of mistakes, or who want to use our errors to manipulate & control us) to stand out from those who are genuinely being helpful. Humble Theory helps to identify who needs Toxic Person Management. Knowing how to spot abusive people reduces the fear of being hurt by everyone.