Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is the weirdest ADHD symptom ever. Like hello yes my weird brain chemistry manifests as Whiny Crybaby Disorder
btw this is not a universally agreed upon “symptom” of ADHD and I think many people would benefit from treating it as part & parcel of ADHD’s broad, foundational trait: inability to do emotional regulation. A feeling of total rejection and terror at failure is a treatable and manageable issue. For me, I found it easier to manage once recognized that the reason I was having these reactions is that like many other emotional states, I couldn’t “exit” an emotional state related to feelings of rejection once I was in it.
imo way too many people are going through life thinking they’re just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this “symptom.” I don’t think it’s terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.
signed: someone with ADHD who used to not be able to take critical feedback from anyone every and is now a freelancer and gets critical feedback three times before breakfast. still workin on it but it’s very possible to go from “whiny crybaby disorder” to “mostly functional, if slightly sensitive ADHD adult”
I also think it’s worth noting that rejection sensitive dysphoria is most parsimoniously interpreted as a trauma reaction—a learned response to a potential signals of social relationship deteriorating for reasons the ADHD person can’t necessarily control. Social relationships are incredibly important to humans, and ADHD (especially undiagnosed and undisclosed) really sets us up to fail. This is especially true given that perceived social blame for stressful situations is a massive factor in transmuting stressful experiences into lasting trauma, and ADHDers are typically judged to be personally responsible for the failures that happen as a result of attentional, time awareness, or memory failures.
What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)
It’s a common kind of stress injury, basically. It’s not Whiny Crybaby Disorder; it’s more like shin splints. Getting better shoes for running, being careful about the ground you run on, and letting the splints heal properly can all help make shin splints go away when you’ve been running barefoot on concrete roads your whole life.
i love discovering new music. but there’s actually nothing like rediscovering old music. like, hello me from 5, 10, 15 years ago. so good to see you. same heart, i see. god, i love you.
sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you’re like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don’t know what though
PSA: if you want to describe a story as a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story, please do make sure that the two houses are alike in dignity.
The original reasons the two houses hate each other - if there ever were any - are otherwise left unspecified, but the one thing that gets made clear right at the start is that those reasons are not socioeconomic differences. Please consider alternative cultural references to describe a forbidden romance between people of different socioeconomic status. There are a whole bunch of those too.
“came back wrong” sure yeah that’s cool i guess “came back suicidal” now you’re talking
came back imprisoned by obligation to bear responsibility for the love and grief that others feel for you. came back painfully aware of the horror of existence. came back to a life you cannot bear to live anymore, to a body you cannot bear to call yours.
