Read on Twitter
So today's therapy session was PRETTY INTERESTING and I think it might help some neurodiverse people on my feed to share some of what it covered, so here's a lil thread about Relationship Sensitive Dysphoria and my action plan for it.
So, starting with the basics Relationship Sensitive Dysphoria is a thing a lot of folks with ADHD and/or any form of autism experience. Google will tell you the long version, but the short version, even the vague idea of incoming rejection is paralytically terrifying.
This has a lot of effects - falling out of contact, work anxiety (e.g. being scared about that calendar appointment that says 'just checking in'), conflict avoidance, to list just a few. It's pretty Not Great and pretty Hard To Deal With.
A lot of this comes down to mind blindness that many neurodiverse folks have - not knowing what other people think of you is obviously completely normal, but it's a common neurodiverse trait to experience an extra barrier around it. We know our minds are different so it's scary.
Time blindness is a whole thing as well - ADHD in particular just has a whole level of time dilation surrounding it that is tough to deal with, and that only gets worse when you're waiting on a reply in a difficult conversation. A few minutes feels like a decade.
So yeah. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. RSD. Pretty not fun, and the reason I'm scared to text anyone who I've not spoken to in the past couple of weeks. So what do you do? How do you move around it?
At the end of the day, the scary thing about the interaction is what I expect to receive. I *want* validation, friendship, casual chats, I'm scared of receiving rejection, abandonment, loss. And all of this because I gave a small message checking in on someone. But!
There's another situation where I give things, and receiving things barely matters. When I give a gift, it's my way of communicating that I remember that the recipient is really into a specific thing, or that dumb joke we have together, and so on. It's not about what I get back.
(There are occasionally times I get uppity about not receiving a gift because I had decided There Is A Social Contract Here but that's a different neurodiverse minefield we won't explore today)
The point is:
The point is:
I need to think about contacting people as a gift that I'm giving and not expecting anything back from. Instead of sending 'thought of you today <3' and sitting in a corner shaking because I might receive rejection, to focus on the fact that that thought was a gift I gave.
Now, like all therapy stuff, this is like an exercise that I'm going to have to work like hell on, and it'll make the muscle I'm working on (my brain) ache and sometimes I'll fuck it up. But this is the first RSD strategy I've heard and gone 'oh yeah that makes sense'.
(Also a note to myself that the exercise isn't to sit down and think about all the people I've not spoken to in ages and send them a thing as a way of pushing myself as that is absolutely not what this is about)
To be clear this is absolutely not me looking for advice, this is if anything me sharing advice that I've received in therapy because I know I'm not the only one who struggles with this stuff (but I know y'all mean well, thank you)
