Healing from Rejection Sensitivity: My Story
Below you will find the text of my most recent post on IG, comparing the so-called diagnosis of “Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria” to the 19th century medical diagnosis of “hysteria” in women.
In that post I note that Dr. William Dodson, who invented “RSD,” claims there is no effective therapy for this so-called disorder other than two specific medications he recommends be used off-label. He specifically claims, based entirely on anecdotal evidence, that therapy is useless in healing rejection sensitivity in ADHD people.
The anecdotal evidence of my own family—me, my husband, and my son—is quite different.
Unlike Dr. Dodson, I do not claim that the plural of anecdote is data, and I offer our story simply as three examples of what is possible.
Without going into too much detail, I will just say that all three of us, for much of our lives, displayed all of the classic symptoms of what Dr. Dodson calls RSD: intense sensitivity and reactivity to actual or perceived rejection, resulting in either sudden, uncontrollable, angry outbursts, or, alternatively, the repression and internalization of those feelings, often leading to depression and anxiety.
I can’t claim that we’re all perfectly “cured” of these symptoms, but I can say that over the course of five years, we have all healed deeply. Intense sensitivity to rejection, along with drama, reactivity, and debilitating forms of anxiety and depression are simply not a part of our day-to-day lives anymore. Each of us is in a really good place right now.
I thought I would share just a little bit about what has helped us.
For me, intensive psychodynamic therapy with a Jungian-trained psychiatrist, along with a cocktail of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and ADHD meds got me through a few traumatic years after a bitter and abusive divorce. That therapy also gave me insight, self-knowledge, and the analytical tools to continue my own healing. After weaning myself from all four of the medications I was on (under the supervisions of my shrink, of course) and feeling really good for a year, last fall I decided to go back on an anti-depressant to help me cope with burnout and some feelings of despair (largely related to the pandemic and the political situation, not so much issues related to neurodivergence). I continue to take that medication, and find it helpful.
Alongside of therapy, it has been the love, support, and companionship of my husband that has been most profoundly healing. He loves me because of, not in spite of, my neuroemergent quirks, and his bedrock, consistent, and patient belief in me and my passionate, meandering, non-linear ways has been nothing short of a magical elixir. There are memes out there that say you can’t truly heal and be loved until you first love yourself, but my experience is not so … well. … linear!
I believe love is healing, and that broken people need love in order to put ourselves back together again. Love is part of what heals us. But let me be clear: I am talking about love, not necessarily a lover. Love, not necessarily a marriage. In my case, that healing love just happened to come most specifically in the form of a lover and a marriage. But finding an online community of like-minded folks, and becoming close friends with a few of them, has also been hugely healing. Never let anyone tell you that online friends aren’t real friends.
Next, for me, getting right with Time—surrendering to my loopy ways and my cycles of productivity and the need for rest—has been key.
So has casting out shame and self-judgment.
Hand-in-hand with both of those has been giving myself permission to indulge the pleasures and passions of creative work—and not because it will earn me a living. Just because. I have come to realize that making art is a spiritual practice for me, nothing short of mystical prayer. Likewise, being in the woods and near water is deeply healing, and getting to the woods is perhaps my most consistent spiritual practice. When I can’t get to the woods, just noticing trees and the flowers and plants in the yards of my gritty urban neighborhood works well too.
Finally, embracing my introverted temperament, unapologetically leaning into my vocation for solitude, has been hugely healing.
In short, the more I become my Self, and the less I worry about fitting into a world that wasn’t designed for me, the more wildly happy and content I have become. I can honestly say the symptoms of “RSD” are almost entirely healed in me.
I would venture to say that for my husband, a patient, loving marriage has likewise been healing. For him, in addition, the community, spiritual practice, and peer support of a recovery community has been nothing short of a miracle.
And for my son, his remarkable healing (now at the age of 17) most clearly began when I took him out of school near the end of his 9th grade year in favor of a very loose, hands-off form of homeschooling (really unschooling). Trusting him to be the inquisitive, creative, autodidact that he naturally is was everything. Well, actually, just trusting him, period—to make his own decisions, including his own mistakes—was the single most important thing I did as his mom.
And expunging shame and guilt-trips from my parenting repertoire has been pretty big too.
But beyond that, I would say his friends have been the most central part of his healing. My son is a naturally social kid and has a large and vibrant peer group. He’s a good and loyal friend, and so are his friends in return. They have made all the difference. They have all loved and healed each other. My main job has been to offer them a safe space in my home, and then just get out of their way.
Based on my personal experience, and that of the two ADHD people I love most, (and despite what Dr. Dodson and the ADHD Industrial Complex would have you believe) healing IS possible.
As you heal, though, just be clear—what you are healing from is not some made-up disorder in your brain called “Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.” No, what you are healing from is rejection itself, the complex trauma of being pathologized and rejected by a society that doesn’t understand you, wasn’t designed for you, refuses to accommodate you, and doesn’t value the incredible gifts you have to offer.
But even in such a society, healing IS possible! I promise.
Here is the text of my IG slides from today’s post:
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is the new hysteria (an essay)
(ID: a black silhouette of a woman in an elaborate Victorian dress in front of a background of vintage yellow wallpaper with a plush damask and striped pattern)
Just over 100 years ago, "hysteria" was considered a diagnosable physical disease in women (note: this is in my own grandmother's lifetime). Symptoms included shortness of breath, anxiety, insomnia, fainting, amnesia, paralysis, pain, spasms, convulsive fits, vomiting, deafness, bizarre movements, seizures, hallucinations, inability to speak.
French neurologist and anatomical pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the "father of modern neurology," theorized that hysteria was a hereditary, physiological disorder caused by impairments in the brain. Hysteria was also believed to be related to the female reproductive tract (the name is derived from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, also related to the word hysterectomy).
Many of the symptoms of "hysteria" in women can now obviously be attributed to trauma, oppression/repression, and to simply being passionate, sensitive, creative human beings—an unforgivable phenomenon in women. The diagnosis of "hysteria" was clearly just misogyny masquerading as science and medicine.
In 1892 (just a few years before my grandmother was born), Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a short story called "The Yellow Wallpaper," written in the voice of a woman whose physician-husband has diagnosed her with "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency." As a form of treatment, he shuts her up in the nursery of an old mansion he has rented for the summer.
Central to the unnamed woman's "cure" is “rest”—not just physical rest, but also “rest” from anything that might stimulate her mind. In other words, she is prescribed boredom as a cure. She is forbidden from reading, writing, or any form of work. This so-called "rest cure"—i.e. boredom—was often prescribed to women diagnosed with hysteria.
Left with nothing to do but contemplate the yellow wallpaper that adorns her room, she begins to imagine there is a woman trapped on the other side of the pattern. Eventually, suffering from the psychosis induced by her husband's "cure," she begins creeping around the perimeter of the room on all fours, clawing off the wallpaper in an effort to free the trapped woman.
Gilman perfectly illustrates the gaslighting, abusive circular logic of this type of diagnosis:
1) the very symptoms the diagnosis purports to explain are actually the result of trauma and repression related to some form of oppression (misogyny in the case of hysteria);
2) the diagnosis then attributes the "disorder" back to that very oppressed identity—i.e. hysteria is a disorder of "femaleness"; and
3) the "cure" prescribed is just more of the same oppression that caused the trauma and the symptoms in the first place.
Let's look at how this same logic is at work in the "diagnosis" of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, a "disorder" invented by Dr. William Dodson.
Dr. Dodson observed, over the course of decades of treating ADHD people, a set of symptoms that are, indeed, common in many neurodivergent people:
intense sensitivity and reactivity to actual or perceived rejection, resulting in either sudden, uncontrollable, angry outbursts, or, alternatively, the repression and internalization of those feelings, often leading to depression and anxiety.
(Please note I am not disputing the existence of these symptoms, just one explanation of their cause.)
Despite the fact that these symptoms can simply and elegantly be attributed to the complex trauma of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world (just as the symptoms of hysteria were easily explained by the trauma of misogyny), Dr. Dodson has a different theory.
Just as Dr. Charcot attributed the symptoms resulting from misogyny to the very object of misogyny—i.e. "femaleness" and specifically the female reproductive tract—so too, Dr. Dodson would like to blame the ADHD brain for its own oppression.
With exactly zero peer-reviewed scientific evidence (by his own admission), Dr. Dodson theorizes that the cause of sensitivity to rejection in ADHD people is caused not by a life-time of pathologizing by clinicians like himself, and rejection by society at large, but rather by some genetic, neurological disorder in our brains.
Moreover, he theorizes, there is no cure for this terrible brain defect, and the only therapy is the off-label prescription of a few specific medications.
Do you see what a neat trick this is?
First pathologize difference as disorder.
Next traumatize a whole population by calling them "disordered" and failing to accommodate the different ways they are in the world.
Then blame them for the symptoms of their trauma. Locate the cause of the symptoms of their trauma in the very "disorder" you invented because you can't tolerate and won't accommodate difference.
Then prescribe a "cure" that doesn't address any of the underlying causes of trauma, but instead keeps everything neatly in your own pathologizing paradigm.
In a nutshell: keep us sick while neatly absolving yourself of all responsibility for making us sick in the first place. Which, personally, feels exactly like an emotionally abusive relationship I was once in.
Like many of us, I once suffered intensely from the symptoms Dodson calls RSD. So did my husband. So did my son. Based on anecdotal experience, Dr. Dodson claims therapy can't help RSD, only medication. Unlike Dr. Dodson, I don't believe that data is the plural of anecdote. . . but fwiw, all three of us are on a path of full recovery through a combination of therapy, peer support, spiritual practice, medication (though not the ones Dr. Dodson prescribes), and most importantly, the removal of active, on-going trauma from our lives.