One of the things that made the most sense of all to me when I started learning about ADHD while I was getting my adult diagnosis is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD for short. It’s something that is linked to ADHD and I had heard people talking about it a lot in Facebook groups and the emotional pain it causes and I started reading into it. In simple terms, it is a huge fear of rejection, be that perceived from a person you care about, from peers or falling short of your own expectations for yourself. It made so much sense to me as I always had a terrible fear of getting things wrong and being laughed. It was probably at its worst when I was younger and goes way beyond your usual ‘teen angst’ and could cause real physical feelings of pain and humiliation that I would dwell on for weeks if not longer.

I also had a terrible fear of being disliked, even if I didn’t care if the person liked me, and I didn’t like the person, I couldn’t cope with the thought that they didn’t like me. This also applied to strangers. I felt like I had to present the very best version of myself at all times. And I realise how ridiculous that sounds but I had to try and make myself more likeable to everyone! This might mean changing the way I dressed, the music I listened to, my opinions and when I was younger I would always buy the cigarettes, the alcohol. Anything to try and ‘buy favour’ with whoever I wanted to be friends with.

If I felt that I was being laughed at, I would often overreact and ‘blow up’ acting in an angry or irrational manner which would just make people laugh at me more, and the cycle would continue. The main downside was that I was so trusting which made me incredibly gullible as I just wouldn’t imagine people would be making things up, which would then result in them finding new ways to ‘trick’ me and then finding it hilarious. The humiliation of being duped and thought of as stupid was so huge that I would almost feel it physically prickling my skin, it was that uncomfortable. So I ended up becoming more suspicious than I normally would and I was never quite sure if people were lying to me or not. It made my

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria can cause people to stop trying in life as they really don’t want to face the prospect of failure and what people will think of them. The idea of starting and failing means that you would rather not even give it a go and so it ends up being really frustrating as you have so many aspirations and dreams that you want to achieve but you’re too scared to put yourself out there. This can apply to school, sports, jobs, anything that could ‘go wrong’ and leave you looking stupid to others. Team sports were an utter nightmare to me as I didn’t know the rules and sometimes retaining information is just impossible so remembering things like the areas you were allowed to go in when playing certain sports didn’t come easily and resulted in the rest of the team getting annoyed.

Another issue is becoming a people pleaser. Feeling that you have to work really hard to get people to like you, low self esteem makes you doubt that anyone could like you for yourself and so you go out of your way to be as helpful, as friendly, as nice as possible. Often resulting in you doing things that you wouldn’t normally, perhaps taking on extra work despite being totally overwhelmed yourself, or offering to look after a friend’s children when you’re at burn out already.

I’d also have the tendency to blow things out of proportion and read into things too much. A simple text conversation could leave me agonising and dwelling on what the other person really thought, or was saying or meant. The majority of the time, after many sleepless nights, it would turn out that the other person hadn’t been thinking any of the things I’d been thinking and hadn’t actually given the conversation any more thought. It also meant that I’d back down from an argument if I felt like the other person was really angry with me, even if I was in the right.

If any of this post about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is resonating with you, you can take a free self test here. If you would like to read more about the signs of ADHD in Girls and Women, you can read that here. RSD is one of the things that makes it so hard to approach your doctor to ask for an assessment so I wrote a post detailing how to do it here.