Can RSD be healed? A personal journey of faith, ADHD and recovery.

All things are possible through Christ Jesus…

This is just my own personal journey. But if I use it to share something of God’s deep love for us, I think and hope it might help someone else.  I’ve often been drawn into other people’s life stories of when God shows us insights into his infinite love and deep healing that he offers.  So, here’s a small bit of my story of Rejection Sensitivity Disorder.

RSD is something talked about a lot in the ADHD community.  In the last 5 years as we have become more aware of ADHD and that it affects more people than previously thought. The sharp increase in diagnosis only reflects that many of them are women.  (We shall be ignoring all the false claims about overdiagnosis.)   Like me, many women are being diagnosed or identified in their peri-menopausal years.  I was 50 when I decided to go to the GP and ask for an assessment.  She asked me why I would want a diagnosis when I’d obviously managed this far.  But what she and many professionals have been missing is the internalised challenges and constant feelings of never being enough, always failing and no-one noticing.  Being alone in my struggles and anxieties.

It took three years to get to the assessment stage.  That gave me three extra years of research.  When I read about RSD I cried.  For the first time I had a name for the worst thing in my life.  The feelings that paralysed me and which had turned me into a super people-pleaser all my life, often to my own detriment.

There is no actual clinical term of RSD and it’s not in any diagnostic criteria. However, it is now widely written about in ADHD research and journals. 

“Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is extreme emotional sensitivity and pain triggered by the perception that a person has been rejected or criticized by important people in their life. It may also be triggered by a sense of falling short - failing to meet their own high standards or others’ expectations.

Dysphoria is Greek for “difficult to bear.” It’s not that people with attention deficit disorder (ADHD or ADD) are wimps, or weak; it’s that the emotional response hurts them much more than it does people without the condition. No one likes to be rejected, criticized or fail. For people with RSD, these universal life experiences are much more severe than for neurotypical individuals. They are unbearable, restricting, and highly impairing.”  https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/

The words that jump out at me are:  Extreme. Pain. Triggered. Hurt. Severe. Unbearable.

The girl behind the sofa: my first memory of RSD

I was the eldest of four children and next door to us lived another family of four children of similar ages.  One week we were all best friends and the next we’d be falling out.  One day when I was about 11 or 12, we had a bit of a slanging match on the front path, and I said “f**k off’ to one of them.  Now swearing was never allowed in our house and I was totally shocked when those words came out of my mouth.  Immediately, the neighbours’ kids started taunting me, threatening to tell my Dad I’d sworn.  My Dad was fairly strict with our behaviour but never unkind, but it was in the 1970s and ‘wait till your dad gets home’ was a common parenting hack for many a mother stuck at home with a gaggle of kids. 

I can only remember the wave of dread that completely saturated my whole body.  I ran inside the house and hid behind the sofa…. And sobbed… for over 2 hours.  When my Dad came home from work I continued to hide, until it was teatime and I was being looked for.  My Dad found me behind the sofa and, concerned, sat me on his knee and asked me what on earth was the matter.  I gasped and spluttered my way through a confession – that I’d sworn at the kids next door.  I was mortified and terrified, but I didn’t know what of. 

My Dad seemed relieved; he smiled and gave me a big hug.  He said he thought I’d punished myself enough and helped me wipe my very snotty nose and join the family for tea.

That is my first memory of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.  The rejection and fear of punishment (which had no foundation) was ‘too much to bear’.  And it has been ever since.

There are some theories that RSD is connected to trauma.  I do have to say that I was also a young carer.  My mum had some health difficulties that, as the eldest child and ‘responsible one’ had a profound effect on me. I became my mum’s protector and was highly alert to every nuance of her situation.  I took on far more responsibility than an 11-year-old child should have to.  I also became the one who had to make everyone else happy, so they didn’t become ill either.  I thought I was responsible for my mum’s health.   It’s only years later that we have discovered we were also a family of undiagnosed ADHDers.

Fast forward a few years.  Fast forward through the terrible teenage years I had.  Depression, anxiety and bad choices led me down a road of despair.  I was 21 and at the end of myself when I was a volunteer on a MENCAP holiday at a Christian outdoor centre in North Wales.  There Jesus met me, responded to my cries of despair and saved my life.  Really saved my life.  But somehow that “rejection and fear of punishment (which had no foundation) which was ‘too much to bear’” seeped into my Christian life and I still battle with the internalised fear of being rejected by God.

When rejection feels overwhelming, can you speak to yourself with the kindness God has for you? He understands how deeply this hurts.

Shame, ADHD and the search for grace

Shame is mentioned a lot in the Bible.  Shame is seen as something that the wicked deserve.

“No-one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame, but shame will come on those who are treacherous without cause.” Psalm 25:3

And this has been a hard battle in my Christian life.  It has been hard to not think I am wicked or sinful because of all the shame I feel.  It has been hard not to think I am being punished for my sins. And being ADHD I can tell you a hundred sins I have confessed to the Lord before lunch time each day.  On Sunday’s in church I grew to hate the confession section of the service.  I’d already confessed all through the week and the way some churches do that part of the liturgy only served to crush me even further. 

There is a popular survey often quoted in the ADHD community, that says shame arises because that by the time a child with ADHD reaches the age of 12, they have heard 20,000 more negative comments about themselves than a typical child.  It leads to them internalising that they are bad, different and can never live up to the expectations of others.  For me, who was a ‘teacher’s pet’ at school and tried to be the ‘good daughter’ at home, those negative comments were self-imposed.  I was never good enough and always too much for others.   Internalising my shame even more. 

But I am so grateful for the Holy Spirit in me and for those faithful and grace-filled Christians who had nurtured my faith over the years.  I love the Bible because I find the counterattack of all that shame and negativity I fight with daily.  I battled the negative and catastrophic thoughts by learning scriptures of joy, praise and grace.  I know the Bible well because I continually searched the scriptures for news of God’s grace and love. And I have been found, saved and sustained by those words of love and grace.

Romans 8:38-39

 “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

When shame tells you that you are not enough, can you pause and remind yourself that God does not condemn you? He understands your struggle because he is there in it with you.

Why healing takes time

When we have a lot of life baggage and become a Christian, have you ever wondered why God doesn’t just heal it all and sort you out there and then?  I had so much baggage that I took into my Christian life, into discipleship and even into my marriage and parenthood.  Healing has been a long, gradual journey.  And I do know why.  Because I was broken and so many pieces of me had been scattered or had dug deep into my very being.  I had to be carefully remade like a master restorer doing his work.  I had to reach a point where I didn’t want to be that girl behind the sofa anymore. 

Can you give yourself permission to heal slowly, without judging where you are today? God is patient with you, and it is his love and understanding that makes this journey take time.

Beginning the journey towards healing

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God.” – Psalm 42:11

So it’s only in the last three years I’ve started the journey of healing from the RSD.  I needed to know what it was first. Luckily my ADHD ability to hyperfocus down a rabbit hole of curiosity helped.  I read all I could about it and started to see the link between RSD, trauma, anxiety and the behaviours it causes us to develop through wanting to protect ourselves.

RSD comes to me in a wave of dread.  It starts at the top of my head and sinks through my whole body until every fibre of my being is secretly shaking with shame.  My diaphragm clenches in spasms and my stomach aches.  My shoulders tighten and I often get a headache.  My body feels sluggish and my brain cannot think clearly.  I just want to lie down and hide, or to escape from the place I’m in as if it was on fire. 

Just like the research said, it happened when I thought I might be rejected, told off or criticised.  Or if people responded too vaguely or not at all.  Then I would catastrophise and I cannot tell you the number of days in my life I have wasted because I have hidden inside myself going over and over the worst-case scenarios.  But then this would make me want to smooth over the situation and restore the other persons good opinion of me.  I would go into what we now know is ‘fawning’, a similar response to ‘fight, flight or freeze’ when the nervous system is in extreme danger alert mode and does all it can to get away to get to safety.   I would always apologise, or ‘hide’ from the person by avoiding them.  I’d leave groups, make excuses and not go to events and I would feel the utter shame and contempt of myself for maybe weeks after the event.  The trigger could have been something so small, even not registered by the other person.  But to me it was the end of the world. 

This happening time and time again feels like shame is piled and piled on top of you until you struggle to function without being on high alert.  You keep trying to succeed, and can be very driven, but the thing driving you is fear of failure, of rejection, not joy.

The Lord has done a lot of healing in my life.  My relationship with my parents has been healed and strengthened, I trust God more and don’t feel depressed or despairing any more.  I have a lot to thank him and praise him for.  But I was still experiencing RSD.  And two years ago, I wrote in my journal that I was ready to work this through.  I didn’t want it anymore, so I was ready to do the work to let God heal me.  That might sound contradictory – but my experience of God’s healing has usually been hard.  In healing deep wounds, he first had to bring them to the surface and sometimes that felt like experiencing the pain all over again.   Time and time again I have said ‘no’ to God because I wasn’t ready.  I praise him for his infinite patience with me!  But that pain had to surface in order for it to be banished from my life. And the space created could then be filled with God’s goodness and love.  That’s my experience of healing.

When fear rises, can you resist blaming yourself and instead offer yourself gentleness? God sees what lies beneath your reactions, and he understands how hard they can be.

When the body speaks: interoception and emotion

I knew I’d have to spend time listening to where God wanted to take me with this.  I knew he would take me through reliving some deep rejections from my work life, my relationships and of myself.  At the same time, I was thinking about what I had learned in my job about the sensory system called Interoception.  I’ve found Kelly Mahler’s work particularly helpful.

“Interoception is our body’s powerful sensory system that helps us notice and understand the signals coming from inside of us - things like hunger, thirst, a racing heartbeat, or the need to use the bathroom. These internal signals are what give us clues about how we’re feeling in the moment—whether we’re anxious, calm, tired, or excited.”   https://www.kelly-mahler.com/what-is-interoception/

Interoception’s connection to emotions has changed the way I work with neurodivergent people and their emotions and in understanding RSD in myself. I began to realise that the shame, the dread and the anxiety were all first these huge physical feelings in my body.  They were so strong that I did so many avoidant behaviours because I did not want to feel those sensations.  They were truly ‘too much to bear.’  I had to ponder on this for a while.  I found so much reality and comfort and in the Psalms.  There I found that real big emotions were talked about alongside feeling rejected and the way the internal body responds to those big feelings.

“Your wrath lies heavily on me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.

You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them. I am confined and cannot escape; my eyes are dim with grief. I call to you, LORD, every day; I spread out my hands to you.  Psalm 88:7-9 

“I waited patiently for the Lord, he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire.  He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.” Psalm 40:1-3.

Understanding I had hypersensitive and strong interoceptive sensory responses became my starting point.  I started to ask the Lord to guide me through listening to my body.  His Spirit told me to notice. Notice what happened inside my body when the dread came.  I spent a few months doing that.  And from that I learned that the dread passed through.  It didn’t need to stay.  If I waited and noticed it, the dread came, washed through me and left.  And most of all, I learned that God’s Spirit was with me in the waves.  There was no-where he was not. 

And afterwards my mind was clearer, I didn’t catastrophise as much, and the Holy Spirit started to ask me gentle questions as I processed the situation that had caused the RSD.  “Is it really that bad?” “Is it likely they really meant to reject you?”  “How important is this in the wider picture?”  “Are you going to let this steal your peace and joy?”.

Wooooah!  Those questions were challenging.  But over time they are starting to change everything I do.

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls, all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” Psalm 42:7

I was realising that God could heal this.  He could conquer my RSD and change the way I have reacted to people and situations.  I’ve hidden, told lies, made excuses and people-pleased for over 50 years.  There’s a lot to undo here!  Saying yes, all the time was bringing me to the verge of burnout.  I needed to learn this.  I needed to learn to say no without appeasing.  I needed to know that I could turn things down, say I can’t and it is okay.  I needed to know God was encouraging me to do that and that it was okay.  I wasn’t letting him or anyone else down. 

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I lack nothing.  He makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside quiet waters.  He restores my soul.”  Psalm 23:1-3

This is teaching me something more about God.  Jesus said we weren’t to worry and that he was always with us.  But although I would confess I trusted and loved Jesus with my whole heart – my life was telling a different story.  If I am anxious all the time, then I am giving more power to fear than to his love.  And I don’t want that in my life. 

When an RSD wave moves through your body, can you let yourself notice it without shame? God is present in every part of that experience, and he understands how intense it feels.

Still healing: what I do when RSD strikes

This is what I now do when I am faced with RSD.

First, I stop and I notice the dread wave going through my body.  I let it take its path and work its way out.  That used to take a few days, it is now taking a few hours. 

I am learning I need to trust God and find ways to call on him in those trigger moments.  I’m also learning how to breathe deeply when it happens as breath work can calm our nervous and interoception systems down. I’m learning to walk more in natural environments.  Even my local park is a place where I can walk through the RSD waves.  I’ve also had a bit of help from an ADHD coach.  Together we have made decision flow charts so I can learn to pause before I default to fawning or running away.

Then, I look at the situation that has triggered it.  And I let the Holy Spirit guide me through those questions until I think I have a better balance of what really has happened. Often, it is only my perception that has taken on too much fear.  Sometimes I have to let go of false responsibility, or wanting to control a situation.  Sometimes I have to admit a mistake and move on and not carry shame.  I am learning that surrender to God is not weakness – it is strength.

I think God is doing a much bigger work than I realise.  I think he wants to show me how much I am loved and how there is nothing I need to do to live in that total acceptance and freedom from responsibility.  I feel like I am a little child, learning how to truly trust him, despite having been a Christian for 37 years.  It goes to show, we are continually being made like Jesus, God’s work in us never stops.  And I hope that I keep getting less hurt by RSD until I am completely free of it.  And I pray that someone will start their journey of healing from this too. Jesus said he is the truth and that the truth will set us free - and that's what I'm counting on. I’ll still have ADHD, but there’s a lot of good stuff about having this kind of brain too!

“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 4:7

The next time RSD strikes, what would it look like to treat yourself as someone deeply loved rather than someone who has failed? You are not alone. God understands you completely.  Psalm 139 x