 Good day everybody and welcome back to my channel. My name is Thomas Henley and today we're going to address autistic rejection sensitive dysphoria. Something that you may have heard before in the context of ADHD, but something that I would like to explain further in the context of autism. How do you overcome it? What is it exactly? What does it look like? What are some of the things that you can do in your life to get over it, to move past it so that it's not something that you experience on a regular basis? We're going to get into all of that within this video. So what exactly is RSD? It's a difficulty regulating your emotions when faced with failure or rejection. Now you may be asking to yourself well Thomas doesn't everyone not like failure and rejection? Isn't that just a normal part of human existence? Well, yes. For a lot of people who could be seen to have RSD, they tend to have a lot more of an intense experience with failure and rejection when compared to your average person. It tends to be a lot stronger than your average person. It tends to be a lot more intense. And the threshold for noticing and categorizing something as failure or rejection is a lot lower. So things like vague interactions, vague responses, vague changes in someone's body language, facial expressions, vocal tonality can all cause some level of rejection, feelings of rejection, feelings of failure, even if it's not totally apparent that that's what's happened to most people. It can also be related to a difficulty controlling your reactions to said failure or rejection, meaning that as I said, compared to your average person, these reactions that you have tend to be a lot more out of proportion for the actual situation. You might have heard about RSD mostly in the context of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or certain personality disorders. But today I want to dive into the autism because I feel like there's a lot of reasons why autistic people might be more likely to experience this. But we'll get into that in a second. The thing about rejection-sensitive dysphoria is that it's not a diagnosable condition. It's not in the diagnostic statistical manual for mental health, the DSM. It's something that has been talked about within the psychiatric communities. It's been talked about quite online in terms of the autism, neurodivergent advocacy spaces, particularly on social media. And so it is used to characterize a certain profile for somebody who really, really struggles with that feeling of rejection and those feelings of failure. So what are the proposed symptoms? What can you look out for if you are thinking that, hey, I know other people experience rejection fairly and negatively. It's never a fun thing for a human being to experience, but I do feel like in a lot of instances, when this happens for me, it tends to be a little bit over proportion, even to myself when I look back at it. Well, let's have a look at some of the symptoms. You might be a person who is more easily embarrassed or self-conscious. You might find that any time when you're in a group situation, or if you're meeting someone new, someone who you're not very close to, wherever you're in a class, workplace, anything like that, you may very much overanalyze what's going on. You might make some hiccup during something that you're saying, and it might just feel like it's the end of the world for you. When in reality, it's just a small hiccup. The next symptom is low self-esteem. If you're quite a low self-esteem individual, it's more likely that feelings of failure and rejection impact you a lot more. Another symptom might be a trouble containing emotions when you feel rejected. You might be able to think about the fight flea, freeze, fawn response, fight being that when your adrenaline kicks up, do you turn into a combat situation? Do you run away from that situation? Do you try to make up for it in some way? Do you excessively talk and try to make sure that the situation is good? Or do you freeze? And do you shut down? If you feel any of these in situations when you do experience failure or rejection over the top, mind you, that could be a pointer towards RSD. But it's not always these outward facing reactions, and this is something that I personally experienced when it comes to failure and rejection, particularly in my adolescence, when I was a bit younger in my early 20s. I found that a lot of the reactions that I had to feelings of failure and rejection was less so on the outward side of things, and it was more an internal thing. So I sort of inwardly faced. I kind of looked like it didn't bother me. People would, you know, say that I'm a bit nonchalant about it. But inside, you know, after the facts and maybe for a little bit after, my mood just drops a lot. My self-esteem goes down. It really, really impacts me on kind of a deeper level. It's not something that I experienced at this point in my life, but definitely when I was a bit younger. You might also act a little bit more people pleasing than most people to avoid that feeling of disapproval. You might even turn into a perfectionist in order to satisfy like a very authoritarian boss, someone that you're in a relationship who's, you know, you're not feeling that safe with. You might very much become that kind of people pleaser to avoid those feelings of failure and rejection. Another way that you might go about trying to avoid these feelings is by avoiding circumstances where these could come up. And this could be as small as perhaps going to a social event and trying to make friends, or it could be as big as starting a project or starting a new job or setting up your own business. These things all carry with them different levels of possibility to fail. And if you are a person who really struggles with that, it's obviously going to be a lot more of a daunting thing to start in the first place. You might also feel like you need to be a bit more of a perfectionist. You compensate for your difficulty failing or being rejected for something that you've done, some kind of work that you've done by spending way too much time ironing out the fine details that no one's going to notice. But in your mind, you're trying to reduce the amount of variables possible so that you don't get rejected. You don't feel that feeling of failure. So we've talked a little bit about the signs, the symptoms, whatever you want to call them, of RSD. What about the causes? Are there any actual causes of RSD? And people are not necessarily clear on this. A lot of the hypothesis about why it could happen is likely due to past experiences. Obviously, if you've grown up feeling like failure and rejection is not right, and it's not an okay thing to experience as a human being, it's something that you should avoid at all costs. Or you perhaps have some unfavorable dynamics with friendships or romantic relationships or with parents even, then it's likely that that could be a source of developing RSD. But there have been some discussions about the co-occurring factors in someone developing RSD. It tends to be individuals, as I said before, with ADHD, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, but other personalities and mood disorders too. The hypothesis behind why this might occur is a lot to do with the way that an ADHD brain regulates internal communication, some of the differences in the filters and the regulation of signals within the brain, within the nervous system may not be as active. And so, sometimes perhaps a little bit less inhibited, disinhibited rather. And of course, you know, with the title of this video, I'm going to be talking about autism, but we do have to cover something before we go there. Wait a second for that. Can you treat RSD? We're not totally clear on that either, or at least from what I've seen. A lot of the medications that have been put forward to help people deal with RSD have either been alpha 2 receptor agonists. You might know some medications like clonidine or guanfaxine. I think I said those right. It's very difficult to pronounce the names of drugs. I had got awful time trying to do it at university. But these alpha 2 receptor agonists basically activate those brain areas, making it easier to regulate internal communication. And of course, the more known medications for ADHD, which are the stimulants, things like Adderall, things like Ritalin, if you know about those two, these basically make the brain communicate more effectively. They increase the excitatory neurotransmitters that go through your brain, effectively increasing the ability of those neurons to communicate with each other. There is also the MAO inhibitors. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors, antidepressants is type of antidepressant, and this basically flattens someone's mood profile. You can imagine if someone gets out of control emotionally when experiencing rejection or failure, that flattening out their mood profile is obviously going to reduce the intensity of that emotion. Lastly, bar medication, because that is definitely not probably going to be not everybody's go to when dealing with RSD. Psychotherapy, particularly psychotherapy that focuses on processing rejection and emotional control, can be beneficial to some people. So what about autism, Thomas? You've been talking about RSD about the symptoms and causes and what we can do about it. But where does autism come in here? Well, this is actually not as well researched as the other areas. And indeed, the other areas are not the most heavily researched areas anyway. But RSD can trigger mental health issues, anxiety, depression, eating disorders. There is a very big crossover with autism and mental health conditions, and a lot of crossover between RSD and mental health conditions, and ADHD of course. There is also an aspect of pattern seeking, which I think is, you know, is quite an integral part of an autistic brain. We tend to be very good at lateral thinking, divergent thinking, tying concepts and pieces of information together. And so, if you're very hyper vigilant towards noticing rejection and you're naturally that kind of pattern seeker type brain, you're going to notice some patterns in people's behaviors. And so little things, little changes in people that you've noticed, even if rejection or feelings of failure are not going to come from that might trigger you to feel those feelings in the first place because you're just kind of looking for these signs that you've seen before and saying, okay, if this happens, then I know this is going to happen. And so you're already prepping yourself for it. There is also the past experiences element. So autistic people disproportionately experience a lot of horrible things in life. I say this in a lot of my podcasts and my videos, but type in autism and pretty much any bad thing that can happen to a human being. And it's very likely that you're going to see some statistics that you weren't expecting or at least you will expect it from me saying that. But just in general, you know, might shock you a little bit if you do like doing a research project like I was and seeing these horrible statistics that just reflect your life so well to a point where it just makes you feel less alone, makes you feel less special to some degree, but also, you know, pretty depressing. So those past experiences, a big aspect of it, scarcity is also a really big thing. With being autistic, we tend to experience a lot of negative experiences with people, of course, bullying, discrimination, difficulty finding a partner, difficulty maintaining, finding, making friends, maintaining familial relationships. These are all things that we could find a lot harder than most people. And so sometimes we have a bit more of a negative bias towards our experience, particularly with non autistic people, neurotypicals. And so in our heads, we're already thinking that if, you know, we come across someone who is good and who is showing us interest, perhaps like in a dating scenario, or we're having a workplace who is really heavily considering us as part of perhaps joining the organization and being part of a job role, we might feel like these are far and few between that we're never going to have this opportunity again, or at least it's going to be a year from now, or it's going to be two years or it might be a decade. And so this puts an immense pressure on you to succeed in that moment. And so if you do fail, and you do get rejected, it's going to hit you so much harder. The last thing is the social difficulties with neurotypicals. And I feel like this is a big one because, you know, we do communicate differently. We tend to be a lot more direct instead of indirect with our vocal tonality, body language, facial expressions. We tend to not really enjoy small talk or be good at it in a lot of circumstances because of that. We tend to have a lot of our interests that we're happy to talk about at length, and not really notice if the other person is enjoying listening to us or is wanting to be on something else. And vice versa. So there's a lot of ways that we are different socially to neurotypicals. And that can cause us to have a lot of negative reactions with people, you know, people make assumptions about the way that we are because the way that we are interpreted because of our traits might shift their view on us because you can think of something small like eye contact, like if you don't make as much eye contact with someone, they see you to be less trustworthy, a bit shifty, perhaps not interested in you or what you're having to say. Whereas, like for me, if I'm looking away from somebody, especially if they're talking to me, I'm trying to reduce the amount of sensory input that I'm having in order that I can focus exactly on what they're saying and think about what they're saying to such a more heightened degree. That's just what I'm like. But people might misinterpret that. And there's a lot of ways that neurotypicals can misinterpret our behavior. And to be honest, the other way around too, and that sometimes could indicate that we might be failing in the interaction or we might be, you know, just a few senses away from being rejected. But what can you do about this? You know, you've come across this video, you're learning about RSD, all this stuff, you know, Thomas says it could be something related to autism. There are a few good things in there that I'm sure need to be looked into a bit more in terms of scientific research. But what can you do about this? If you are just absolutely overwhelmed with starting anything new because you're so fearful or talking to anyone new because you're so fearful of being rejected, it's not a good place to be. It really holds you back in life. So one of the top ways that I would suggest is find a good therapist. And this is by no means an easy feat, I just have to be honest. If you're within the general healthcare in the UK, sure, you might, you know, really strike the iron and just find someone who really understands autism and can also help you process these emotions. Likelihood is probably not the best option is to go private, of course, and that would cost money. And you'd have to do that anyway if you were, you know, from countries like America, you'd have to pay for a therapist. What can you look for in a good therapist? You want to find someone who has a knowledge of autism, good tester that I do whenever I'm talking to an autism specialist, ask them about alexifamia. Ask them if they know about that. Because I know that alexifamia is very, very high, like highly comorbid with autism. It's something that a lot of autistic people experience. And it really, really does have lots of impacts when it comes to therapy, because therapy is a lot about emotions and experiences. If you struggle identifying and noticing your own emotions, particularly in the moment, and then tying those two events, things that you're talking about, things that you're thinking about, it's going to make therapy a lot more difficult and it would require some awareness from the therapist. So this is just a good kind of tester that I do. You want to make sure that they understand alexifamia. It's not something that's talked to, taught to every single doctor out there, every single psychotherapist, quite often they, you know, don't necessarily have all the knowledge there, but you really want someone who does. You also want to ideally have someone who is also autistic or at least has experience with people who have lived experience. They have friends they've talked to and delivered therapy to other autistic people in the past and had good results. They have a family member who's autistic that they talk to. They have even a partner who's autistic that, you know, is engaged within the community. And you also want to find someone who will make adjustments for you. You know, perhaps you want to go for online therapy because you found someone good, you know, it's quite hard to find someone who is good with autistic people in terms of psychotherapy. And so you might have to go for something that's a bit more online. You know, does that person like make it mandatory that you have your camera on? Will they let you text while they talk? If that's something that you want, you might not even want that, I understand. But if they can make the adjustments to make you feel the most comfortable when you do this therapy, that is a very good green flag. And of course, one thing that I think every single person on this earth who goes for therapy wants, needs, you get on with them. There's some kind of understanding, you know, you could possibly see yourself being loose friends or acquaintances with this person when you talk to them. Sometimes it might take a little bit of a while for you both to know if the therapy is working, whether you get on with them. But you really do have to have at least some level of like respect for that person and you have to, you know, feel like they understand you to some degree or the connective you or you feel comfortable with them. Those are all really important things. So that's the main thing that I would suggest. I am going to go through some of the ways that I personally dealt with reduction sensitive dysphoria. This is the way that I do it. I'm not saying that this is the gold standard. This isn't a research method. But this is the way that I overcame my RSD. Number one, I gathered a larger sample size. For any of you don't know, I went to university, I did biomedical sciences. There is a lot of statistics involved in that. I learned a lot about how scientific research was made, how facts were proven and disproven. A lot of the time, having a larger sample size of data allows you to be a lot more certain about whether something is right or not. When you don't have a large sample size in terms of people, and a lot of those experience are quite negative, especially when you're just coming up through school, there's kind of adolescent early 20s kind of ages, you're going to have a very large bias towards the negative. You're going to feel like there's no good people out there. You're going to feel very intense feelings of scarcity. One of the best ways to try and overcome that is to try and meet more people, try and see if there is someone out there who just vibes with you, gets on with you. Doesn't necessarily have to be dating context. It could be friends, it could be acquaintances, it could be people within a group. You could just loosely join in with a group. You don't even have to have a one-to-one conversation with someone. You could just be like listening to people talk within a group or listening to other people having conversations. Just gather a better sample size, a bigger sample size of what human beings are like, and you'll undoubtedly, you'll understand that you are right about the negative for a lot of people. Some people don't particularly have the most favorable personality traits, just from my experiences, but there will be a lot of people who do. Once you find those people who do, you'll have a bit more of a grasp on the reality of the situation, and you'll feel less in that feeling of scarcity. Therefore, less intense feelings of failure and rejection because you know that there's more opportunities coming to you. Number two, and this is a lot about confidence, becoming competent and learning to truly value that internally. Now, when I was younger, I used to be quite a successful athlete. I got a lot of medals in terms of national and international level even. If you're from the UK, I went to the Commonwealth, I got a Commonwealth gold, so I was in no shortage of doing well at life. You know, I got into a good university, I got a good degree, but I still felt that difficulty when it came to feelings of failure and rejection, and a lot of that was because I didn't really feel like I won that. I was deserving of the accolades that I gained. And so, you know, learning to both be good in certain areas, but also to value, like, think about all the time that you put in in order to get to that level of competency and genuinely feeling proud about yourself for doing that. It does a lot for your self-esteem, a lot for your, like, level of self-respect towards yourself. It's very much like a muscle that you have to build confidence. You can obviously fake confidence. A lot of people do, they say, you know, fake it till you make it, things like that. I can very easily spot someone who is faking confidence. It's very apparent. You can see it in their body language, it's just very over the top. People who are just truly confident tend to be quite, like, calm. I've been around a lot of martial artists, gyms, boxing gyms, taekwondo gyms. A lot of the really, really good athletes, they tend to be like that. They're pretty chill. They don't necessarily try to, like, force, like, forcefully dominate people or anything like that. They're just cool with themselves. They feel confident in themselves. And that's really a point that you want to get to. You don't want to be putting on this facade of confidence and getting yourself in fights and trying to dominate other people. That is definitely not the way that you want to go. You want to be able to get to a point where you see people on an equal playing field to you. Now, when I first wrote this, I was going to say, you see people lower than you. But that is also not a good way to go about it, because I feel like being able to see other people as equals, whether they are like a CEO of a company, whether they are someone who works at McDonald's, treating people the same, seeing them as equal, I think is a really important thing because it turns less from this action of, all right, I'm really not like a great person. I haven't really had a lot of relationships. I haven't had a lot of friends. I have a lot of negative experiences with people who's going to like me. You are automatically putting yourself on a lower level than the people that you're talking to. So it's going to feel a lot more intense when people do that. And if you're thinking that you're higher than people, as soon as some piece of information comes across that they say all the way that they react, it's equally going to have a bad reaction for you because she'd be like, oh, so I'm not actually better than this person. So seeing people on an equal playing field, it's a really good kind of goal to try and aim for. When you see it as just two humans interacting, seeing if they get on and if they don't, it's good. And if they do, it's good. It does a lot for you. You get to a point, especially when you when you become confident, competent in yourself and therefore feel comfortable where you are, who you are, you seek less validation externally. Now, there is a lot of stuff out there on the internet that says validation is bad. I disagree. I feel like validation is something that should be reserved for people who are very close to you, and especially not strangers, not people that you don't know, that people that don't know you. If someone in my life was to say, oh, Tom, you're a horrible person. You look like you look terrible. That's going to have a bit more of an impact on me emotionally and going to make me feel a bit worse than if it was, you know, some random on YouTube who's watched like 60 seconds of my video and made a comment. So there's levels to it. And I think once you can stop trying to validate yourself through the attention or the positive affirmation from strangers, you're in a good place. And lastly, grounding and reality checks. This is a really, really important thing. This pulls you back to earth when your when your brain is blown out with failure and rejection and you're feeling like your world is collapsing and you're never going to find anyone. No one's going to like you and you're always going to do badly and you know, everything like that. You really want to have these in your back pocket, these things to remember, these grounding reality checks, whatever you want to call them, what do they look like? Well, it's recognizing that the world is a little bit more complex than what you perceive it as. There is a lot of factors that go into someone failing and also a lot of factors that go into someone getting rejected. This means if you are being rejected by somebody, you assume that all of the blame is on you, that you're not good enough, that you've done something wrong. There is an element of that, obviously, like in a lot of situations. And it's something that you can improve in terms of communicating well with other people. But to a certain point, it's not necessarily all on you. There's a lot of different factors involved. What headspace are they in? Is their mental health good? They could be feeling really, really bad at the moment, really low self esteem. They could be feeling exactly how you do and wanting to protect themselves. They could just be a genuinely quite narcissistic person. There's lots of different factors involved in that and personal preferences. Perhaps they're not the type of person that they find attractive. You're not the type of person that they'd usually be friends with. You might not have the similar hobbies that they really like in friends. You might have differing communication styles, which is a big thing for autistic people. The environment, there's a difference between going up and asking someone at it on a date or to go out and do something. It was one of those events where people go on singles nights. I saw something recently about singles nights. I feel like those things have really gone out of fashion just from some of the stuff that I've seen online. But you're more likely to get a positive response in those circumstances because people are looking to date the like you know that they are. Whereas if you just approach someone behind them when they're doing their shopping and they're trying to get home from work and they've got something on in a bit, perhaps that's not the best time to start a conversation with somebody at the supermarket checkout. Might not be the best idea. That's a factor to consider. They might also have biases. They might be quite discriminatory in a sense. It's something that some people experience. They're not always outward about it. They may know that you're autistic. They may not want to say that they don't want to date you or be friends with you because you're autistic because that would be ableist, not cool in the eyes of most people. But they might feel like that way and that's not your fault. They may also lack autism awareness education. A lot of people do. It's not something that's embedded within the school system for people to know this stuff or embedded within workplaces or within mainstream media to really understand what autism is, how it comes across, some of the misconceptions, the stigmas. The thing that I want to get across with this slide is that there are so many things involved in this that is not related to you. This isn't saying, hey, look, blame everything else. There's nothing that you could do differently in this situation. This is just bringing a bit back to reality. This is saying, okay, perhaps there is a little bit or quite a bit from my end, but perhaps there's other stuff involved in that and I should not feel as rejected in that sense. It could just be their loss. Sometimes you do have to have that kind of attitude in order to get used to feelings of failure and rejection. There's a lot of guys that I've seen out there who have got over their feelings, their fear of being rejected by approaching lots of women and asking them for dates and getting rejected. This is something that I've seen online and it's definitely true. The more experience that you have with it, the more that you don't necessarily live in scarcity in any circumstance, whether it is getting jobs, whether it's friends, whether it's dating, you will feel a lot better. But that is something to develop in time. These are things that I've developed in the long term. It's not like one day I've decided, flip, I'm going to stop doing this. A lot of changes to your thought patterns, the way that you view things. If you're trying to make some really big change about yourself, it's obviously going to take a lot more time to change, to develop, and that's cool. It's just about you see yourself slip in, bring yourself back to reality, focus on getting competent, gathering a large sample size. All of these things, if you do those, I'm sure that you'll get to a point where you're like me, where I don't feel those intense feelings when it comes to failing rejection. It does happen, of course, not going to lie. It's not like something that goes away, but it's not overbearingly bad. It's not like my life's ended. So let's think about some of the caveats to what I'm talking about before we end up this video. It may feel like you're shifting that kind of personal accountability that I was talking about. The thing is in this circumstances, you are already taking way too much accountability for the outcome of this. If you don't, why are you watching this video? Okay, you might be interested in what I have to say, but if you are experiencing RSD, it's very likely that you need to shift some of the accountability away from yourself at least to a little bit and take on those very possibilities of what might be going on behind the scenes. It's not a free pass to treat others badly or feel depressed. It's just understanding the situation. This doesn't mean that you can be like, oh, okay, yeah, I've not got any scarcity. I hate everybody. You know, they should like me. And the only reason why they don't is because of all these other circumstances. You know, you just get you going the opposite way, where you need to be. And also don't feel depressed that it's, you're not always going to succeed in situations. This is not a video about how to stop being rejected, stop experiencing failure. That is very dependent on lots of different factors. Some of those factors being yourself, you know, what you do. So it's not about being rejected less. It's just about processing and reacting to failure and rejection properly and not letting it consume you. Dating, workplaces, platonic, familial relationships, obviously will have their individual nuances when it comes to feelings of rejection and failures. So obviously going to be very dependent on the person, the situation, but all in all, I really hope that you have enjoyed this video. And if you have, make sure to leave it a like, drop me a subscribe if you want to see some more stuff from me. And if you want me to continue making these videos, I'm trying to grow my channel, trying to get myself out there, trying new stuff, doing these videos as one of them. And if you want me to continue doing that, you can support me for as little as 99p a month for YouTube membership. You get a little infinity badge next to your name that you can use when you comment, when you join the lives. And I would really appreciate that. Follow the social medias and I'll see you guys in another video. Check this, check this video out as well. That's, that's a cool video. Definitely. See you later.