Hi Folks,

I would like to share a little about 'rejection sensitivity', both from my observations of others and (sadly) from my own experience. I'd like to know what experiences others on Psych Central have had on this painful subject.

As I understand it, the person with rejection sensitivity has the unshakeable belief that they are unacceptable. This is a core belief which thay think is a fact about themselves (albeit carefully hidden) and which informs their behaviour.

The person with RS will do anything to avoid the pain of being rejected again, and I say 'again' because I believe that this condition arises from being rejected as an infant, and maybe persistently rejected, by a parent. The pain of this experience is buried in the subconscious, but keeps bubbling up in the form of fear of rejection.

Anyway, this is my belief, and fits with my rather useless coping strategies. I have observed these strategies in others, and used them myself, and they seem to be built around the terror of experiencing rejection.

The strategies are:

People pleasing - trying to be so nice that you won't get rejected, which is a tiring and false attitude, which fails at the first hint of rejection because, of course, other people are not playing the same game.

Testing relationships - the opposite of people pleasing. The RS person deliberately pushes other people to reject them, by unreasonable behaviour, and eventually they do, which confirms the RS person's belief that they are unacceptable.

Avoiding reality - This can go from slight to extreme. One is, never extending social invitations but waiting for other's to make the move, another - not applying for jobs or promotions, another - avoiding intimate relationships, and finally - avoiding ALL relationships. This is crippling stuff, which I have been through myself at various stages of life.

The problem is that these strategies are all forms of 'self rejection' as they are firmly based on the belief that the person is unacceptable, that if there is going to be any rejection happening it will be happening to them.

As hard as it is, my belief is that that the only useful strategy in RS is to take some more rejection. This is an agonising experience, (certainly for me), and it seems a lot to ask from someone who is hurting already, but it has something in common with other psychological strategies, such as CBT, as it involves facing up to the problem at the core, facing the fear.

Eventually we might come to realise that a particular friendship didn't work out because the other person lacked some empathy, or that we didn't get that job because we didn't have just the right qualifications, or someone cut us because they were socially narrow minded. These are painful experiences which most people suffer at some time or another, but they are not predicated on the fact that we are peculiarly and uniquely unacceptable.

That's the belief that make the RS life so hellish, and it is false.

I'd like to hear what people feel about this.

Cheers, Myzen.