Rejection Sensitivity: Why You Overthink Everything

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. I want to talk to you today about something that a lot of you are experiencing, and I mean a lot of you that are watching this. But you may not have a name for it. And that is rejection sensitivity. It's that feeling when your wife responds to your long text message with, "K." It's when your boss says to you, "John, you and I need to talk later." It's when your wife doesn't seem as receptive to your hug like you think she should be. Your brain immediately starts spinning out of control. Your heart starts racing. Your stomach drops. And you immediately start thinking, "What did I do to cause this?" And what can I do to fix it? Yeah, that. That's rejection sensitivity. There seems to be two people in this world. One is people that seem to live life on what I call hard mode. They're always thinking, did I say something wrong? Should I have done that or not? Did I just piss her off? Did I overshare to my date? Is my boss mad at me? Oh, I shouldn't have brought that up. Or should I? I don't know. And then there's the other group of people that say, You know, if I piss them off or whatever, that's on them, not me. If they don't like me, oh well. They just screw up and they laugh it off. They don't have to give a PowerPoint presentation to explain their point. They're not sitting up at 2:00 AM wondering what their wife's K response to their text message means. From the outside to the rest of us, it looks like they are playing life on easy mode. Rejection sensitivity is basically this. Your brain seems to be finely attuned to the fact that people may leave you, they may disapprove of you, they may abandon you. It's not just simply, "I don't like to be rejected," because nobody likes to be rejected. What we're talking about is the constant expectation of being rejected. It's seeing rejection where it may not even exist. It's emotionally and behaviorally overreacting to what may be a very innocuous situation. And yes, again, this applies to a lot of you. I can't tell you how many guys have told me that my wife didn't react to my hug in the right way. I think she's cheating on me. That ain't good, dude. If you are one of those neurodivergent guys— ADHD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder— you may already be aware of this phenomenon. They have a name for it called rejection sensitivity dysphoria, or RSD. A lot of you watching this, whether you know it or not, you are in fact neurodivergent. So a lot of what I'm about to say in this video will sound very, very familiar to you. This rejection sensitivity didn't just start out of the blue one day like a lot of you think. It's not because that one woman didn't respond to your text right away. It all goes back to— yes, like I say in countless other videos, this all goes back to what you experienced as a child. A lot of you unfortunately grew up in households as a child where one of your parents set the tone for everyone else. You were never quite sure which version of mom or dad was gonna walk in the door that day. They gonna be happy? They gonna be mad? They gonna be drunk? Are they gonna be explosive? So what does a smart little sensitive kid do in those situations? He learns how to read the room and read people. He recognizes the sound of those footsteps as the parent is coming to the door. He recognizes how they shut the door a certain way when they're mad. He recognizes that certain look on their face. He recognizes how they set their keys down when they're mad after a long day at work. And within a few seconds, you realize as a kid, okay, time to be invisible. You learn to not rock the boat. You learn to not have emotional needs as a kid. You learn not to bring up stuff that might upset them. And unfortunately, you learn that if they are mad, it's probably your fault. That hypervigilance of yours doesn't necessarily mean that you are broken All that is is your nervous system trying to keep you safe in a very shitty environment. The problem is, is that while it may have worked back then when you were a little kid, what it's doing now is absolutely wrecking your relationships with the opposite sex. Let's break down the 3 main parts of rejection sensitivity that you may be experiencing. Number 1, anxious expectation. You go into every interaction with a thought of I'm probably going to screw this up. And because of that, you overthink every little thing you do. You overthink that text message you just sent. You start rehearsing conversations in your head. You start rewriting the things that you said while you're still talking to the other person. You are not relaxed. You are not present in the moment. You're constantly assessing the threats. Number 2, negative interpretation of very neutral situations. Someone doesn't text you back for 6 hours. A normal brain, so to speak, says, "Eh, they must be busy." Your rejection-sensitive brain says, "They're either mad at me, I pushed them too hard, I said too much, I'm annoying, or eh, I knew it, they don't like me after all." Your wife is a little quiet one night. A normal brain says, "She's tired, she's overwhelmed, she's just having a shitty day." Your rejection-sensitive brain says, She's disgusted by me. She's thinking about leaving me. She's cheating on me. This is all my fault. These very neutral, innocuous events get filtered through the lens of I am the problem. Number 3, emotional and behavioral overreaction. Because your brain is always, you know, pulling the fire alarm, so to speak, your body reacts like this is an emergency. And so you have panic and shame and an extreme urge to fix. So what do you do in these cases? You send 8 follow-up text messages. You just apologize for even existing. You buy flowers, you buy gifts, you do these grand gestures of appreciation. You over-explain your side of the story in a big 900-word text message. From the outside to everyone else, that looks very needy, very clingy. And very weird. But to you on the inside, in your very rejection-sensitive brain, it feels like, "If I don't do this, I will lose everything." So let's play out some scenarios of how this shows up in your real day-to-day life. A lot of you can probably relate to these exact situations. I know this because I hear it every day from the guys that I coach one-on-one, and you can learn more about coaching at help4men.com. Let's say you're one of these guys in kind of a dead bedroom or sexless marriage situation. What you want to say to your wife is, "Hey, I miss you. I miss us. Let's work on, you know, bridging the gap between the two of us and getting back together again." But your rejection-sensitive brain says, "If I bring this up, I'm going to scare her away. She's going to get mad at me. She's going to once again tell me that that's the only thing I ever think about. She'll probably shut down for another week or two. I'm just going to prove to her that I'm very unlovable." So what a lot of you guys do is you shut your mouth and you try to out-nice the situation. You buy more gifts, you do more chores, you stop initiating any kind of intimacy, but all you're doing is just bottling up an energy that is so strong and so forceful that eventually it explodes. And you have the big inevitable meltdown. All she sees is a guy who is very scared of her reactions, a guy that doesn't stand up for himself, a guy who apologizes just for having needs, and a guy who eventually blows his top. So he's kind of scary. He's unpredictable. So you see the same thing at work. When your boss says to you, "Hey, I wanna talk to you later this afternoon," you start freaking out. And then you preemptively send the guy this long, like 8-page email over-explaining something that the guy frankly didn't even ask about. And then you walk into this meeting already like in apology mode. Here's the really dark and twisted part of all of this. Your rejection sensitivity, you over-explaining, you taking on the burden and the blame for everything, that makes you a magnet, a big target for narcissistic and abusive people. For a lot of you looking back at your past and your negative dysfunctional childhoods, that avoiding, that shrinking away, that over-apologizing to your parent, it worked for one reason. Your parent wasn't going anywhere. They may be really toxic and broken individuals that probably shouldn't be a parent to begin with, but at least they're going to be there tomorrow. You could go hide in your room and the relationship, you know, between you and the parent, it still exists. But in adult relationships, you and your spouse, for example, it doesn't work that way. When you withdraw from people, they just drift away from you. If you never speak up, they assume that you're fine. If you over-apologize for things that aren't your fault, people tend to take advantage of you for that. And if you constantly chase after people and seek reassurance, you're gonna push them away. Those people will feel very smothered by you. They'll think you're some kind of weirdo. So basically, you learned to swim, so to speak, with like a life vest on as a kid. But now the life vest is gone. And you're out there in deep water wondering why you keep sinking and why you keep breathing in water and why you're drowning. So there's nothing really wrong, per se, with your desire to connect to people. What's wrong is that old software that you got running in your computer. So what do you do about all this? Let's look at some really practical ways to approach this. Number 1, you need to start collecting new data. Right now, your brain is operating on an old broken childhood operating system, so to speak. What it says is, "If I upset people, I am not safe." What you need is new adult data. That means deliberately putting yourself in small, low-stakes situations. And then you let these small, low-stakes situations just be what they are, a neutral nothing thing. You don't try to be the funniest guy in the party. You don't try to overshare your whole life story with the guy next to you. But at the same time, you don't like sit in a corner and disappear from everybody. You just show up and be okay. Be okay with yourself and then leave. Over time, your nervous system learns, "Ah, I guess I'm okay. I guess I'm okay just being me without worry of, you know, crushing it and becoming the best guy in the room or shrinking down and being nothing and being destroyed in the process." What that does is it turns down that anxious expectation, you know, down a few notches. Number 2: Challenge your automatic story. When something happens, ask yourself this: What are 3 other explanations that don't involve me being completely at fault here? That don't involve me being a complete screw-up? So, in other words, she doesn't text you back, so then you say to yourself, maybe she's just really busy. Maybe she saw my message and in her head she replied, but she forgot to actually type a message to me. This is really common, by the way. Maybe she's overwhelmed right now and she doesn't really have time to get back to me. And that has nothing to do with me. By the way, you don't have to, you know, actually believe all of these right off the bat. You're just going through the reps, so to speak. You are building a new habit, and you are not putting yourself up on the proverbial cross. Number 3: Delay your reaction. This one is huge. When you feel that intense need to, quote, fix the situation right now, you don't text them, You don't send the big wall of apology. You don't send the gift. And you don't launch into a massive explanation. You give it time. Give it the afternoon. Give it an hour. Give it just 10 minutes. But you tell yourself, "I am not allowed to respond in a state of panic." You know what? You can actually type out a big, long explanation or apology message and put it like in the Notes app in your phone. And then you look at it and you look at it with a new set of eyes and you say, "Would I send this message to somebody that I respect?" 9 times outta 10, you know what? You're gonna say, "No, and I'm kind of glad I didn't send that." Number 4, practice self-compassion as opposed to self-attack. I know this sounds really fluffy and annoying, but bear with me here. Right now, your inner voice is saying, "Of course they pulled back. Of course they're rejecting me." I'm too much. I'm an idiot. I'm a burden to people. I always screw up. But you cannot build a solid, attractive, masculine version of yourself if that's at baseline what your programming is. But when you have those little moments of panic, breathe slowly, take a timeout. I've talked about box breathing in another video of mine. And say to yourself, all right, I'm feeling it. This sucks. It is what it is. But I'm not a monster here. I'm not some idiot. I'm just learning. You do this enough times, you get enough reps under your belt, it goes from I am bad to I'm just feeling bad in the moment. There's a huge difference there. And number 5, get help in the right kind of environment. Therapy for a lot of people with the right kind of therapist certainly helps, especially if you're dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, Borderline personality, bipolar, you know, all that fun stuff. But a lot of you guys don't get what I call like live, real-world reps in the right kind of environment. And that's exactly why I created the Brotherhood, a private support community for men only. And you can learn more at help4men.com/join. You say or do something awkward, nobody like kicks you out of the group. Nobody makes fun of you. We give you valuable, constructive feedback. You share something raw, and instead of getting rejected or laughed at, you know what you get? Yeah, me too, dude. Been there, done that. Let me tell you what I did. You practice setting boundaries, and nobody's going to explode and call you an idiot. You know what you get to experience? I shared my real me, my real thoughts, my real insecurities. And they didn't leave me. Whether it's with our group, with another group, or whatever it may be, that is invaluable. That experience of being able to share and be genuine and basically practice being seen and being heard and not rejected, that is a real game changer for those that suffer from rejection sensitivity. So guys, if any of this hits home for you, I want you to hear this really clearly. You are not defective just because you're kind of spinning out of control because of a text or a lack of text from your loved one. You are not weak because your wife's cold shoulder really wrecked your day or your week or your month. You are not less of a man because rejection makes you feel really weak or makes you hearken back to some childhood baggage of yours. You are very much trained by your environment, by your background to act and respond in the way that you are. You learned to survive by predicting bad things and then taking the blame for them. And the good news is that training can in fact be unlearned. It takes awareness of what your brain is doing, new experiences that contradict the old story, some courage to sit in discomfort as opposed to trying to fix it right away, and then support from other people. People who have been there and done that. They get it, and they're not gonna punish you for your feelings. If you want a place to dig into this whole concept of rebuilding from the ground up and retraining yourself, may I suggest my new book, "Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man." All members of the brotherhood get this in audiobook format as well as PDF format for no additional charge. But you can also find this in paperback as well as hard copy version on Amazon. You can learn more at readrebuild.com. So guys, once again, you don't have to go through life on hard mode. You just have to be aware that your little scared 6-year-old boy strategy is not the strategy for life going forward.