The Cruelty of Rejection Sensitivity

The average person does not like rejection. It is a difficult, unpleasant part of life for most of us, and a large part of adult emotional development is devoted to learning to tolerate it as the unavoidable downside of risk-taking and growth, particularly in social and romantic contexts. Most people do in fact experience some prickliness and poor behavior when they are rejected, especially before they grow into a bit more emotional regulation. Almost everyone experiences the fundamental attribution error to some extent - a tendency to excuse your own negative behaviors as being passing errors of judgment, while the negative behaviors of others are attributed to fundamental ongoing character flaws. To use a Russell conjugation, I’m tired, you’re cranky, he/she/it is a bitch.

Some people struggle a great deal more with rejection, with noticeably greater difficulty managing other people’s disapproval. There’s a clinical term for this - rejection sensitive dysphoria, noted to be prevalent in people with disorders from autism to adhd to narcissism and borderline personality disorder. I’m going to talk about the (very) subclinical manifestation of this pattern, largely based on my experience with a loved one in my immediate family and some of my own experiences observing my own reactions to rejection.

What’s interesting is that people with this trait have heavy overlap with the meme autism crowd described in a previous post: smart and given to difficulty with the nonverbal. Where these two groups overlap, that immunity to social signals has a major exception: they tend to be masters of detecting rejection of any kind, perhaps especially nonverbal, in others. The slightest flatness in tone of voice, the briefest glance away, the merest hint of tense posture will stand out to them in vivid color if it appears to point to disagreement with them, to say nothing of outright disapproval

A foundational mechanism at work: rejection sensitivity struggles with the idea that others think negative thoughts or have negative feelings about them, even if combined with positive ones. A rejection sensitive person knows their own goodness and their own good intentions, and their tendency toward black-and-white thinking results in a struggle with the idea that they have any negative qualities at all.

This leads to a natural if somewhat subconscious belief that other people’s negative perspectives are sinful, morally wrong behavior. Such people are often capable of intellectually engaging with the idea that they’re not perfect, and even correctly identify some of their flaws. The emotional sensitivity remains, however, making it much rarer for them to notice when those negative qualities are hampering them or their perspective in real time.

This is sort of a cruel fact of birth, nurture, or other, in my opinion. Rejection sensitive people, who are exquisitely sensitive to the consequences of their failings in the first place, struggle to recognize their own flaws sufficient to deal with them, and they will actively push away others who attempt to override this system, entrenching it.

People with rejection sensitivity tend to manage the spotlight of success, prestige, and high status poorly. Their model that people who experience negative thoughts about them are morally in the wrong leads to punishing even legitimate criticism, which is much more consistently directed at those with high status (as they tend to get more responses of all kinds than lower status people). They tend to lash out at those with lower status should such people display a detectable degree of discomfort or displeasure about the differential between them. To outsiders, this can look like a somewhat monstrous abuse of their position. It’s not enough that they’re unusually good at something, they also need to thought police everyone around them into agreeing that it is the best possible outcome that they’re high status where others are not.

This is not at all the true intent of the person with the rejection sensitivity - all they know is that they feel being high status should be treated as good by other people, and that they are innocent if not superior in achieving said high status. When other people break with what they believe to be this straightforward moral understanding, the rejection sensitive high status person concludes that this lower status person is cruel and trying to punish them for their innocence and high capacity, and said high status person feels more than justified in punishing them in return.

Their sensitivity to all forms of negative feeling and tendency to over-interpret available data does, however, have the consequence of little to no meaningful compassion for others who are unhappy being low status. Indeed, their model usually holds that feeling like that is somewhere between dishonest, indulgent, and cucked. This is perhaps because on some level they know that their way to manage being low status is to resent those above them, and they see this in others even when they’re the ones who’ve succeeded. Their sensitivity to negative emotional tells and their belief that such things are usually if not always malicious means that only losers who betray no distress about their status will be treated with consideration.

Their emotional stance on negative feedback gives others an ample degree of power over them and especially others with consistent negative affect, putting them in a sort of perpetual cycle of victimhood, especially at the hands of others less fortunate than themselves. They tend to underestimate the harm they do to those who already aren’t equally blessed by life, and overestimate the harm such people do to them.

All of this is downstream of poor emotional regulation, a hallmark of people in this sort of meme autism class. It takes an ability to self-soothe to be able to calm down about negative feedback and sort out why people might say it - neutrally, not resentfully - and even more development to be able to improve on flaws and calmly discard the rest. Even the basics of not reacting strongly and negatively to subtle indications of disapproval require substantial emotional management. This can be developed, even under these conditions, but it’s undeniably harder.

This problem is self-reinforcing on multiple levels. Other people tend to notice a rejection sensitive stance, sometimes before such people even open their mouths. Rejection sensitive people tend to vibe defensive and easy to upset, withdrawn, and in extreme cases, resentful. Overall, the energy is not dissimilar from a stray dog with permanently raised hackles. It is, to put it mildly, the opposite of an inviting personal and energetic stance.

These nonverbal vibes code for “unpredictable, unpleasant, and potentially socially dangerous” to the average person, leading to avoidance and efforts to push away the rejection sensitive person. This only makes said person more convinced that others reject them capriciously, harmfully, and immorally, and it increases the rejection sensitivity.

I do think that there’s reason for hope. The social world benefits from the same high analytical standards that scientific and philosophical claims do in the rationalist world: we have a lot of biases that we come by honestly, and we and everyone around us benefit when we actively reduce their grasp on our worldview. This includes our view of ourselves and our view of other people.

I’ve used the same principles for evaluating my intuitions on abstract claims as I have for evaluating intuitions about other people, especially around rejection. Steel man the opposition. Acknowledge the limits of what you can prove, what you have real evidence for. Consider the outcomes of taking this or that position - an assumption that people are positively motivated vs. one where they are actively hostile to you. Experiment - try changing your approaches to the degree that you’re comfortable with. Cycles that were vicious can be turned to be equally virtuous, albeit not without significant effort. Anecdotally, I have considerably better social outcomes when I expect the best of other people than under other circumstances.

Make no mistake, however - this trait is an incredibly unfair one to have to learn to overcome. Few things seem more painful to me than a self-reinforcing self-isolating predisposition, and I do think it is to some degree recoverable.