Healing from Rejection Sensitivity with Somatic Therapy

If you completely spiral everytime…

• You receive negative or constructive feedback

• You’re not sure what other people think of you

• That person you want to hang out with doesn’t text back

...You might be struggling with what’s called rejection sensitivity, or rejection sensitive dysphoria.

This tends to be really common for people who are neurodivergent or hold other marginalilzed identities, because you’ve likely had a lot of experiences where you were misunderstood, mischaracterized, or outright rejected for being different. It’s also common for those with complex PTSD and developmental trauma, due to repeated experiences of being misattuned or emotionally abandoned early on in your life.

As a result, you might struggle with chronic social anxiety, fall into people pleasing patterns, or even avoid social situations at all costs. And at the end of the day, you’re left unsatisfied with your life because you’re lonely or afraid to go for some of the things you really want.

Let’s talk about what rejection sensitivity is, where it comes from, and how experiential somatic therapy can help.

What is Rejection Sensitivity?

First of all, I prefer the term rejection sensitivity to rejection sensitive dysphoria, because the term dysphoria is overly pathologizing. In reality, this emotional pattern comes from somewhere – such as persistent experiences of feeling misunderstood or abandoned.

As result, your brain internalizes these experiences, creates a narrative about what this means about who you are or how the world is, and uses this information to make predictions about or respond during future interactions.

This process of internalizing and making meaning often happens in the deep layers of the brain, where it’s not always conscious. While there are often aspects of rejection sensitivity that are conscious – or explicit, in neuroscience language – there are also aspects that take place in the implicit memory areas of the brain.

Implicit memory is an adaptive function of the brain that allows you to recall how to respond in situations and navigate the world without deliberate conscious effort. This is helpful for a number of daily tasks, from tying your shoes, riding a bike, to emotional reactions.

Emotional reactions rely on stored information in the brain. Your response is shaped by pasts experiences that determine whether you’ve come to understand something as safe, dangerous, an opportunity for connection, or a time to defend yourself. This could include that happy response you get when you see a fuzzy animal or your own child. It can also include a sense of dread when you see your ex-boyfriend in public or fear when a huge spider creeps into your kitchen.

Similarly, when you hear certain words (like, “I can’t hang out today”) or see certain facial expressions (even those you aren’t consciously clocking), for instance, your brain may have learned that those things mean you aren’t liked or wanted.

The Challenge with Rejection Sensitivity

The challenge with rejection sensitivity is that, while there are certainly times when you are accurately reading a situation, your brain often errs on the side of caution – this means that there may be many times when you are not being rejected, when someone likes you but simply can’t hang out, or even when someone wants to set a boundary with you from a place of care, but your brain interprets it as more emotionally or even physically dangerous than it is.

This is actually an emotional flashback. Flashbacks aren't just scenes and images that suddenly intrude into your mind like you see in the movies -- flashbacks can also show up as thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns.

How to Heal from Rejection Sensitivity

Healing from rejection sensitivity is two-fold.

Growing Your Nervous System Capacity to Feel Hard Feelings

Firstly, it doesn’t mean that you’ll never feel rejected or never feel sensitive to how others view you. You are human, and it is normal to want to be liked and to be sad when someone doesn’t respond in the way you’d hoped.

Experiential therapies, like somatics, can help you to grow your nervous system capacity, so that when you feel those hard feelings it doesn’t feel like you’re absolutely going to die. In somatic therapy, we can work on developing coping resources - some that may change how you feel, and some that will feel supportive in those times when you just can’t shake the feeling. 

Using these resources can help your brain to stay in or move into an integrated state. This means that when those feelings come up, it won’t feel like you’re drowning in them without a life guard in sight. It means that you’ll be able to notice the feeling you’re having, but differentiate from it enough that it will be like standing on the edge of the pool, seeing the water, dipping your toe in, but able to hold the rest of the landscape in your line of vision.

Without this ability, rejection sensitivity can pull you under the water – or take over the steering wheel, if another metaphor works better for you. This is because your brain is in an unintegrated state. It’s fixated on the danger, and desperate to get away from it.

With this ability, you can notice the feeling, pause, decide how to respond, and trust that the feeling isn’t the whole story and won’t last forever. This is how you develop self-trust and resilience – once you know that you can feel a feeling without dying, you unlock a whole new level of freedom to explore parts of life that previously felt too scary.

Changing the Narrative that Something is Wrong with You

As you grow your nervous system capacity for hard feelings and shift toward a more integrated brain state, it’s like getting a more birds eye view of the situation. When this happens, you can start to detach the hard feeling from what it means about you (e.g. “I’m unlikeable” or “I’m abandonable) or the world (e.g. “The world is unsafe” or “People are always mean).

In therapy with me, I use brain-based somatic methods to help guide you through a process called memory reconsolidation. This process helps your brain to understand that while you may have been abandoned as a child or rejected by a past partner, that doesn’t mean that you are inherently abandonable or that you will never find love again.

Doing this work in a therapeutic setting is important because oftentimes, you may know this intellectually, but that intellectual understanding hasn't yet reached those deeper, more emotional layers of your brain. I can walk you through processes that will help your brain integrate this information so you can finally feel less triggered and stop having your whole week derailed by one passing comment. You can learn more about that process here.

What Happens When You Heal from Rejection Sensitivity

Reading Situations More Accurately 

The ability to feel feelings without drowning in them, to see situations from a more birds-eye view, is extremely helpful in reading situations more accurately. So when someone says or does something, your automatic response isn’t guided by those past experiences of being rejected and abandoned. 

Instead, you can remain open and curious – maybe someone is just having a bad day, maybe this isn’t actually a person you want to be friends with, maybe they were rude because they were afraid you wouldn’t hear them and just need reassurance that you respect their needs.

Stop People Pleasing, Acting Out, and Shutting Down and Finally Make Friends

Often, the clients I work with who are sensitive to rejection fall into one of three camps:

• They compulsively people please, doing anything to make the other person like them, even overriding their own needs or changing who they are.

• They push for the other person to understand them better, get defensive, and trapped in arguments.

• They shutdown, withdraw, and isolate because it feels like relationships just aren’t worth it.

Or, it might feel like you adopt all of these defense mechanisms, depending on the situation.

The work we can do in somatic therapy – building nervous system capacity, more accurate discernment, and memory reconsolidation – are the foundation for changing the patterns you get stuck in. These aspects of therapy are like scaffolding, so you can feel stable, supported, emboldened to practice new patterns in your relationships. 

That means:

• Instead of agreeing to a plan that sounds miserable to you, just for the sake of being “easy” or liked, you can say “actually, how about this?”

• Instead of trying to make your point understood, you can choose whether you even want to be in a relationship with someone who misunderstands you 

  • OR you can model more healthy conflict practices by seeking to understand their point and co-regulating with their nervous system

• Instead of deciding that you’re done with relationships and going lone-wolf mode, you can feel resilient to try out a new activity where you might meet new people who share your interests

Freedom from Rejection Sensitivity

I know you might be reading this and wondering if this is actually possible for you. I want you to know I work with people like you every day, people who have been people pleasers their whole lives, or never felt good enough to put themselves out there on a dating app.

The reality is that your brain is always learning and adapting and changing. The same way these automatic patterns of sensitivity have been conditioned and embedded into your brain is the same way we can recondition your brain and rewire your automatic thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns.

I offer free 20-minute consultations to share more about what somatic therapy sessions with me are like and help you decide if this is the right fit for you. Book your consultation today - I look forward to seeing your name pop up on my calendar!

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