And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls Podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and this episode is all about rejection sensitivity. And if you're ready, We'll start the show!

Alright there? How are you? Have you been up to much since I spoke to you last? Oh, what have I been doing? Oh, thanks for asking. Podcasts! And that's about it, really. Me and Fiona are recording season two of Therapy Natters now, so that'll be out soon. We want to get half a dozen or so recorded in advance so we don't have to rush them out.

Season one, we recorded them on the Friday and I edited them over the weekend and then put them out on the Wednesday, so it was a bit of a rush. Made having a week off hard, so we're getting a few in the bag ready this time in advance. We were unsure whether it would take off, but we've had loads of positive feedback about Therapy Natters, so we're definitely going to continue it for as long as we can.

It doesn't get as many listeners as this one does, but then this show I've been doing now for nearly 15 years, so comparing the two just wouldn't be fair. But then aren't all comparisons unfair? Really? This week I was catching up on the five minute podcasts that I make for Fridays, little bonus ones.

People seem to like those, so although it's a bit of a hassle because I video them as well and stick them on YouTube, I think it's worth it. Subscribe to me on YouTube if you like and you get to see my cheesy face, not just listen to my cheesy voice. Link is in the show notes along , with all the other different things that I get up to in the social media world.

But, despite having thousands of listens to my audio podcast, my demographic isn't YouTube. Not really. So I hardly get any views on there. Because you've already heard the podcast in your car or whatever. So you're not going to listen to it again. And I get it. So the numbers, they aren't really relevant. And I know it shouldn't matter. I know it doesn't matter. It doesn't. I make audio podcasts, so not having as many YouTube views is how it should be. But there is a slight feeling of rejection, which is totally normal. Like I often say, nothing's a problem unless it causes problems. When clients talk to me about this, though, I do hear a different side because to a lot of people opening yourself up to the possibility of rejection is not just outside of their comfort zone, you might as well be asking them to Skydive without a parachute.

It's terrifying. Now the extremes of it can be a personality disorder. And I get that having labels can help people to see that they're not alone in feeling the way that they feel. But labelling people as having borderline personality disorder, or emotionally unstable personality disorder, sounds awful.

And to me, the idea of Making these labels is to help people to realise that they're not broken, that their issue is so common, it's got a name. And I like that there's been a push in the UK and Ireland to stop calling it borderline, because obviously anyone diagnosed with it is going to ask, Why is it called borderline?

And the answer is because the symptoms border on a diagnosis of psychosis, as if the patient is borderline delusional. But emotionally unstable personality disorder? That isn't much better, is it, really? It still makes people sound broken. And I think it's because labelling anyone with a personality disorder, whether that's me, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder is different to a balance disorder, a thyroid disorder, a hearing disorder. Because a diagnosis of something wrong with our body seems to have far less of an impact than a diagnosis of something wrong with who we are as a person. Imagine meeting someone and you learn that there's something disorderly about their hearing, their balance, or their thyroid.

How easy is it to accept that, and them? You just accept them. I'm not sure it's as easy to accept someone with a label of something disorderly about their personality, because people think that their personality is set in stone, written in the stars. Spoiler! No, it's not. Only half of our personality traits are genetic traits.

That's been seen in multiple studies over the years. And even then, our environment can switch these genes on and off. But what's the alternative? If we don't call them personality disorders, what do we call them? Maybe it's not the name that needs to change, though. Maybe it's people's attitudes. Maybe it's the stigma of having something disorderly about the way that we think and feel that needs to change.

That way, more people can be diagnosed if they have a problem, rather than think that they're going crazy and hide away from everybody. Would it help to call EUPD and BPD something else? I don't know. But if it was to change, I think a more accurate title would be something to do with rejection sensitivity because that's the foundations to a lot of these issues.

I don't want to see these experiments done, but you can imagine the effects of associating pain with a stimulus. Think about a young dog with a squeaky toy. It loves that squeaky toy. Squeak, squeak! Instinctively reminds them of finding food in the wild. They associate that squeak, squeak, squeak, with a feeling that everything's gonna be okay now.

How lovely! How safe! What a happy little puppy! Now imagine every time it squeaks The dog gets kicked in the head, and it ain't gonna be long before what was once associated with something with safety attached to it becomes something it feels it has to avoid. Just the sound of the squeak, it's gonna make it hide in the corner.

Because, like a, like a phobic response, the neurons of the brain have been wired to fire off on demand, like turning on a light switch. Well, what do you know? The light comes on. And we're no different to that dog at a neurological level. But we have frontal lobes to think with. and a society to live in, we are different.

But our reactivity is going to be the same. Something that we instinctively desire. Friendship, belongingness, companionship, can easily become something we also fear. If throughout our life there's been the equivalent of the dog getting kicked every time it hears a squeaky noise.

Many anxious clients over the years have told me that they wouldn't have an anxiety problem if they lived on a desert island and didn't have to deal with other people. Because for a lot of folk, their anxiety is all about being vulnerable to the possibility of rejection. Now, it's normal for our brain to seek out the things that we fear, to notice dangerous possibilities.

That's natural selection for you. But for those that have been primed from an early age to expect rejection, because they were emotionally neglected, ignored, overlooked, then their brain is going to start perceiving rejection everywhere, whether it's there or not. Someone doesn't have to explicitly reject us for us to perceive that they are.

Rejection can simply be implied by not getting a text message reply quick enough. And then when they do, it's got no substance to it. It's just an emoji, a thumbs up maybe. Is that rejection? Does that mean that the other person can't be trusted? Now, most people would say, no, of course not. But for many, someone glancing at their phone whilst you're trying to talk to them, that can feel like they're in danger.

It's a potential threat to their safety. It's the exact opposite of acceptance. And this is why when John Bowlby was promoting his attachment theory ideas back in the 50s, and he wasn't being taken seriously by the psychoanalysts back then, the evolutionary psychologists and the animal behaviourists were the only ones that said, Yep, this has got a strong base, this matches up with what we see as well.

Because being accepted by our group was really important for our prehistoric ancestors. To be rejected was pretty much a death sentence. And we do see it in other animals as well. Not just mammals, but birds. They'll kick out one or more of their offspring or siblings. So that the group can do better as a whole.

And chances are, this probably happened to us too. Millions of years ago. And our brain has learned to fear it. And we also know from plenty of other studies that the brain is going to react in exactly the same way for physical pain as it does for rejection. We might not feel it as pain in our body, but we feel it in our brain and it hurts.

Rejection hurts. We even use the word burn in English, don't we, to mean dismissing someone to their face. And burns hurt. Real burns do. I burnt my hand once because I took a casserole dish out of the oven and stupidly touched the metal handle on it when I was scraping around with a spoon to keep it steady.

I felt the burn and pulled my hand straight off it so that I wouldn't get hurt further. And to someone with a personality disorder when everything they do is about trying to be accepted by others. That burn doesn't just hurt like a little burn from a casserole dish handle. It will feel as if they're on fire.

So would borderline personality disorder be better off as being grouped under rejection sensitivity disorder? Maybe. Preoccupied acceptance disorder? Maybe we should call it that. I don't know. We can call it what we like, I guess. As long as it gives us a better understanding of ourselves and how we think we fit in with people, so that we can challenge ourselves,

and look for healthier meanings behind other people's behaviour other than I am unlovable, I am unlikable, I am worthless. Just because somebody looked over our shoulder at something else in the room, or when we spoke they rolled their eyes, when we told a bad joke, or God forbid they disagreed with us about something, or gave somebody else more attention than they did to us, or didn't subscribe to their YouTube channel.

None of those are a rejection of who we are, but this rejection sensitivity feeds itself. If you see rejection everywhere, we mostly go one of two ways. We either become preoccupied with being accepted and lean into relationships, or we become avoidant of closeness in case they reject us and we put up barriers.

So we're likely to be emotional. We might be angry, we might be withdrawn, we might be defensive, we might be tense. We might not be the relaxed and carefree character that people probably want to hang around with. And so we might get ever so slightly, occasionally, rejected, overlooked, ignored, which confirms all along that rejection exists and should be feared.

Making us even more sensitive to it. For some, it can turn them into a controlling, manipulative person, maybe even violent. For others, they become paranoid and anxious and that paranoia of everyone judges me, everyone's thinking about how stupid I am, was the reason Borderline was called Borderline, because the psychologists of the time could see that what was going on inside someone's head didn't match reality. But could also see that they weren't actually psychotic.

They were neurotic. As with many things, folks, the key to overcoming these things is to understand it. Be aware of it in your life. And accept that it's real. Acceptance of a problem doesn't mean giving in to it, though. I don't want you to think that accepting a mental health disorder means you can't overcome it.

That's not what we mean by acceptance. By accepting it What I mean is you're not denying it, because denial is a defense mechanism that stops us moving forwards, stops us getting better, because you can't improve your sensitivity to rejection if you don't accept that you are sensitive to rejection. So, understand it. Accept it, and then you can challenge it. Then, you can look for other meanings behind people's behaviour. Because your gut instincts are broken. Your instincts might say they don't want you around. You bore them. They hate you. And in the extremes of a personality disorder, that can give you a feeling that you need to strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger.

When actually all they did is just go out for a drink with another friend and they didn't invite you. Nor did they not invite the eight billion other people. But that's not the point. Am I not their friend too? Clearly not. So here have my great vengeance and furious anger. That's what tends to happen if we don't accept that the problem exists.

It's a bit of hard work, overriding it, but combining all the different things that I waffle on about in these podcast episodes. Learning more about yourself, being more mindful, tuning into the present moment, not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. All of this sort of therapy nonsense, it helps us to move on from these sorts of issues.

But it takes practice, and with many things in life, the cure is actually part of the problem, because you actually have to put yourself into those social situations in order to learn how to cope with those social situations, which then triggers the rejection reaction. But hopefully, less and less each time. Now then, time's up for today.

If you want to hear more about how to handle all of this, then subscribe to me on Patreon. And, I'm hardly exaggerating here. There's at least a billion years worth of content. Alright, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there's a lot of helpful content. Hours and hours and hours and hours of it.

But I won't feel too rejected if you don't join me on there. But it will mean, if you do, that the free stuff I put out to the world will always carry on. Either way, go forth and make your week amazing and I'll speak to you next time, folks. Take care.