I see lots written about this. I'll tell you a story about my RSD.
If I'm in RSD, if I'm triggered by real or perceived negative feedback, it feels like PTSD.
My heart aches, I feel sick, and I feel like I am about to be caught and charged with murder. I am being stared at, laughed at and rejected. I feel like a bad person as if I've lied and cheated and everyone knows. This is how awful RSD feels.
This is how I try to cope/recover.
I try to help myself with compassion. I acknowledge it is a bad pattern of thinking and my body needs comfort in the form of relief, a diversion, a back door exit, an escape plan or a shock/recharge/ice/running or star jumps kind of thing. It needs something different. My body is in shock which is why it is such an extreme feeling.
I tell myself I am the sky. RSD is a cloud. A big fcuking dark one. But I am not the cloud.
I also now know that when I fcuk up I learn.
I've come to the conclusion that we rarely know the truth of whether we are doing good or not. No clue. Imagine if what I thought were my best times were actually my worst and probably all those shit things I did, others probably thought I was actually brilliant. We really have no clue because we are up our arses most of the time. Just oblivious. Hiding from feedback and hoping we are good enough when in reality, it doesn't matter if we are good enough.
I try to remember that fcuking up and being honest is liberating. If I fcuked up, I tried. People love a confident fucker-upper.
I used to be a fibber (a fight-flight alternative is to fib). Fibbing caused shame on top of RSD plus an extra dose of fear (of now also being found out for fibbing). Fibbing was defensive, self-protection. I'm no longer embarrassed that I used to fib.
So being a confident fcuker-upper is liberating and feels edgy and brave. I'm proud I'm a fcuker upper. Don't have it written on my grave though (am I the only one with a dark morbid imagination?). I get warmth and humour from my dark imagination.
Back to RSD.
It is just shite and I feel for all of you that experience it.
For those that don't understand, I'm talking about a huge reaction to something tiny. A look. Fear of a look. A fear we fcuked up. Some tiny bit of criticism. I'm not talking about a big cock-up. I'm talking about RSD and a reaction in us that does not match the 'crime' (imagined or real).
RSD and the fear of it sit silently warding off danger, stopping me from standing tall and fulfilling my potential. And it used to limit me, squash me as I hid. Until diagnosis (ADHD) when I found a whole community of folk who understood and experienced all this too and with them, I problem-solved the fcuk out of it.
And finally. My pies de resistance (wrong spelling) is to tell myself 'maybe I'm shit and fcuking up and I'm still loved'. Because y'know what? 50 years of RSD and hiding mistakes from the World with shame and fear, was a bollocks amount of wasted time.
Making mistakes and owning them, getting out there and being openly, honestly, bravely, really shit at stuff, is fcuking freedom.
Love from me.
Pic of me stomping along a cobbled street, looking confused and lost which is a good metaphor for life. Photo credit to ND Bestie Jules
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