Beating Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria with Jessica Summers
In this episode, RSD coach Jessica Summers explores Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and its impact on people with ADHD. The conversation covers what RSD is, how it affects individuals differently and effective tools and strategies for managing emotional dysregulation. The episode also touches on the importance of setting boundaries and learning to prioritize self-care.
Highlights
Jessica 's own experience with RSD and how she got into this work
RSD definied and its significance to sufferers
Methods of treatment, including hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming
Creating a sense of safety to facilitate learning and personal growth
Mentions
ADHD Online Assessment: adhdonline.com/adultingwithadhd (use promo code ADULTINGADHD40 for $40 off)
Jessica's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-summers-hypnogenics
Jessica's website - https://jessicasummershypnogenics.com
Summary
In this episode of the Adulting with ADHD podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with RSD Coach Jessica Summers about the often misunderstood experience of rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) in the ADHD community. Jessica shared her personal journey of discovering RSD in her own life and how it shaped her work as a coach. We discussed the emotional pain that comes with RSD, how it differs from typical human emotions, and the importance of having our unique struggles acknowledged and validated.
Jessica opened up about her transformative experiences living abroad, which forced her to confront her own fears of rejection and build deeper, more authentic relationships. She emphasized the significance of creating a sense of safety for ourselves, especially when learning to set boundaries and advocate for our needs. Her practical advice—like personifying our emotional responses and prioritizing nervous system regulation—offered listeners actionable tools for managing overwhelm and building resilience.
We also explored Jessica’s integrative coaching approach, which combines hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and neuroscience to help clients retrain their responses to shame and triggers. She highlighted the value of courageous conversations and the power of community in supporting personal growth. If you’re interested in learning more about Jessica’s work, her book, or her upcoming workshops, be sure to check out her website and connect with her on LinkedIn for ongoing insights and support.
Transcript
The adulting with A DHD podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. Please see a medical professional. If you think you have a H ADHD or have H ADHD and need additional assistance For podcast archives, please visit patreon.com/adulting with adhd. This is the adulting with A DHD podcast, self-empowerment for people with A DHD Today I am excited to have with me RSD Coach, Jessica Summers.
Welcome to the show, Jessica. Thank you very much, Sarah. I'm really excited to be here and I love the name of the podcast because like many other people with A DHD, I've certainly had to do a lot of adulting in my life. Yes, absolutely. So let's talk a bit about your journey and what inspired you to specialize in rejection sensitive dysphoria, which you can also tell us about.
Yeah, so I'll tell you briefly what it is. It's actually very simple. It is a pain, an emotional pain, so bad in response to a shame trigger that it can feel either that we're imprisoned in our body that's incredibly constrictive, or it can make you feel like you want to leave your body like escape from it because the pain's so great even for a very short time.
In the short answers. The reason I've ended up specializing it is because I realized that I experienced RSD and that was quite a recent discovery, maybe two years ago. But looking back on my practice over the past 10 years, I would say that I've worked with RSDA lot, but I just didn't know it. Amazing. So.
Does everyone have RSD? This is a little off script here. I'm cur, you got me curious. Now tell me how that works. Yeah, that's something that gets commented on a lot. Like I share a lot on LinkedIn uhhuh, and it gets commented on a lot that isn't RSD just a normal human emotion, are we not medicalizing a normal human emotion?
And it makes people really angry, but I really defend the term dysphoria. If you have ever experienced this pain. All you feel when somebody says dysphoria, which is from the Greek, which means unbearable, you feel a sense of acknowledgement that somebody has understood your pain and we need that. Yeah.
It's the same as if you have a DHD. You need somebody to say yes. What you're experiencing is different from normal. And also in this case, it's not acceptable and it's not okay and it must be really hard. Yeah. And how did you come to learn about, like, how did you find out that this was a thing? I think it was actually reading a very famous article by William Dodson, who is like the main expert on a DH adhd.
Mm-hmm. And I think I read it on the Attitude website. Yes. And then I began to investigate, and like most of my clients, I felt a great sense of relief of being able to put a name to what I was experiencing because otherwise we just did a prison of our wrongness. If you're listening to this show, you get how stress and overwhelmed can wreak havoc on your life, and how sometimes the issue runs deeper than that.
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Okay, so you're coaching on emotional dysregulation, and through the course of this, you discovered this RSD thing, which I agree is definitely a thing. Definitely agree. It's a separate thing. That's interesting. So how did your personal, like your travels, you mentioned Bulgaria, how did that shape the experience?
It's been a brutal, beautiful, and amazing experience and it's forced me to grow. I had this idea in 2021 when me and my husband put a house on the market, packed our car full of our stuff and went off to Europe to have the travels we'd never had along with our daughter. And I had this idea of palm trees, an escape.
That everything was gonna work out wonderfully. And actually what ended up happening was I had to lean into every single area of my life that I've been avoiding. So that really included friendships, intimacy, having those difficult conversations I'd hidden behind my husband and my job, and managed to avoid that as many neurodivergent people do.
So. I had some really difficult conversations with people because there's a language barrier and there's a culture barrier, and very often there've been situations where people have not understood me. They have not understood my neurodivergence. It's not a thing in the Balkans, and I've actually had to be brave.
And what this has meant is that I have grown as a person, and also I'm able to have close and intimate friendships with other women, which I couldn't do before because the. Fear of rejection was so great, and I know this will resonate with people listening. The fear of rejection was so great that I just didn't allow anyone to get close enough to me, and I think that's easy if you have a long-term partner to hide behind that.
Many people with a DHD struggle with emotional overwhelm and the fear of judgment, but practical tools or strategies do you use to help clients with past triggers and feelings of not being enough, especially with your RSD free framework. There is a really simple tool. It's a philosophy that immediately sets clients free, and I'm more than happy to share this here.
I think we all need to know this. Yes. Okay, so the first thing is, I'm speaking to your listeners. It's not your fault. Yeah. This is not your personality. I. I have worked on myself for years. I have to, as a therapist, I have to work on myself for years. And what I became aware was that this was not to do with my personality.
It was not even psychological. It was like limbic cortisol response that came in and seemed almost separate from my thinking processes, my psychology. Okay. And the minute I started to realize. It was not my fault. It was not my fault that all the work I'd done was not affecting it and that it was something, it was a part of me, but it was a separate part of me.
And that created so much freedom and meant that I could begin to, what I say, personify it. So I think of this responses, and I use this with clients as like a dog that's been abused or traumatized, and we have to give it strong boundaries. We have to talk to it. We have to take charge, otherwise the dog starts to take charge of us.
It starts to take over and try and run our lives and decide who we're gonna see, what business we're gonna be in, where we live, whether we go out or not. And I know this is sounded familiar, you're nodding. And so we have to take control of this very precious animal and give it clear guidelines and boundaries.
And the minute clients understand that, it's like they are able to suddenly. Put a stop to situations that would overwhelm. Just listening to you speak about that process. It's a relief to hear it 'cause it's, Ugh. It sounds so nice. Put it in a separate thing. Don't internalize. I like it. You've mentioned the need to be accountable for our own emotions and experiences and to have courageous conversations.
Tell us a bit about this. Oh, I think. This courageous conversations that I feel are so important. I said in a LinkedIn live today, I said I'm not an expert in conflict. Um, but I am an expert in having courageous conversations even though I'm terrified. I am notoriously terrible at facing conflict. Many of us are.
We avoid it. We either avoid it or we feel attacked and we defend. We don't feel like we have any choice now. That was me, and in some ways I feel like the most important role I play is as a therapist who's willing to say, put my hand up and say, yes. I experienced the triggers of RSD. Yes. I really have to work on being able to get into situations where there's difficult conversations to be had, and maybe my hands are shaking.
I am now willing to say what needs to be said, and I like to help other people to do the same. Now I come from a very human and experiential level, and I think that helps clients a lot. Absolutely. So what steps do you recommend for clients looking to become more confident in setting boundaries and advocating for themselves?
Yeah, there are lots of. Tools that you can learn, and I'm going to talk at the end about how you can learn more about that. But as a general rule, what I want to say is you could sit down and read a book with all the tools in the world about how to be better at conflict, and that's what most of us wanna do.
We're fighting, fill in the pain, and we can go into a perfectionistic spin about learning all the best tools so we never have to feel uncomfortable. It ain't that. So the first thing that you need to do is work on feeling safe and giving yourself that sense of safety. Most of us do not feel that it's worthwhile to spend our time to make ourselves feel safe, to create relaxation, time, to actually create boundaries around our own time and to be aware of when we need that.
And that is number one, because when we feel safe, we can learn better. In actual fact, you can't learn anything new. If you don't feel safe, it just won't go in. So that's the first step. But then what's miraculous is the more and more you prioritize your safety, you find that organically boundaries are in place because you no longer fear quite as much that if you say no or you say Uhuh, that doesn't work for me.
You no longer fear if that person says that, I don't wanna see you anymore. Oh wow. My sense of self no longer rests on that because I feel safe. Can't underestimate the importance of having a regulated nervous system. It changes everything. Yes. I saw one of your posts recently, and I, it really stuck in my head, you said, uh, when you have a regulated nervous system, you don't need all the strategies and negotiations.
That feels so freeing. I like the sound of that. You just wouldn't believe how much can change just from prioritizing yourself or putting yourself first. And don't get me wrong, I know that is the biggest risk that most of us will take. 'cause our nervous system says, Hey honey, you can't afford to do this.
You can't afford to take that time for you. Everything will fall apart and it takes a leap. But I just wanna be that bridge right now and say it's worth doing and it's okay, and you have to make that leap. So come on, let's do it. I like that. Let's talk a bit about your coaching technique. It integrates hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming techniques, neuropsychology and behavior modification.
Could you walk us through how these approaches work together to create effective change? Yeah, sure. I'd love to. And now keep it really simple. 'cause it all sounds really complex when you put it like that. Right. But it's, it's like a wheel. I have to see things in pictures or I can't remember anything.
Okay. Absolutely. Good. I'm glad it's not just me. So the first part of the wheel is as we've talked about, safety. Okay? And once you feel safe and you understand why you're taking the action you are, then you can start to change your behavior. So we create safety in this RSD pre system by using hypnosis lets you feel safe on a deep level, on a subconscious level, and is very nurturing.
And then also neurolinguistic program. And we change how you see yourself. We also create, which I love, a really friendly person that you should have had all through your life to support you. We've got enough bad guys in our heads. So what we do is we create a good guy or gal to support us and clients really enjoy that.
So that's safety. And then the next step is, once we feel safe, is we start retraining the brain. So this is where the neuroscience comes in. Instead, when we get a trigger, instead of going into some negative little shame spiral, which makes our lives smaller. Leaves us scanning the environment for danger.
We do something different and we create a sense of ease in our body after a trigger of shame. And don't get me wrong, that takes practice. However, I liken it to, if you had a broken leg, you wouldn't have to like work at taking a painkiller. You take it 'cause it makes it feel better. And it's the same with this process.
If you're experiencing pain or shame, you do the retraining process. You feel better. And then the next step is growth. We want you to start turning that spiral outwards so you're starting to grow your life. So we use what I call the A BC protocol, which is what we do in response to a trigger. And we use it to rehearse future situations that might challenge us so that we start to grow and our lives get bigger.
And then the last bit is living the cycle. And we really get clear on whether our standards and values that we have are supporting us. 'cause they can change. We can have better standards and values. Yeah, absolutely. Do you wanna tell us a bit about your book and what you've been working on lately and your talks?
Go ahead. Yeah, sure. I've written a book, uh, which I think is suitable for people with A DHD or D-H-D-R-S-D, all the other acronyms that you can think of. I think it's suitable for most people are highly sensitive and it's called Surviving Family Gatherings and other Social Situations, and it's great for work.
Also Christmas. I struggle with Christmas. I don't think I'm alone with that. No. And this is really like 10 of my best techniques for working with the fear and shame that can come up when we feel overwhelmed in social gatherings and RSD. When RSD comes up, clients say it's super helpful. So that's the book I've been working on and that's published now.
You can get that on Amazon. Then also, this is something that I really care about and I'm co-facilitating with Lucy Tatu Ogden. We have a series of 10 workshops, 90 minute workshops, highly interactive and very safe space, and these are a fantastically low price because I really think everybody deserves to have access to these tools.
And basically, lots of people say you should have boundaries, don't they? You should. We should say what we need. We know. We have neurodivergent advocates who tell us that, but we don't know how to do it. And here together we really unpick how do we do that? How can we all be braver together? And it's a really super supportive space now starting on the 6th of November.
I love that. That sounds great. And work and listeners keep up you and find these talks and everything, you, you have a website or I have a website which is Jessica Summers hypnos.com. And then also I have blog, which is on my website and a substack. It's the same thing, RSD free. And I post a lot on LinkedIn.
I know not everyone's on LinkedIn, but I find it such a lovely space with really intelligent conversations and I get to be me there. So if you wanna see the real me. You'll find me talking on LinkedIn and I know you're on there as well. Sarah, aren't you? I am. I've rediscovered the platform recently and I agree with you.
I'm liking where it's headed, so yeah, it's a good place to have some intelligent conversation. For sure. Thank you for being on the show, Jessica. Thank you so much. I've loved every minute of it.
