Name your RSD as a character to disarm it
Give your rejection-sensitivity a separate, cartoonish name — 'Dave the Dragon' — so you can externalise it. When it flares, recognise it as that creature reacting to thousands of old wounds rather than to what actually just happened: the pain is very real, but it's not based in present reality.
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RSD pain fires in the present but is really reacting to the accumulated weight of past criticism — the current event reactivates thousands of old wounds, so the intensity belongs to history, not to what just happened. Naming the reaction as a separate character makes that separation usable. Give it a distinct, deliberately cartoonish identity — a mythical creature, ‘Dave the Dragon’ — so that when the sensitivity flares you can attribute the flare to the named thing rather than to yourself or to the actual situation: this is Dave reacting to old hurts, not an accurate read on the person in front of you. That framing holds two truths at once. The pain is genuinely real and shouldn’t be dismissed. And it is not based in current reality, so it doesn’t deserve the authority of a verdict. Externalising and naming it strips a lot of its power, because a caricature reacting to the past is far easier to notice, question and set aside than an anonymous certainty that feels like the truth about you.
