selfbecoming
If it helps on reconciling what Sounds and Feels weird about RSD, I don't read or hear many real clinicians discussing it outside specific Pop Psych resources because... everything about it is covered by Emotional Dysregulation, a widespread neurodivergence symptom. Resources on *that* tend to offer a lot more practical coping help, and feel a lot less like it's telling you you're cursed to sad snowflake disorder and fawning. Mileage, of course, may vary.
That does help a great deal actually, not even mainly because it reframes it conceptually away from Sensitive Snowflake Disease (which RSD isn’t! I know that! I just suck at internalizing it when it’s me!). I know at least a little about emotional dysregulation already from having an Autistic brother, so there’s that, but also that hooks the RSD aspect into a much larger struggle I have with negative emotions and depression.
One of the reasons I often don’t consume new media until it’s old media with spoilers and plot summaries, and certainly one of the reasons I’ve had a hard no on apocalyptic/dystopian media for over a decade, is that I have no off switch for Sad. You know how people talk about listening to a sad song and having a cry and “getting it all out”? That’s not something I experience. If I’m sad about something, I’m sad about it for a really long time and it impacts my quality of life. Same with anger, and humiliation. I pretty well know what will cause those emotions at this point, at least most of the time, so I can minimize exposure, but I’ve never had great success with resolution -- I’m able to think “I don’t want to feel this anymore” but not able to do much about it. But if that’s tied into a biological inability to properly regulate emotion, then at least I have some new angles of attack on how to solve the problem, instead of just avoidance and repression.
To be clear, I am not blaming things I say or do on emotional dysregulation; I’m a whole grown man and I take responsibility for my actions. But it’s a relief to know that this is at least in part chemical, not a flaw of personality. Something new to research, anyway, and I think it’s probably easier to separate the wheat from the chaff researching emotional dysregulation than RSD.














