Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: Assessment and Therapeutic Approaches

Your client hears a neutral comment as criticism. A missed text becomes evidence they’ve destroyed a relationship. The emotional pain is immediate, overwhelming, and—from the outside—wildly disproportionate. That’s rejection sensitive dysphoria, and it shows up in your office far more often than it gets named.

This course teaches you to identify RSD, distinguish it from social anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder, and major depressive disorder, and understand the mechanism underneath: how anxious anticipation, misread social cues, and intense shame spiral into a pattern that shapes your client’s relationships, risk-taking, and sense of self. RSD is common in ADHD and AuDHD—and it’s regularly mistaken for something else, which means clients get the wrong treatment.

You’ll leave with a working differential, a clear picture of how RSD shows up inside the therapeutic relationship itself, and evidence-informed strategies you can introduce with clients—including how to frame the sensitivity as something to work with, not eliminate.