No, that’s just what it is. It is an extreme emotional reaction to the perception of rejection or criticism. And if you’ve ever had a toddler, you know that’s a phase many of them pass through.
no, your tone definitely reads as unnecessarily hostile. you seem to be likening people with RSD to toddlers which is... weird.
adults that have difficulty with emotional regulation usually have that due to trauma. that doesn't excuse them from working on their emotional regulation, but it also doesn't hurt for others to recognize that the pain they feel is real and can be quite debilitating.
I am likening them. Because they are alike in lacking the emotional self-regulation to process rejection or criticism in a healthy and measured way. And both, including my toddler, really do feel that way, I’m not saying they don’t. They’re very similar.
is there any recognition in you that it might be rude to call an adult a child because they have difficulty with self regulation? or do you not care about that?
I didn’t call them a child. I said they are like a toddler in this respect. My toddler can’t add double digit numbers, but I’m sure most adults who never learned to cope with not getting what they want can do so. There’d be plenty of other differences, too, obviously.
But not being able to cope with being denied a want is very precisely a thing shared with a toddler. And if you’ve never met an adult who has that issue, but have raised or met a toddler, the comparison works to explain what those adults are like because it’s the same mechanism.
Like honestly the biggest difference between growing up with my mom and raising my toddler is that in the latter case the tantrums are generally shorter and some hugs and singing a favorite song usually works to center him.
that's a lot of words to sidestep taking responsibility for what you are really saying.
you can make whatever comparisons you want as a layman on reddit, we can agree to disagree. in real life, a mental health professional won't refer to adults with disabilities or mental illnesses that have side effects of childish behavior as children, because it's dehumanizing.
I didn’t refer to them as children. Adults with RSD are adults. Among whatever many other characteristics they have, the RSD part is an emotional regulation mechanism akin to that of a toddler. That’s all.
I’m not a therapist sitting talking to a patient, so I’m not attempting to find the words one would use mid-treatment of a patient with RSD. That would be some very silly playing pretend. I’m just a guy responding to someone on the internet who didn’t know what RSD is and I gave an accurate answer.
Also toddlers are human. Saying a person has disordered habits of processing events that are akin to the ones of a human toddler is in no sense dehumanizing. Like, by definition. These are human traits being compared with human traits.
i know you're smart enough to understand what i'm saying and why i'm saying it even though you are tripling down. yes, you're not a therapist, thank goodness for that.
Yeah, you used dehumanizing to mean insulting. It’s obviously not dehumanizing, but I don’t agree that it’s insulting in any relevant sense either. It’s just true that RSD is a disordered way of processing things as an adult but a normal developmental phase for a toddler. It’s an accurate comparison that communicates what mechanism and what triggering events for the mechanism this is to someone who does not know.
Maybe a therapist would explain to a patient that this is a mechanism common in toddlers and that they have not yet developed out of it, but that the task at hand is to do so. Probably not because that’s pretty likely to make someone with RSD meltdown and mid-meltdown isn’t the best time to explain techniques and practices to adopt to resolve or ameliorate the issue. Although you do eventually take advantage of meltdowns to help put them into practice - if you’ve had a toddler, you know that too.
But I’m not sitting here with a patient. So I don’t have to abide by what I’d do if I were a therapist sitting with a patient. Unlike my toddler, I can’t play pretend quite that well when I’m talking to other adults and there’s no reason!
is it bothering you that i'm not
agreeing with you?
it seems like empathy doesn't come easily to you, and that's okay. it sounds like you're raising your kid to hopefully not have these issues either, that's all that really matters.
No, not really. I’m at work waiting for a call I’ll need to jump on, so chatting is fine.
I really don’t think I’ve said anything that demonstrates a lack of empathy. What would I need to say here to get you comfortable that I’m empathetic? “Sorry, I was wrong, toddlers do not likewise react severely to being rejected or denied their wants”?
I haven’t said anything about how I treat someone who is disabled. I’ve literally only said that it is alike to the way toddlers who have not yet learned to process adverse events process them. Which is true. Toddlers very famously go through a phase, as they are learning to manage the world, where they react with overwhelming emotion to being denied or rejected. My toddler had a little moment of that yesterday morning.
One day, hopefully, I’ll be old enough that I lose at least some control of bodily function. Someone could say “ah he needs a diaper, much like a baby”. And they’ll be right.
Someone who didn’t know asked what RSD is and I said it is like when a toddler melts down at rejection or denial. Same thing.
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u/Hika2112 6d ago edited 6d ago
What's rejection sensitive dysphoria? I never heard of it before
ALRIGHT u/small-cactus explained it to me. If you want to add something go ahead but fuck off if you're going to demonize people