How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

To be honest, I really do not know. This is for a couple of different reasons

1. ADHD with associative RSD

2. Demand Avoidance Autism

Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is when you experience severe emotional pain because of a failure or feeling rejected. This condition is linked to ADHD and experts suspect it happens due to differences in brain structure. Those differences mean your brain can’t regulate rejection-related emotions and behaviors, making them much more intense.

The human brain has an elaborate network of connections between its different areas. Those areas have different jobs, with some areas managing memories, emotions, input from your senses, etc. As you get older, your brain learns to regulate those signals, keeping them at manageable levels. This is much like the volume control on a TV when it keeps the sound at levels you find comfortable.

Emotional dysregulation happens when your brain can’t properly regulate the signals related to your emotions. Without that ability to manage them, it’s as if the TV volume control is stuck at a disruptively or painfully high level. In effect, emotional dysregulation is when your emotions are too loud for you to manage, causing feelings of being overwhelmed, uncomfortable or even in pain.

Emotional dysregulation can happen with many conditions, especially those affecting your brain’s structure or how it processes information. It happens commonly with personality disorders, mood disorders and more.

Emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity

Emotional dysregulation happens with both rejection sensitivity and RSD. Dysphoria doesn’t. People with rejection sensitivity can do one or more of the following:

• Feel severe anxiety or other negative emotions before an anticipated rejection.
• Have trouble seeing nonpositive interactions (such as neutral or vague reactions) as anything but rejection and react accordingly.
• Overreact to feelings of rejection, leading to behavior that reflects negative emotions like anger, rage, extreme sadness, severe anxiety, etc.

While all of those are also possible with RSD, there’s one more component: People with RSD describe feeling an intense — if not overwhelming — level of emotional pain.

The unofficial adage of ADHD time management is, “By the time you feel it, it’s too late.” ADHD expert Russell Barkley, Ph.D., has famously said that ADHD is not a disorder of knowing what to do, it’s a disorder of doing what you know — at the right times and places.

Struggles with time management cause the most heartache and difficulties with getting things done for individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or ADD).

Now, there is a catch to all of this. I haven’t lost all of my memory. Unfortunately for myself as well as those involved, I have an infallible memory for negative events.

Because of the RSD, the memories of tragic and emotionally damaging events are relayed through the repetition of similar emotional events.

I’ve had PTSD since before I can remember. Although the real behavioral and emotional changes didn’t hit me until the time of my maturation, I live each day riddled with anxiety because there is no cure for what is wrong with me.