How to Overcome Your Fear of Rejection: An Autistic Person’s Advice

Written By Caroline Smith

As an autistic woman, I know rejection like the back of my hand, and even if you’re not autistic, I’m betting your fears of rejection have been holding you back from so many opportunities and potential connections. Living in debilitating fear is no way to live, and is bound to cause bouts of anxiety and depression.

The good news is that no matter who you are, your fear of rejection does not have to ruin your social life forever! Join me as we talk all about rejection, including fears of rejection, getting over rejection when it happens (because it will happen) using my 5-step framework, rejection sensitivity, rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), feeling rejection when there really is none, and more.

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

Today’s podcast episode is all about rejection; fears of rejection, getting over rejection, rejection sensitivity, rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), feeling rejection when there really is none, and more.

I just recently finished up a free 60-minute coaching session that’s part of a Christmas giveaway I’m currently doing.

By the way, I still have 2 spots left at the time I’m recording this video, so if you want a free session of my 60-Minute Social Confidence Booster, just send me an email at caroline@theintrovertedmisfit.com before December 25, 2024.

And in this session, the coaching client was dealing with some issues of a fear of rejection.

This is what inspired today’s topic all about rejection, so I’m going to share with you my best advice on how to overcome your fears of rejection and how to not take rejection so personally when it inevitably happens based on my own experience with rejection and emotional regulation as an autistic person.

I want to start of by saying that even though I’m autistic, you do NOT by any means have to be autistic in order to resonate with what I’m saying.

Rejection is rejection, whether you’re autistic or not, and we’ve all got to learn to deal with it in one way or another, and who better to take advice from than someone who knows rejection like the back of her hand — me?

Growing up as an autistic kid was not fun.

I’ll admit I had most of the essential things that children need to have a healthy upbringing: loving parents who took care of all of my emotional and physical needs, two older sisters who each cared for me in their own ways, plenty of food and water, shelter, etc.

But, the one thing I was missing was a solid friend group.

I’m not going to exaggerate and say that I had absolutely no friends during my entire time in school, because I did have 1 or 2 stable ones who were great in middle school and then a different set of 1 or 2 friends in high school when my family moved states, but because of my social anxiety and lack of social and relational skills, if those 2 friends were not around, I was basically hopeless — I would just sit by myself in the corner.

Now that I think about it, the only reason I had those friends was because they somehow initiated the relationships; it definitely wasn’t me who initiated it because like I said, I had social anxiety in addition to being an introvert and was very nervous about starting interactions — especially with people whom I didn’t know.

It’s kind of like the meme you’ve probably seen on social media where it’s talking about how introverts make friends, and it’s just that an extrovert found them and said hi.

But back to the topic of rejection.

For those of you who are not autistic and may not know, rejection is one of those things that go hand-in-hand with autism, kind of like how peanut butter goes with jelly on a PB&J sandwich.

The two common relationships we have with rejection include rejection sensitivity, and rejection sensitivity dysphoria.

Let’s clarify the difference between those two by discussing three important definitions:

Rejection: The act of refusing to accept, use, or believe someone or something.

Rejection Sensitivity: A trait that makes a person expect, perceive, and react intensely to rejection, real or perceived.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD): Occurs when a person feels intense emotional pain related to rejection.

So basically, RSD is like rejection sensitivity on steroids, and I can tell you from experience, it is a real thing.

It’s almost like any action done or words said that could possibly be taken as rejection, even if there was no rejection intended at all, feels like you’ve been defeated.

It almost feels like the floor just drops from beneath you.

I’m going to give you a few examples of RSD from my own life, and if you’ve never experienced it, you’re probably going to think I’m joking:

  • You walk up to someone and ask them a question, and they answer, but they don’t respond with a smile, or maybe their response is short. Their neutral response makes you think they are upset or angry with you, even if they don’t even know you.

  • Someone chuckles at something you said or a question you asked, and even though they may have meant no harm by it, you take it as a personal attack and start to ruminate about what you said and how you said it.

  • Someone in a group setting makes a joke or says a comment about someone else, and even though it was not directed at you whatsoever, you start to think of how they could’ve indirectly been making fun of you.

  • Someone gives you constructive criticism about a task you’ve done and it feels like they are criticizing you as a person, and you take it as you being unworthy or less than.

I even asked my followers on Instagram and Threads to describe how rejection makes them feel, and I’m going to share a few responses with you:

  • “It’s so hard. Even with people I know love me deeply, perceived rejection feels like reinforcement of my lack of worth to them. [It] takes a lot of nervous system regulation when it happens.”

  • “[It] feels like all the blood drains from my body. I feel cold and I feel my heart beat faster. Nauseating.”

  • “[It] feels like someone drained all my blood and ripped out my heart. If someone does it to me I don’t recover, ever.”

  • “For me it feels like my heart is gonna jump out of my throat. I go quiet and can’t talk. My brain goes down intense spirals and I think about all the things I’ve done wrong. Also my body starts tingling and it feels like every cell is shaking, [I] get dizzy and nauseous and my ears start ringing.”

  • “I get this tight, choked-up feeling in my chest, like I’m on the verge of crying, but the tears don’t come.”

  • “An emotional sunburn all over my body.”

  • “…it can feel like this big heavy cloud that settles over me and I can’t pinpoint what I did that was wrong; all I can do is just constantly replay the feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and almost physical pain.”

It’s basically an overreaction to rejection or perceived rejection, which can lead to you feeling extremely sad, angry, anxious, or any other negative emotion.

Some people end up externalizing their behavior which means they take it out on others, and other people like myself tend to internalize it and take it out on ourselves.

So, what’s at the root of this intense fear of or sensitivity to rejection, even if yours isn’t as intense as experiencing RSD?

Well, like a lot of things related to emotional dysregulation, I think it’s rooted in insecurity of some sort, but the cause of that insecurity may differ from person to person.

Maybe it’s an insecure attachment to your parents that results in you having low self-esteem; maybe it’s insecurity that results from being bullied or excluded in school; or in the case of many autistic people, it’s usually insecurity that stems from social anxiety or insecurity that comes with constantly being socially rejected.

And I’m not a therapist or a mental health professional, so don’t take my advice as law, but it’s just what I’ve experienced and what I’ve witnessed in those around me.

So essentially what I’m saying is that something has happened in our lives that has made us insecure, lack confidence, and have low self-concept, and because of that, any semblance of rejection, even situations where there is none, makes us feel even worse about ourselves.

I’m not going to lie to you — even with as much mental work as I’ve done to work on my RSD, I still find myself getting severely emotionally dysregulated when I experience it, but I think the only difference is that I’m able to mask it by moving on with the interaction — even though I still feel it inwardly — and I’ll ruminate about it later.

But depending on how severe it is, it might start to show on the outside.

So now I’ve talked about what I believe is at the root of rejection sensitivity and RSD if that applies to you, how do we combat those negative feelings when they come over us?

I thought back on my own journey with rejection, and put it into a 5-step framework that you can use if you want:

  1. Embrace it.

    There is good news and a bad news to negative emotions like the ones that come with rejection.

    The bad news is that the negative emotions feel terrible, especially if you feel them more intensely.

    The good news is that every emotion, even the negative ones, are important indicators about ourselves, our relationships, and our environment.

    They are trying to tell us that something needs to be addressed and possibly changed.

    I can only speak for myself, but when it comes to emotions resulting from rejection, I realized that I was feeling that way because I was insecure in myself.

    I had low self-esteem because of the continuous rejection and bullying I had experienced growing up.

    It felt like I had to think very intently about every word I was going to say and every action I was going to take so that it wouldn’t be scrutinized, and if it was scrutinized in any way, I immediately felt bad about myself.

    And I realized that because that kind of rejection was happening over and over again with very few people to counter those moments, I withdrew further into myself and built up this debilitating fear of and sensitivity to rejection.

    And that’s exactly what those negative emotions were trying to get me to address — my past with rejection.

    Ultimately, I had to go on my own journey of self-discovery to become more secure and confident in myself so that I wasn’t walking through life afraid to talk to people.

    And that leads us to my second point.

  2. Do the inner work to become more secure within yourself.

    I realize that this is so much easier said than done, and this statement is not an overnight process, but everyone has to start somewhere.

    Once you have listened to those negative emotions you feel and you’ve gotten to the bottom of why you feel that way, it’s now up to you to dispel those negative thoughts so that you can become more confident in yourself.

    I say “self-discovery journey” like it has been completed, but I think I’ve come to realize that life is one big self-discovery journey.

    Every day we’re faced with new experiences and new ideas that can make us grow or regress for that matter, so it’s a constant journey, but what exactly does this “journey” look like?

    Here is some insight based on what worked for me:

    • Get professional help if necessary.

      If your situation is bad enough to the point where it is affecting your ability to live normally, you might need to consider therapy or counseling.

      I even went to counseling for a couple of years while I was in college when my social anxiety had reached an all-time high, and I do think it gave me a new, useful perspective on my situation.

    • Don’t ruminate on rejection.

      I know this is advice is rich coming from an introverted person who really values my alone time and thinking deeply about things, but when it comes to situations of rejection, the more you sit around and think about it, the worse you’re going to feel.

      As a general rule, I give myself a few hours but no more than a full day to ruminate on my feelings of rejection, and then I move onto other things.

      The more you “do the inner work,” the less and less time you need to process the emotions.

      I’m not saying that I stop feeling bad about it after sulking for a while depending on how bad the rejection was, but I’m saying I’m only going to set aside one day actively think about those emotions.

      After that, I’ve found that it becomes counterproductive and depressing.

    • Constantly challenge negative thoughts with logic.

      This one is difficult because sometimes the logic side of our brains takes longer to catch up to the emotion side of our brains, especially when you’re talking about very big emotions.

      I think this one is best explained with an example, so I’m going to use an experience I think we all can relate to, especially women, and that is feeling rejected because we don’t think we look as good as the next woman.

      It’s the age-old comparison game, where we find ourselves looking at women who we think are prettier, skinnier, curvier, have better skin, have longer hair, have higher cheekbones, have smaller and daintier feet or something like that, and on and on and on.

      The comparisons never end.

      I would convince myself that the reason I was so insecure around other, more attractive women and around men I was attracted to was because I was not good enough in a lot of different ways — I wasn’t extroverted enough, I was too shy and awkward, and of course I just wasn’t pretty enough.

      And my younger years of social rejection just made those things easier for me to believe about myself.

      Well, one of the ways I overcame those negative thought patterns was to challenge them with my logical brain.

      So here are some of those challenging thoughts I asked myself:

      “Just because another woman is beautiful doesn’t mean you are not beautiful in your own way, so then why do you think another woman’s beauty takes away from your own?”

      “Look around in the real world; woman of all different types and levels of attractiveness have managed to find partners that hopefully make them happy, so why do you think you’re any different?”

      “In your day-to-day life, is your looks really all that important? At the end of the day, does it actually get you the quality friendships and other relationships that would serve you in your life?”

      This example reminds me of a BBC article that was written last year about bees and flowers.

      I’ve been really interested in bees lately because I found a few carpenter bee nests on the wooden posts in my backyard, and I didn’t want to kill them because there is supposedly this issue of not enough pollinators to pollinate our crops.

      The article is titled The beautiful flowers that bees can’t use, and it talks about how cities use a lot of horticultural plants to decorate green spaces that have been selectively bred for certain qualities, those certain qualities being very surface-level ones that would make the flowers more visibly appealing.

      Some of the qualities included larger more flashier petals, more vibrant colors, unusual and eye-catching shapes, and more.

      But what they found is that even though the flowers look more beautiful to humans, they are so selectively bred that the nectar sometimes becomes inaccessible to the bees.

      So essentially, the bees can’t even use the flowers for their intended purpose because they are too beautiful and lack functionality.

      In other words, the flowers were attractive with absolutely no substance, and that’s kind of how I think about this issue.

      Those are the kinds of thoughts I used and still use to challenge my negative thought patterns.

      And when you do that enough times, you become a more secure person.

    So that’s my advice on how to “do the inner work,” and just to tie it all in, the breakthrough I had about myself after doing the inner work is this: There is no reason for you to be insecure about yourself. Despite having autism, you have strengths to embrace and weaknesses to improve upon just like anyone else in this world, and that means you are no more or less deserving of relationships and respect than anyone else.

  3. Change your perspective around rejection by viewing it as a learning opportunity.

    Rejection happens to the best of us, but the one thing I’ve learned about rejection as a fairly new entrepreneur is that rejection more or less teaches you two important things about your business: either the problem is with your business offering, or the problem is with the audience you’re trying to market to, which is to say that either I need to change something about myself and my offering in order to attract the right kind of people, or I am marketing to the wrong people and need to change who I am targeting.

    That’s the reality, and what I’ve found is that once you do the inner work to become more secure in yourself as a person, it’s easier to look at that reality and see it for what it is without receiving it as a moral judgement on you as a person, because believe me, I know that when you are still insecure, even the slightest bit of self-reflection and correction can make you feel terrible.

    So if you find that people are constantly rejecting you, does it have something to do with how you’re behaving, or are you maybe trying to fit in with the wrong type of people?

    For instance, when I was in middle school and had no clue that I was autistic (because I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 17), I would often try to fit in with the cool kids, not because I thought I was cool, but because I just didn’t realize that cool kids didn’t want to talk to me.

    I thought we are all people so I can attempt to make friends with anyone, no matter where they were in the hierarchy of coolness.

    And I would constantly get excluded in very subtle ways.

    You know, the turned backs, ignoring everything you say as if you didn’t say anything, exchanging glances with each other after you said something that you thought was completely normal, etc.

    Well, it wasn’t until later that I realized those kinds of extremely superficial kids were not going to associate with me, because I didn’t have the look and the vibe.

    In my case, I was marketing myself to the wrong crowd and I didn’t have the basic social skills to make and maintain friendships, so it was a double whammy for me.

    At the time, it did hurt to come to that realization, but with time, growth, I was able to improve my social skills as much as I could, even though I’m still kind of awkward — in fact I would call myself “confidently awkward” — and figure out the kind of people that were a good fit for me.

    And that’s what rejection taught me about myself.

  4. Stop anticipating rejection everywhere you go.

    The one major thing I’ve noticed about social interactions and relationships since becoming socially confident is that if you approach them already anticipating rejection, that anxiety is going to show externally 99.9% of the time in some way, whether it’s the way you nervously shift your eyes, the way you timidly walk up to someone, or the way you speak in an inaudible voice that no one can hear, and that presentation doesn’t set you up for a good interaction.

    Essentially, it shows to others and to yourself that you have already given up on yourself before you’ve even given people a chance to meet you, which logically makes no sense, and the only reason it makes sense to your brain now is because you are projecting your past experiences with rejection on the current and future ones.

    But at some point, you have to realize that dwelling on the past is not serving you; it’s actually holding you back from creating new connections with people.

    When you walk into interactions visibly lacking confidence, most people assume that they should not interact with you.

    But on the other hand, when you walk into interactions with a confident mindset and physical presentation, with your back straight and your shoulders squared and your head slightly raised, you completely change the kind of attention you receive.

    People can visibly see that you are confident within yourself, and therefore they are not going to actively avoid talking to you like they previously did.

    Because you are showing others that you haven’t given up on yourself and that you care about yourself, they are going to notice that and treat you accordingly.

  5. Stop running away from your fears.

    I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the saying, “Confidence comes with doing,” but I think that saying fits in with this topic very well, because it’s one thing to do the mental prep work beforehand, but ultimately, you’re never going to cross that threshold if you keep running away from potential rejection.

    Like I just went over, rejection is a natural part of life that you cannot escape, so you might as well conquer your fears of it.

    I’m thinking back on my nearly decade-long battle with social anxiety, and one thing I learned as I was researching the anxiety cycle was that the more you run away from your fears, you are teaching your brain that avoiding your fears is going to keep you safe, which your brain interprets as a good coping technique.

    So you’re walking along, and then you see someone or a group of people, and you start to get really nervous about a potential social interaction, so you run away, and then you feel safe from the potential threat, and your brain thinks avoiding the problem is going to keep you safe.

    Ultimately, the only way to break that cycle is to face your fears of rejection and social interactions, so that you can teach your brain that rejection is not as scary as you think it is.

    So I encourage you to face your fears of rejection one small step at a time.

    Start with small, low-risk social interactions, approach them with confidence without anticipating rejection, and if rejection happens, look around and realize that the world didn’t end; you’re still alive.

    I am living proof that this strategy works, because I went from being afraid to go to the airport by myself to starting my own coaching business where I literally had to hear the word, “No,” so many times before I finally found clients who wanted to work with me.

    So it works!

    Now, if you’re ready to stop running away from your fears of rejection as a shy, socially awkward introvert, I want to invite you to check out my signature 1-on-1 coaching program, Communicate With Quiet Confidence, which is specifically created to help you become a socially confident introvert while being your authentic self.

    You can book your free discovery call today by going to my website, theintrovertedmisfit.com, or you can find all of the relevant information to my coaching services in the description of this podcast episode.

That’s all for today’s episode!

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend.

Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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