Dr. William (Bill) Dodson

My pleasure.

Thank you.

RSD is a phenomenon that I first noticed because I'm a practitioner, I'm not a researcher.

And so when you sit with a thousand people and you hear the same thing,

coming from every single one of them, you may not know that it's important.

I mean, what it is, but you know that it's important.

And so I have to give all the credit to my patients because they were the ones who described it to me.

And what RSD is, is an exquisite sensitivity to the perception, doesn't have to be real, the perception that someone has withdrawn their love, approval, or respect.

And I mean, nobody likes being criticized.

Nobody likes being rejected.

But for people who have an ADHD-style nervous system, it is catastrophic.

In fact, that's why the name of it includes the word dysphoria, which is literally Greek for unbearable.

And so it's...

It's like sort of other people's experience of rejection, only it is suddenly hit.

It goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye.

It's incredibly painful.

It's physically painful.

You'll see people clutch their chest or hunch over or grimace because it's not just emotionally painful.

It's physically painful as well.

One of the other odd features of it is that people cannot describe what the pain is like.