[roadrunna]

> I recently broke down for an entire day after a judgemental encounter with someone, and learned about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Highly recommend to be radically honest and natural about everything. Every time you get a piece of info about yourself aka natural feedback will immediately enlighten you and help you expand your perspective and move forward.

It's a bit counter-intuitive because so many of us are taught to hold thoughts, words and actions back, but once I stopped doing that, things started to improve massively.

I watched non-ADHD people attempt the same but none of them evolved (my sample is small, 40+ people, I don't have notes on all of them). So far, the only difference I could find, was ADHD-pattern-recognition + that weird ADHD-Naïvité <3

[lazide]

Be very careful with this around folks with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Anything you say can and will be used against you to maximum destructive effect. Including them actively triggering the states that cause you to be confused and dysphoric anytime you seem to be starting to figure it out or get away.

And they will often actively lie to you or manipulate you if they know you’ll take what they say seriously and uncritically. There are many, many ways to do this.

Many ADHD folks are people pleasers, and NPD folks will actively use those people’s tendencies to destroy them and grin while doing it. I’ve seen it, it’s deeply disturbing.

Open and honest communication is great, with those capable of the same. Doing it with someone who is pathological is a recipe for disaster.

It’s possible to survive, but not until they’ve been fed through the meat grinder a few times and potentially after suffering more pain than you can possibly imagine.

[soulofmischief]

Sounds like you've been through the ringer yourself. I learned very early not to trust or be honest with authority figures.

Linking the people-pleasing to RSD and thus ADHD recently was a massive eye-opener. And the connection between people-pleasing and cutting people off as two sides of the same emotional spectrum.

[lazide]

Yes. I've personally learned it's not just authority figures though. I've had friends and lovers do it too. Identifying what I’m doing to trigger it helps. Trauma bonding is for all kinds of relationships [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding], and folks with traumatic pasts do it pretty naturally sometimes.

Being overly honest to someone who is actually a problem is one of the common behaviors, as is forgetting some/all of their actual problematic behavior when they 'get better' so as to preserve the important seeming relationship.

"However, later on, repeated instances of abuse and maltreatment generate a cognitive shift in the victim's mind: that preventing the abuse is in their power. By the time the inescapability of the abuse becomes apparent, the emotional trauma bond is already strong.[12]"

[lazide]

Specifically, I'm wondering if this particular trait is actually a conditioned response (look up trauma bonding) to narcissistic abuse.

Being fully authentic and honest (regardless of the circumstances) is essentially narcissist bait. And it works. It's giving up power to an external authority (in many ways), because it's saying 'here are all my cards, do with them as you will'.

It also works well when not in a predatory environment.

But 'normal' folks don't do this except in very specific, highly trusting environments, most likely because they know the consequences if they do it otherwise. And very few environments are actually not predatory (as in, have no portion of real or hidden predators).

And at the beginning, narcissists WILL make things better when they have someone like that around. They got their supply, and the love bombing, extreme gratitude, etc. will all help make EVERYTHING feel amazing. At a job, they may get promoted (but not too high), or get raises (but not enough for them to not need the job or be a threat), etc.

However, at some point dysregulation of one or both parties starts to happen (or one or both parties starts getting bored), and then that gets turned around and the shit starts, and then any authenticity or honesty gets used against the target while the NPD person denies all responsibility, DARVO's, etc.

[soulofmischief]

I'd highly recommend The Evolution of Trust, by Nicky Case. It puts some of these ideas into an interactive framework in the context of game theory.

It shows how interactions between these different kinds of people play out given different population distributions.

https://ncase.me/trust/