Rejection Sensitivity
In general, people with borderline personality disorder are highly attuned to others' emotions. While this can mean that a person with BPD is more likely to recognize when someone is feeling positive toward her, it also is more likely that she will think that people are unhappy with, or rejecting, her.
People that are sensitive to rejection tend to anticipate, recognize, and overact to real or perceived rejection from others. The sense of rejection is overpowering and consuming to the person with BPD, but may not have been anything that was meant or intended. However, the person's reality is one where she is being rejected.
In addition, the coping skill of splitting in conjunction with the rejection sensitivity creates an added aspect. When the person with BPD perceives that she has been rejected, she is unable to have any awareness of positive feelings toward her from the other person. To her, the person has always been rejecting of her; she was never thought to be a valuable person to whoever is rejecting her.
Some Examples of Rejection Sensitivity
- Fiona is hurt when her children come home after spending time with her cousin and talk about what a great time they had. What she hears them saying is not that they had a good time and are excited about what they did, but that they like her cousin better than her.
- Bruce has a history of job changes. He continues to get jobs that he, initially, finds very fulfilling. However, Bruce is unable to receive direction from his bosses, and perceives each direction as an unfair criticism and he begins to feel that his supervisors are out to "get him." Eventually he believes that people at the office are trying to find reasons to fire him, and angrily reacts. Due to his anger and the resulting insubordination, Bruce is let go.
- Roberta flies into a rage toward her brother-in-law Max when he refers to his parents as "my parents," instead of "our parents," as she experiences this as Max excluding her and her husband from inclusion in the family. Max is bewildered and defensive, as he never meant to exclude Roberta and his brother from the family.
Abandonment is the ultimate form of rejection. For the BP who sees everything in black and white, each rejection feels like an abandonment – there is no small rejection.
