If you noticed there wasn't a newsletter from me last week... I was on holiday.
Last time I wrote, I was working like a maniac to earn a week in Thailand. Well, I went. A week with friends, nothing to deliver, nobody expecting anything from me when I landed. My first trip in a very long time that had nothing to do with work.
And I've decided I need to do a lot more of those.
(Which is a slightly embarrassing thing to only be deciding now, as the guy who teaches rest for a living 😅)
But this email isn't about Thailand. It's my monthly confessional lol, and it’s about something that happened a few days before I flew out.
What happened on Father's Day
Father's Day here in Australia was at the start of September.
My daughter didn't come up to see me.
Here are the facts. She had exams the next morning. I've recently moved up to the Central Coast, which is a two-hour train journey for her. She'd seen me the week before, on my birthday. I hadn't told her I wanted to see her on Father's Day. And nobody had made a plan.
Put like that, it's a normal Sunday.
That's not what I felt.
Underneath, I was sad. On top of the sad, I was angry. And on top of the angry, I could feel my chest starting to close... like I was switching off my love for her.
My own daughter. Over one Sunday.
Rejection sensitivity
Now, I know this pattern. I teach this pattern. And it still caught me.
There's a name for it. ‘Rejection sensitivity’.
It's when a small sign that somebody might not care... hurts as much as if they'd told you to your face they want nothing more to do with you. A short reply. A pause before they answer. A message left on read. A Sunday without a visit.
‘Rejection sensitivity’ is a close cousin to ‘fear of rejection’, but it isn't quite the same. Fear of rejection is the dread beforehand. Rejection sensitivity is how hard it hits when you think rejection has happened... even when it hasn't.
If you've never had it with family, you've probably had it at work.
Somebody sends you a message at ten to five. "Have you got ten minutes tomorrow?" That's all it says.
And your evening is gone.
By 7pm you've worked out what you did wrong. By 9pm you've got your defence ready. By two in the morning you've lost the job... and you're working out how to tell your friends.
The next day, it turns out all they wanted was your opinion on a slide!
Ten minutes for them. A whole night for you.
Why something small hurts so much
So why would something that small hurt that much?
Tim Fletcher, whose work on complex trauma I lean on a lot, puts it simply. When the size of the reaction doesn't match the size of the event... the event has touched an old wound.
So my father’s day Sunday explains a small part of the hurt. The rest of the hurt is coming from a long time ago.
For some of us, the warmth at home depended on how we were doing. Warm when we did well, a bit frostier when we didn't. Nobody said anything out loud, but we could feel the change... so we learned to watch for it.
For others it was a silence. A whole day of being ignored by the person we depended on, which to a small child isn't just uncomfortable, it's frightening.
And for some, nobody was unkind at all. A parent was there, just busy, or worn out, or somewhere else in their head.
Either way, a child learns to spot the earliest sign that somebody is pulling away, so they can fix things before it gets any worse. And some of us went one step further and learned to switch the feeling off. If I don't care about you, you can't hurt me.
That's the chest closing. I’m an expert at it.
It's physical, too, which is why it's so convincing. A drop in the stomach. A tight chest. It doesn't feel like an opinion. It feels like being hit.
Where it meets burnout
And here's where it connects to burnout.
If any sign of disapproval feels unbearable, the safest plan is to never give anyone a reason to disapprove. So we over-prepare. We check the work four times. We say yes when we mean no. We answer the email at ten at night so nobody can think we're slow.
A lot of what looks like perfectionism or people-pleasing has rejection sensitivity sitting right underneath it. The over-preparing isn't about the work. It's about making sure nobody has any reason to pull away.
And that job never ends. You can do everything right for a year, and one short reply on a Thursday afternoon can still ruin your day.
What to do about it
So what do we do with it?
I'm not going to tell you to stop being sensitive. I don't think you can, and I don't think you'd want to... the same ‘sensitive’ wiring is why you read people so well.
What I'd like you to be able to do is tell the difference between what happened and what the feeling is telling you happened. The hurt is real. The story that arrives with it is the bit to check.
Here's what I use.
1. The four questions
For the minute right after something hurts, before you reply or go quiet. Out loud or on paper.
Question 1 - What happened?
Only what a camera would have recorded, with no interpretation. "She replied with one word." Not "she's annoyed with me". A camera can't see annoyed. It can only see that she wrote one word. This is harder than it sounds, because the fact and the story arrive stuck together, and your only job here is to pull them apart.
Question 2 - What am I telling myself that means?
Now say the story that’s in your head in full. "She's annoyed with me. I've overstepped. She's going to stop inviting me to things." Don't argue with it. Just say it. When you hear the whole story out loud, you might notice how much you've built on top of one short reply.
Question 3 - What else could it mean?
Find two or three other reasons. “She's busy”. “She's in a queue”. “She replies to everyone like that”. You don't have to believe them. A hurting brain grabs the first explanation it finds and treats it as the only one. Once there are a few other possibilities on the table, the first one stops being a fact and goes back to being a guess.
Question 4 - Is this feeling the same size as what happened?
If it is, fine. Feel it, and deal with what's in front of you. If it's much bigger, say to yourself: "This is bigger than today." You don't need to work out where the rest came from. You only need to know that some of the hurt is old... because the old hurt is the part telling you to do something drastic.
The questions won't stop the hurt arriving. It'll still come, as fast as ever. What changes is what you do in the ten minutes afterwards.
2. Give it a night
While the hurt is still there, don't decide anything. Don't reply, don't go cold, don't quit, don't write the person off. If something needs an answer today, send the shortest, most neutral holding reply you can, and leave the rest until tomorrow.
The hurt fades faster than you'd expect. And the decisions we make while we're hurting are nearly always about making the pain stop as quickly as possible, not about what happened. They're hardly ever what we'd choose the next morning.
3. Tell people your pattern
So, back to that Sunday.
When I ran the questions, the camera saw a teenager with exams in the morning, a two-hour train journey, a birthday visit the week before, and a dad who never told her he wanted to see her. The feeling was nowhere near that size. Most of it was old.
Which brought me to the last thing, and it's the one that changed the most.
At a calm moment, not in the middle of it, tell the people you love what you do when you get hurt. A few plain sentences.
So I told my daughter how it felt on my side. I said that when I get hurt, my tendency is to get angry to cover the sadness... and then shut down to cover everything (and FYI, in my opinion, ‘angry’ is a better option than ‘shut down’, because when I'm angry, at least I'm still present).
She was really lovely about it.
From the outside, going cold looks like not caring. The people close to us can't see the hurt underneath, so they meet a wall and draw their own conclusions. Once they know the pattern, the wall stops being a mystery... and it's a lot harder for us to hide behind it.
I don't always catch the shutdown in time. But I'd much rather she knows her dad was hurt... than finds a wall where her dad used to be.
So if something small hurts a lot this week, you're allowed to feel every bit of it. And you're still allowed to check the facts before you believe the story.
If a message or a conversation is still going round your head at bedtime, play this one 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Nothing Left to Think | Deep Sleep Hypnosis for Overthinkers
Chibs 💙
PS. Tired & Wired is my small community for people who are tired of running on empty. We meet live every week, and this is exactly the kind of thing we work through together. The first seven days are free if you'd like a look → https://www.skool.com/chibs
