Does rejection "eat you up"?

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This could have gone in the social skills forum, but I'm wondering if this is part of autism. I find in a lot of the places I worked at, people seemed apprehensive and would sometimes try to get away from me. Not everyone, of course, but enough that it would hurt me. It still happens in other walks of life.

Now, please answer if this is you ----> it sometimes can get under your skin, and really, really irritate you, and it hurts like hell. Sometimes to the point I don't want to do anything productive. It's almost like an ache. Could this be OCD? Is this part of being on the spectrum? Or could it just be good old fashion mental illness? This has bothered me to the point of getting poor grades earlier in life, and finally quitting jobs, so yes it matters.

OMG, yes. I'm going through that right now (marriage in the crapper, a relationship ended recently with someone I care a lot about, not of my choosing) and I am having extreme trouble handling it. Rejection is the thing that probably hurts me the most deeply and the most severely. That my husband blames me for everything just makes it worse. IMO it's the obsessive nature of AS that makes this rough...I can't get the memories out of my head and they drive me nuts. I can't get the hurtful things my husband has said out either, and I can't get the fact that I don't understand why my relationships with other people fall apart out of my head either....I obsess about THAT all the time.

It sucks.

~Kate

Rejection, in a boy-girl relationship sense, or just a general social sense?

I never even tried with the former, but the latter, being rejected by "friends", classmates, group leaders, etc... that eats me up. Partly because I'm prone to depression, but that chews on my already deflated self-esteem, and makes me hate myself. Myself, I'm still trying to convince myself that the bullying and crap I had early on in my life, is their fault and not mine. I'm still convinced that it's my fault everything happened, and that in itself, "eats me up".

Yes, oh yes. I don't know if I have clinical depression or not, but I've already suspected for a while that I do. I have very vivid memories of rejections that have happened years earlier, and sometimes they just come up and put me into a non-functional state for hours on end.

I can relate to your post a lot. Again I don't know if you mean girlfriend/boyfriend relationships or trouble with relationships socially and in the genral sense. I've been having trouble with both. I often think because of my AS and depression I can't be in with the American majority meaning "soccer mom" NT pepole. I, as well as AS, been diagnosed with clinical depression and I have had all the symptoms of bi-polar disorder. I grew up being teased a lot. When I go to places like malls,sporting events etc. I often think I can't connect. I also often wonder if it's because of my AS. I both been rejected by casual friends and women that I ask out. I feel alinated by the Jones'es so to speak and I often feel that I can never join them. The Jones'es, in crowd, soccer mom pepole, NT's or whatever we can call them.

It does me. I hate feeling like I am invisible all the time.

Yes, I wish it didn't.

Strangely enough, chronic rejection does not bother much anymore. When i was younger, it bothered me alot. But as I got older and gained life experience, I found out that I truly was not missing out on as much as I thought, by being rejected. I prefer to be alone most of the time. And it would be somewhat dishonest of me to be all broken up emotionally about being rejected over something that turned out not to be as important to me as I thought it was.

Social anxiety disorder... a very, very common comorbid... Also, avoidant personality. Or traits thereof, for the milder cases. I think I've gone the opposite way and become a bit more schizoid myself--rather than caring that people reject me, I've begun to reject what people think of me. It's easier this way; and it doesn't stop me from being altruistic or compassionate.

You shouldn't be afraid of rejection.

I can definitely relate. Might be my depression, but I'm not sure. I certainly feel like crap after being rejected and think about it constantly for a while after a sign of rejection. It's hard to let go.

I wish I could just not care what ppl *I* care about think. Those I don't give a rat's behind about, I don't care. But those that I care about, if they reject me...friends, family, male/female relationships, it just obsesses me and makes me crazy, particularly because I rarely understand why it happens. If I understood it and could either (a) prevent it from happening in the future or (b) understand that hey, this one was really not preventable but it was an exception for this reason or that, I could live with it, but crap, this not knowing why and having it happen repeatedly and having no defense against it has worn me down to the point where I am considering that once my children are grown I may not want to continue living. I really hate it that people generally don't tell me why...either they just get angry and blame (and typically they are more focused on the anger than on the constructive end of things) or they won't explain. It is really driving me nuts.

~Kate

I'm used to rejection and I don't care what others think of me, so no, I'm not bothered by it at all.

Usually I'm oblivious to what others think of me, sometimes to my detriment.

In that sense, rejection doesn't affect me at all, in fact I'm completely impervious to it, unless someone who rejects me becomes spiteful because I haven't reacted to their rejection ~ I'm pretty sure this has happened. It's part of being socially .. different.

But, when it comes to personal situations, where I have some degree or form of direct involvement, yes. Oh, yes.

Yes, rejection hurts me very much. Just because I am different does not mean I am not human. I am a social animal, regardless of how socially capable I am. I work hard to appear normal but time and time again I mess up. I wonder if some day I will find love. I try to improve myself everyday, and am always hoping for the best.

Yes, it does. Especially in a social sense. What's more troubling are rejections that aren't in the formal of total rejection (e.g. I hate you), but the subtler forms. You know, someone simply walking away from you or ending the conversation as you are trying to connect with someone. The feeling afterwards is really the worst in the world, second only to grief.