RSD Alchemy
A short protocol for the adult with ADHD.
Four steps, to run on episodes of rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).
Written by someone who wasn't diagnosed until they were a full-grown adult.
Episodes that used to take a weekend from me, and sometimes a friendship, are now usually over the same day. With an apology made instead of a grudge kept.
I still experience RSD. Now it is something I learn from rather than something I cringe at replays of.
The step nobody wants
After launching a different product I had spent eleven months on and nobody applying, I was caught in an RSD spiral.
Once I realised, I ran the first step of RSD Alchemy on the bed in the spare room, straight out of the shower, with a towel around me.
The first step is the one nobody wants. The advice is not new. What you might not have had is the how, written from the perspective of someone who felt some version of what you do. Looking the feelings in the eye when you least want to is the hardest part to train. Learning how to do it is what RSD Alchemy is for.
I had spent the five days before doing the precise opposite: avoiding analysing the launch, avoiding my mentor, avoiding sharing with friends. Then I followed the instructions a younger version of myself wrote.
I stopped running. I cried. It was neither quick nor dignified, and it ended on its own, which is the part I still do not believe until it happens. Then I saw the situation objectively. Someone about to throw away eleven months of work because strangers had been quiet. Nothing had been lost.
Two steps in, the spiral was finished.
The last two steps are the reason you are reading this now, and why I wrote up the protocol rather than enter digital hermitage.
I created RSD Alchemy over three years ago following my diagnosis. The books the psychiatrist who diagnosed me recommended were dense and full of useful information.
When I looked for what I wanted help with the most, there were no entries for it.
Strange, until you look into it. RSD is not a recognised medical or psychiatric diagnosis.
If learning this about RSD is enough to end your episodes, then it is my pleasure to have helped. You can close this page. Otherwise, the rest is written for you.
The authors of those books are qualified. I am not.
Nicholas Traherne is a pen name. I am not a clinician and hold no medical, psychological or therapeutic qualifications. I write from my own experience of ADHD.
So I wrote the entry I went looking for.
You know the shape of it
The trigger is always too small for what follows. Face to face, it will be something that makes me feel attacked in some way, even if I don’t recognise that’s how I feel at the time. The desire to fight back or escape the event can be so powerful it seems like what happens in the moment is rational. Reviewing these situations from a distance, I see my behaviour objectively. My reactions confused me. Why would I feel burning antagonism towards a friend tactfully giving me helpful advice?
Often it is not from a face to face situation. An event cancelled at the last minute. A short reply in a different tone to the paragraph you sent. A two-word note. That feeling. You know how it feels for you, I don’t need to describe it. For me, it is a feeling of hotness rising up: flushed skin, a spotlight upon me, tightness in my chest. Wanting to push back or hide. It was a part of my life for decades before I had a name for it.
The size of the trigger tells you nothing about how long it runs. An evening. A weekend. A week. A sentence you still recall years later, word for word. Afterwards, with the feeling gone, the reaction does not explain itself.
It has a second shape. The first is the one above: RSD in the moment, and the reaction you have no explanation for. The second is quieter. It doesn’t feel like RSD. One piece of negative feedback causes you to ignore the positive ones, and it feels like a sensible decision to quietly stop doing what you were doing. Or the trigger causes the reaction so fast, that there is no RSD feeling you notice, and the reaction feels rational and passes under the radar. The protocol is built for both. The quiet ones aren’t rarer. But they are harder to spot.
What I’ve found is that running the protocol on the loud, obvious shapes trains me to notice the quiet ones too. The quiet ones masquerade as wisdom. Unless I run the protocol on them and notice that there was a trigger, and see I felt attacked and reacted (either to retreat or fortify my position), I would have followed the reaction blindly thinking it was an objective decision.
What this is
RSD Alchemy is a protocol: four steps, in a fixed order, that you run on a real episode. Not a course, not another description of what RSD feels like. You already know. The four together are called WANE, because that is what the surge does once I stop fighting it. I ran WANE first on episodes after the fact.
W: Welcome the feeling.
Not just “sit with it”, but how. For me, the surge passes in less time than I ever believed it could.
A: Acknowledge the global perspective.
Step outside the episode and see it as it is, not how it feels like it is.
N: Notice the feelings of others.
What they were likely feeling, rather than what I assumed they were.
E: Engage your response, not a reaction.
An apology, a question, an action, something else, or nothing.
If three and four look familiar, that is because every version of this advice I was given started there. Nobody gave me one and two, and without them, three and four were as useful as telling a depressed person to lighten up, or a person worried about finances to be rich. Even three, done the way the protocol does it, was not what I had been told. The how is the whole difference, and it is the reason this is a protocol rather than advice.
The steps are the instructions. The rest of the document is the context that allows me to understand why they work. It includes my own model of what RSD is, and what it is for. It is not a clinical model.
For me, RSD is a signal that never got connected to what it was pointing at. It got louder because nothing was listening. The protocol is how I learned to listen to it. When I catch an episode in the moment, it is smaller and shorter than I expect. When I catch one afterwards, the gap between the episode and the rep keeps shrinking. Most of what I find is that I misunderstood something. A plain apology, with no defence attached, releases a pressure I did not know I was carrying.
What a run looks like
You read it once, start to finish, before you need it. About forty minutes. Then you run it on an episode you already had. That is what the worksheet is for, and it is how I ran it on the failed launch: five days late, from the notebook I first built it in.
The runs themselves were never the slow part. The first time I ran it deliberately on something that had happened that morning, it took minutes. What took time was noticing while I was in one, because the emotions were so powerful. Everyone around me could see I was reactive, but at first I could only notice after, when my emotional baseline returned and the contrast was blatant. The worksheet and the protocol are built for the late rep, because that is where I started.
Who this is for
An adult with ADHD who knows the term RSD, has read the explanations, and has episodes anyway.
RSD Alchemy is not a diagnosis and it is not a diagnostic tool. Recognising a pattern in yourself is not a diagnosis of anything, and nothing in this document can tell you whether you have ADHD or any other condition. A diagnosis is not required: each document describes a pattern, and if the pattern describes you, that is the signal to weigh, not the paperwork.
Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is a widely used description of a pattern of experience. It is not a recognised medical or psychiatric diagnosis, and RSD Alchemy is not a clinical account of it.
It is not therapy, treatment, or medical or psychological advice, and it is not a substitute for professional care. It makes no claim to treat or cure ADHD, rejection sensitive dysphoria or any condition, and no outcome is promised.
Who this is not for
Someone in crisis now. If you are at risk of harming yourself or you need help right away: call 988 in the US, Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, or find your local line at findahelpline.com.
Someone who wants other people to change to accommodate their behaviour.
What you get
- The protocol, complete. Four steps, exact instructions, and what to do when one of them fails.
- The WANE rep worksheet, for the first time you run it.
- The one-page quick-reference sheet, for your phone.
Run it, then send me one email telling me what happened, within 90 days of buying. I read every one myself. Every future version of RSD Alchemy is yours free. Not a review. What you ran it on, what the protocol did, and where it failed you.
It is a real inbox and I am the only person in it. I cannot answer questions about diagnosis, medication or treatment, or tell you whether to seek an assessment.
About forty minutes to read. The first rep is one you have already had, so nothing is waiting on your next episode.
£19, paid once. No subscription. Buyers must be 18 or over.
Twenty-one day refund, no questions asked. Reply to your receipt email or use the refund form, and I refund you.
Delivered by email straight after checkout.
Who created this
Nicholas Traherne is a pen name. My government name is Jones, and I have too often been mistaken for the owner of Soho House, and less often for the popular entertainer Nick Jonas. I am not a clinician and hold no medical, psychological or therapeutic qualifications. I write from my own experience of ADHD.
Once I had understood how RSD operated for me, I wondered if I understood it well enough to create a document I could send back in time to my 18-year-old self to help them. RSD Alchemy is that document.
It does not stop the sting of RSD arriving. What it changed for me is what comes next. Where there used to be a reaction I could not stop, there is now a response I choose. I make mistakes. This protocol turned them into things I learn from rather than memories I replay.
What changed
RSD still happens. What ended was always being driven by it. What began was using it to treat myself and those around me better.
In August, after nobody applied, I ran the protocol. Before, I would have burned everything while I was still upset.
Another, a few weeks later. My proofreader had sent me a list of cuts and edits. Most were excellent. Some I disagreed with. During a meeting, I became defensive when they pushed back. They asked me earnestly if I was experiencing RSD, skilfully irritating my choleric disposition. I was certain that my position was correct, and moved on to the next topic.
The next morning I did not have to run it deliberately. As I began the final proofread myself, I read the first sentence of the first section. In a second I knew they were right, and I knew exactly what to do. I let them know immediately I was wrong the day before, apologised for my rudeness, thanked them for their advice, and made every change they had suggested. An episode like that used to be able to run for weeks. Before the protocol I might never have known it was one at all, the pain of admitting I was wrong and misunderstood perhaps too much to accept.
The rest are smaller, but I notice them more. I take responsibility now, where before I did not understand how I had made someone feel. I do the small things that tell the people close to me I have been thinking about them. None of these are big, but the effects on how they make those around me feel are massive. They are the things an episode used to take from me.
Questions you may be holding
I have already read everything about RSD.
So had I. Everything I read described what RSD feels like and what it does to you. None of it said what it was for, and none of it gave me anything to run when it arrived. This does both.
Where are the testimonials?
There will never be any. Inside the document I promise that nothing you send me is ever quoted, published, or turned into a testimonial. Not anonymised, not with permission, not ever. I would rather have that promise than the proof. The only endorsement on this page is that I ran my own protocol on my own failed launch, and then wrote it up.
What if my life doesn’t look like your examples?
The mechanism is the same no matter the situation. It runs on the episode, not the thing that set it off.
Why £19?
Because I would rather as many people as possible try it than have a few people think about it.
How long is it, and what format?
About forty minutes’ reading. A PDF readable on your preferred device or printed out in whole. There is a worksheet and a one-page quick-reference sheet which you can print out separately if you prefer.
Can I email you?
Yes, and I encourage you to. The address is inside the document, it is a real inbox, and I am the only person in it. I cannot answer questions about diagnosis, medication or treatment, or tell you whether to seek an assessment. I am not qualified to, and that is not what this address is for. What it is for is what happened when you ran it, and I would rather hear that than not.
What if I only manage to run it a week after the episode?
Then you have run it. The protocol is built for lateness: the first reps are always after the fact. Running the protocol like this is how it is designed to be used at first. There is no version of doing this wrong because you are doing it late.
Is this clinical fact or your own model?
My own model. I built it from my own episodes and the reps I have run since. It has no clinical standing and does not claim any.
I’m not diagnosed with ADHD. Is this for me?
RSD Alchemy is not a diagnosis and it is not a diagnostic tool. I wrote it for the late-diagnosed ADHD adult because that is what I am. I built it from my own pattern, and that is the basis I sell it on. A diagnosis is not required: each document describes a pattern, and if the pattern describes you, that is the signal to weigh, not the paperwork. The twenty-one day refund exists for exactly that question.
I’m in therapy. Should I run this?
That is a question for your therapist, not for me. I am not a clinician and hold no medical, psychological or therapeutic qualifications. This is not therapy or a substitute for therapy. It is a protocol I wrote originally for myself. It does not ask you to change anything about your care. If you want a second opinion, show your therapist this page.
Who is this not for?
Someone in crisis now. If you are at risk of harming yourself or you need help right away: call 988 in the US, Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, or find your local line at findahelpline.com. This is a protocol you run on yourself, not therapy and not a community.
What if it doesn’t work for me?
Then reply to your receipt email or use the refund form within twenty-one days, and I refund you, no questions asked. One thing before you decide it has not worked: the first rep is meant to happen late and imperfectly. Late and badly counts.
Your next episode is already scheduled.
The first rep is not. It is on an episode you have already had, and it can be tonight.
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