The Trellis

The goal is not to be told you are loved every hour. It is to stop needing to check.

Saturday morning. Your partner is quiet over breakfast, scrolling their phone, and answers your question about the day in one word. By the time the coffee is finished you are certain something is wrong, and fairly sure it is you. You go quiet. They go back to the phone. By evening you have both apologised without knowing what for, and nobody in the day did anything cruel.

This book is about rejection sensitive dysphoria where it costs the most: in love, in friendship, and at the edge of a boundary. Its argument is that the alarm sets up a cycle two people keep turning together. In studies of couples published in 1998, Downey and colleagues found that people high in rejection sensitivity expected rejection, behaved in conflict in ways that drew it out, and were then more often rejected. "The fear helped make the thing it feared." The book is as plain about where the science stops. No study has yet imaged the brains of people with RSD as a defined group, and a 2014 study by Woo and colleagues found that, at a finer level, the brain's patterns for rejection and for physical pain are distinct. Rejection hurting like a burn is "a useful image, not a literal fact."

The way through runs from the cycle itself to the words for a hard conversation, and to the fear that arrives before anything has happened. Then a toolkit arranged from the first minutes to the weeks after, healthy love with a section for the partner without RSD, secure attachment, and friends, screens and work. Each chapter ends with a practice. In one, a couple takes a single medium-sized quarrel, draws six boxes in a circle on a sheet of paper, from trigger to confirmation, fills them in together, and agrees one change.

Ammanuel Santa Anna coaches people who live with rejection sensitivity, and lives with it himself. He wrote for four readers: the person who feels it, the people who love them, practitioners, and anyone who wants to love with less fear. Every claim of fact carries its source, and the stories are composites, labelled as such. The Lantern takes the dating ground further, and Signal and Story the words.

The image he leaves is a trellis, and a rose or a jasmine climbing it. "The trellis doesn't make the plant less tender. It gives the tenderness a shape to grow along."

It describes a pattern and the practices that help with it. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified clinician.