Before any cue even arrives, there's a hum — a quiet, standing question in the background: are they still here for me? Today, the whole chain that hum sets off, start to finish. Not so you can judge it. So you can see exactly where it's interruptible.
A standing baseline hum — they might leave, they might already be leaving — running under everything, before any actual cue shows up. It isn't paranoia. It's a prediction your radar makes by default, learned from somewhere real. We'll find where, next session.
With that hum running, an ambiguous cue arrives — a slow reply, a flat tone — and the radar doesn't hold it as neutral. It rushes straight to the worst reading, skipping the step where it would normally wait and check. The cue never really got a chance to stay ambiguous.
Here's the part that makes this hard to catch in the moment: the verdict doesn't arrive as a guess. It arrives as news. Heart rate up, stomach tight, a wave of certainty. Your body reacts to "they're leaving" exactly as fast as it would to a fact, because as far as your body's concerned, it is one.
Something has to be done with a reaction that big, right now — so you withdraw, or push first, or bend yourself into whatever keeps them close. This is the link that makes rejection sensitivity different from an ordinary bad feeling: the behavior can create real distance. Which becomes the next cue. Which restarts the chain — bigger.
Say this plainly, because it matters: this chain is usually built from real early evidence. Somewhere, sometime, the radar learned that watching closely kept you safer. That doesn't make today's read accurate — but it does make it make sense. Nothing about this chain means something is wrong with you.
Here's the whole point of the next six weeks: every link on this chain is interruptible. We're going to slow down link two — catching the cue before the verdict — and rebuild link four, so the behavior stops writing checks the relationship has to cash.