I became friends with a couple of people and I meet with them often. They like me as well but my brain tries to convince me they hate me. I was severly bullied, ostracized and neglected by my peers at school from elementary school to college and it caused me to have a hard time trusting anyone and gave me terrible self esteem. But I didn’t know that it would be this bad. It sucks having the time of your life and returning home just trying to shut off your brain because you don’t want to deal with the intrusive thoughts. But it doesn’t work, the next day the thoughts come back and make me feel terrible. I almost don’t want to announce that I’m coming for our next meeting because somehow I feel like a burden, even though I was literally personally invited by one of my friends.
Does anybody else deal with this? How do you deal with it?
In general I focus more on talking about external affairs that are not meta-social discussion. I have found I will wonder if people are hinting I am being an idiot or something when referencing, for instance how stupid a lot of fitness and diet trends are. In my case the suspicion comes from like, “do they also view me that way?” if that makes sense.