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?
All the time. Same cause.
It hasn't changed in the ~25 years since I left high school.
I even get it in online communities, in discord servers, in places like this, where we're all barely acquaintances and there are next to no stakes in people liking you. But at places like work it ruins my life.
If you want to read more on it, I think the medical term for it is "attachment disorders", and you might also want to look up "insecure adult attachment styles".