Why Do I Feel Like My Friends Don’t Actually Like Me? (Even When Nothing Is Wrong)
“I feel annoying and unwanted around my friends”
You’re hanging out with friends, but instead of being present and enjoying the moment to moment experience, you’re stuck in your head wondering about every little change in expression or tone, the length or tone of a text message, or the flow of the conversation.
You’re wondering about what you’re friends are thinking about you, and you’re focused more on the belief that you’re annoying and unwanted than you are focused on being authentic, playful, and you.
After the hang out, you might try to think positively and convince yourself that there’s no need to worry, but instead of calming your overthinking mind, you keep looping back, ruminating about the interactions with your friends, and wondering if maybe you’re intuition is right when it says, “they don’t really like me, they don’t want to be around me, they think I’m annoying.”
This experience is so uncomfortable. I’ve had it happen time and time again, and the truth is, a lot of us have been experiencing this social anxiety since long before we knew to call it that. These patterns of overthinking and social anxiety in friendships are normally rooted in… you’ve probably already guessed it… attachment wounding.
Your relational experiences over the course of your life make a big impact, and when you feel like you just can’t stop ruminating or feeling anxious about your friendships (even when no one is saying they’re upset at you or annoyed by you), there’s a high chance it’s your anxietyand rooted in your own trauma and stress, not your current friendships (but they might be a little… we’ll talk about that).
In this blog, we’re going to start differentiating between what’s anxiety and what’s truth. We’ll explore why this experience is common, especially for highly sensitive women, and how to prep your mind and body for the before, during and after friend hang outs so you aren’t flooded by social anxiety and rumination after friend hang outs.
Is This Anxiety or Intuition?
The brain is really smart, like really smart, even when you aren’t trying. It’s constantly adapting to it’s environment, and that includes it’s relational environment. The brain will learn to scan for cues- cues that “I’m not wanted here” or “I need to tone it down, they don’t like this” or “I’m definitely being judged right now” or “I need to correct myself for love and acceptance”- when the environment teaches the brain to.
It could be parents, caregivers, teachers, siblings, and even earlier friendships that affect us and shape our attachment systems. When we feel rejected and we feel unmanageable shame, we adapt; we learn to scan for cues so that we can catch things early and correct them before we are rejected, shamed, or even abandoned in some way. I come across this a lot in my therapy practice and a lot of times we find that those protective, anxious, scanning parts are super young (4 year olds, 6 year olds, 9 year olds) and these young parts get frozen in time at the point in which attachment trauma took place.
These sweet, young protective parts are so beautiful and important; they care deeply about protecting the system from feelings of shame, rejection, and abandonment. But these young protective parts aren’t driven by intuition, they’re driven by anxiety.
You know that intuition is speaking when there isn’t an agenda, when the energy flowing through the fascia is calm, grounded, clear, confident and compassionate.
When the voice speaking in your mind is uncomfortable, frantic, urgent, fixated, or coming with some type of agenda (ex. “I have to find out if…” or “I need to fix…”), it’s not intuition… it’s likely a stuck, anxious, protective part within your system. This part needs care and attention and we need to show up for this part before we show up as this part.
The work of getting to know protective, anxious parts is called “parts work” and it’s rooted in Internal Family Systems Therapy, my jam as a somatic therapist.
Why This Happens (Especially for Highly Sensitive Women)
I think you’re getting the idea here: early attachment wounding will affect the way you experience your later relationships, including your friendships. When your attachment system learns to expect rejection or abandonment, it’ll continue to expect it, even in situations where real rejection or abandonment isn’t happening or is maybe unlikely to happen.
When you’re a highly sensitive woman, you’re even more vulnerable to this experience. HSP women are often those that also experience ADHD, OCD, or autism, but they don’t always. Highly sensitive people actually have changes in brain structure as compared to less sensitive individuals; brain scans actually demonstrate more reactive mirror neuron systems (indicating greater empathy), more reactive amygdalas (meaning greater hyper-vigilance and scanning behavior), and even more reactive insula (responsible for how you experience your senses and your emotions in the body).
Some familiar traits in highly sensitive people include sensory sensitivity, emotional flooding, overthinking and anxiety. HSPs often learn to believe that their emotions are too much and so they work to suppress emotion, but that emotional energy can only be suppressed for so long before it floods the system. The friction HSPs feel, between pushing emotion down and emotion trying to come up, is often experienced as anxiety and panic.
Because highly sensitive people experience the world in such an intense way, they are highly affected by how others treat them; those relational experiences remain in the body and flare up over the lifetime when things feel uncertain in their friendships.
The pattern of ongoing anxiety in relationships, wanting closeness while simultaneously fearing abandonment, hoping for greater connection while struggling to be unmasked and vulnerable, often indicates a fearful avoidant style of attachment. While fixating anxiously on friendships and frequently asking for reassurance might indicate a more pure anxious style of attachment. Either way, noticing these anxious patterns compassionately, and showing up for those anxious parts before showing up as them in your life, is key to becoming more securely attached in all your relationships.
When you start becoming hyper-aware of body language or tone of voice, can you notice the hyper-vigilant, anxious part and breathe into it? When you notice yourself overthinking a friendship, can you pause, notice the associated emotional sensations and breathe into them? Can you pause and notice the anxious emotional energy in your body, soften it with each breath and remind these parts of you, “it’s normally not personal- trust your friend to share their truth- you don’t have to mind read”? Notice how that shifts things in your body and in your mind.
When you start fearing being “too much” or fearing being “not enough,” start noticing the discomfort in your body, notice where you still feel grounded. Your nervous system is activated and your only job is regulating that nervous system again before engaging with those anxious thoughts.
Why You Can’t Stop Replaying It After
When anxious people hear the word “rumination” for the first time, it normally hits pretty deep. We know what that experience is like, and just hearing the word “rumination” we remember exactly what it’s like to be stuck in thought loops that just won’t quit.
This thought looping happens on auto-pilot, and even after reviewing a situation once, twice, maybe even three times, the anxious, ruminative, compulsive brain feels it necessary to do it again. While this experience can feel frustrating and overwhelming and while you might even be judging yourself for it now, this is your invitation to start befriending this ruminative, thought looping part of you.
Harsh criticism and judgment of our anxious patterns isn’t actually useful, compassion is. Rumination happens because the brain is trying to solve something it thinks it needs to solve; anxiety thinks you won’t be able to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what your friend is thinking about you. Anxiety might also struggle to tolerate not being able to fully control how others think about you.
This is rooted in attachment wounding.
Your brain isn’t trying to make life feel more stressful, it’s trying to prevent rejection because the system believes that grief, sadness, embarrassment, guilt or shame are intolerable, and therefore you have to think about it, fix it, or control it in order to avoid the potential for intolerable emotions.
Signs It’s Anxiety (Not Reality)
It can help to have a few clear guidelines to differentiate between what’s anxiety and what’s most likely reality. Let’s take a look at a few indicators that it might be anxiety not reality:
You felt okay at moments, but doubt hits suddenly (intrusively) or later on
No one gave clear negative feedback
Thoughts are repetitive and hard to stop
You assume others think negatively without evidence
You focus only on what you said “wrong”
But now, let’s look back at that list and consider when and where you might have experienced these things in reality in the past.:
You felt okay at moments, but later found out that your attachment figure was being inauthentic and actually did have a problem with something about you or how you behaved
You didn’t get clear feedback but experienced passive aggression from an attachment figure until eventually they exploded
Your attachment figures were inconsistent in expressing love, which left you wondering at times how your attachment figures really felt about you and causing you to adapt a pattern of trying to mind read
You often felt judged by attachment figures and so your attachment system was primed to expect disapproval; your brain automatically scans for evidence to support these beliefs or expectations: “I disappoint others” or “I have disappointed others” or “I will disappoint others”
During tender moments in your life, your attachment figures focused on what you did wrong rather than on what you did right. There was little balance between the two and you learned to do the same to yourself; the hippocampus (memory center in the survival brain) recalls this and auto pilot signals other structures in the survival brain to start secreting stress hormones into the body when attachment related stress is triggered (in both current romantic relationships and platonic ones). This causes you to question if you’ve done something “wrong” in your friendships, even when nothing’s happened and no one’s said anything
Our anxious patterns are often rooted in deeper things; even when they seem unrelated, in your body they aren’t. This is why it’s so important to notice those automatic anxious thoughts and feelings that come up around your friendships. If you can learn to notice, connect with on a deeper level, and make space to process through the deeper stuff, you might be able to overcome the anxiety, rumination, and negative self talk.
What Actually Helps in the Moment
If you’ve been working through anxiety for a while, maybe you’ve been introduced to this intervention: gently asking yourself, “what evidence do I have?” as a way to challenge your anxiety.
Here’s why I don’t like that intervention as a first line of action:
We’re focusing too much on the current situation and not enough on how the past is showing up in the present, through anxious sensations in the body. We have to go a little bit deeper because anxiety doesn’t necessarily care about evidence. It cares about feeling safety in the body now; and once it does, the mind thinks clearer and calmer thoughts.
If we can create calm in the body, we’ll naturally create calm in the mind- without forcing our thoughts to be “better” and without shunning our honest (valid) and anxious feelings in the body.
Here’s what I actually recommend:
Notice the presence of anxious or ruminative thoughts and label what the thoughts are doing. Quite literally say out loud to yourself, “ruminating… imagining… guessing… mind reading…” Do that slowly and try to breathe slow and soft as you observe the presence of these thoughts without building on them
Deepen your awareness a little bit more by naming how these thought patterns make you feel; use a feelings wheel to point out the different feelings that surface when those thought patterns are present and label, “worried… nervous… anxious… scared…”
Deepen your awareness even further by finding those emotions in the body and labeling where they are, bringing compassionate attention to sensations (again, without building any more on thoughts)
Allow the emotional sensations to be there and practice embodying emotions on purpose so that the emotional energy can start to flow through and out of the body
Follow up by adding comfort to those emotional sensations through gentle movement, breath, touch; engaging in small actions that support a sense of nurturing
Connect to an anchor in the body; find a sensation in the body that feels neutral, grounded, maybe even calm or secure. Breathe into this space, connect to a visual that helps you deepen your connection to that calm or grounded energy; stay here
Alternate attention back and forth between the comforted emotional sensations and the grounded sensations in the body
Check in with the grounded sensation or the calming visual and ask into the sensation or the visual; “what wisdom do you have to share with me now?” and listen to the wisdom that comes from within after you’ve connected, felt, embodied, and grounded
The goal here is to move into and through the attachment anxiety, without over attaching to the current situation, without over analyzing your past, and by attending to your nervous system and your body’s automatic reactions in the here-and-now.
When we create regulation in the nervous system using mindfulness and somatic strategies like these, we create clearer and calmer thoughts that are rooted in grounding and regulation, rather than created by anxiety.
How to Stop the Spiral
We stop the spiral when we notice the spiral and choose to engage with it differently. But the goal is not to stop the anxiety. If anything we want to welcome the anxiety on purpose, but without over-engaging with the anxious narrative about the current friendship dynamic.
The intention is to:
notice the anxiety
connect with the anxiety
not over engage with the anxious thoughts
process through the anxiety in the body (embody feelings, ground into an anchor, alternate back and forth making space for the emotions to be felt and released)
connect to calmer, clearer, more confident energy and perspective
We want to connect to the emotions in the body, on purpose, so that we can move through them and so that we can balance out how we feel before we engage with our thoughts again.
Signs There Really Is A Problem In Your Friendship
Anxiety isn’t the villain and sometimes anxious thoughts and feelings surface because there’s something very real you’re sensing from your friend, without them directly telling you.
Here’s what you should pay attention to in your friendships:
Is your friend passive aggressive, rude or mean to you at times?
Do you regularly make more an effort than your friend, in all ways?
Does your friend get defensive or dismissive when you express yourself?
Does your friend regularly tease you in a way that feels icky?
Is it often your friend ignores your texts or calls without apology?
Have you heard that your friend says mean things about you behind your back?
Has your friend explicitly made you feel unwelcome at a social gathering?
Does your friend act differently toward you when other people are around from when it’s just the two of you?
This is a list of just some of the things to look out for as someone with social anxiety; it’s possible the anxiety you feel isn’t just about attachment stress or trauma from the past, but is very much about the person you’re dealing with right now.
If any of these things are happening, and you’re finding it difficult to decide how to navigate the friendship at this point in time, therapy can help you work through that anxiety and make clear, confident and courageous choices for you.
You CAN Change Your Anxious Patterns
You can change your anxious patterns, but it takes more than knowing and understanding your anxious patterns. Even though you intellectually understand the impacts of attachment wounding on how you experience your friendships now, you can still get triggered and react on auto-pilot (despite “knowing better”) from those anxious, ruminative parts of you.
Patience, compassion and practice.
The more you self connect and process the anxiety in your body, the more easily you’ll shift out of anxious auto-pilot mode and into calm, grounded, connected-to-my-inner-wisdom mode.
If you:
struggle with social anxiety
wonder if your friends thinks you’re annoying while you’re hanging out
fixate on whether you’re being “too much” in your friendships
obsess over whether your friend (s) actually even like you
assume that your friends don’t actually want to be friends with you
assume your friends would rather be somewhere else or with someone else
You don’t need to “check for evidence” on whether or not your friend really is your friend..
In fact, checking for evidence might lead to reassurance-seeking patterns which might only exacerbate the loop of anxiety.
Instead, we want to connect into the body, feel through those deeper emotions, lean into those internal resources (our own grounded and anchored sensations) and listen to the wisdom that surfaces from the calm we cultivate through that process.
Are You Looking For Therapy in California?
Does this resonate with you? If so and you’re looking for therapy in California, reach out to me by calling now or by scheduling a 20 minute consultation call.
In somatic and IFS (internal family systems) informed therapy, you can learn and practice what it’s like to move through those recommendations I shared earlier and to connect with all of the anxious and fearful parts within your system that adapted as a result of the attachment stress and trauma you’ve endured over your lifetime.
Remember, anxiety is not the villain and we aren’t trying to stop it or get rid of it. Anxiety might have important information and might want to offer guidance; that’s okay and therapy can help you explore what it’s like to befriend your anxiety and consult with it intentionally.
You can do this.