"Everyone hates me" beliefs

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I have had similar feelings because my mind learned that people are rude to an extent. I learned it from my childhood bullies, and those adults who missunderstood me. If there is no mental phsycosis, this could be the case. It sinks in whether we want it or not, because we would have gotten it too often to know better.

I think that you speak when you really have something to say- this was me too. You were not necessarily shy in your childhood, you just valued quality over quantity of speech. Most people completely misunderstand it. As you got older and began to verbalize more you probably talked about things that were so much more thought-provoking than NT people would chitcat about so they were intimidated. Intellectuals are intimidating.

I found it difficult in my romantic relationships when I would start to go on about whatever subject I felt strongly about at the time and my boyfriend would want to kiss me right in the middle of my rant. Oh that would infuriate me. One of the many reasons I don't date anymore!

Hey Stuart,

I'm sorry you're having such bad feelings.

Can I take them one by one?

Well... I get this feeling a lot. The thing that causes it is the secret feeling that I'm a really bad person.
Is this something you feel? If so, why?
I actually get this one quite a lot too... For a start, where I'm living, I am foreign. ((English speaking, but they know I'm not from round here...) A lot of folks pick up on my accent. Also, I'm very tall for my gender, don't mince like a ninny (ie, "walk like a girl") and all my life people have told me I'm "strange." (Seems that is to do with my diagnoses.)
You know what? Who cares if someone doesn't like you for those things? Sod them! You are still you!
It happens. It's not the end of the world.
That's insecurity. I have it the other way sometimes: it feels like an argument, and I'm in the right!

Have you considered cognitive therapy? It might help.

I have felt this as a constant, all my life, in spite of some evidence to the contrary, and evidence supporting it.
the trouble for me is that my AS presentation and trait manifestation means I cannot adequately "feel" that people value or like me. I don't have a lasting storehouse of good emotional memories and mirroring of good feeling between me and others and so I cannot FEEL a sense of being liked.
As well, I am one AS person who gets high anxiety and accompanying worry and paranoia, and so every interaction is analyzed and mulled over to an overwhelming extent. One small interaction the other day, has been the focus of my analytical energies for hours and hours. "What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Did I say the right thing? What did the other person mean when they said xyz? Did i understand? What was that look they gave the other person? When they leaned over and mentioned something to that other person was that in reference to something I said etc etc etc etc."

This stuff is the really down side of AS for me. The great stuff is my focus, my quirkiness and humour, my skills and talents. The negative side is all the worry and concern and anxiety around interaction with others.

I am learning however, to steer away from people who do not understand. especially in contexts where I HAVE to be - such as my son's school and activities. I have been welcomed by some people in those quarters in a very decent way and yet, my years of fear and paranoia can override this sense, simply because of the inability to truly connect with others.

Those that mind do not matter...and those that matter do not mind.

I heard CBT was useful for this. Looking forward to trying it to get rid of this belief.

Yes, that is exactly how I feel. Sometimes this thought (guilt, shame, wrong, dirty) is so overwhelming that there is very little space for other thoughts. (This dirty - little - Heart / Is freely mine. / I won it with a Bun - / A Freckled shrine - // But eligibly fair / To him who sees / The Visage of the Soul / And not the knees. - Emily Dickinson)

I get better when I have time away from other people, and I get worse the more I am with other people. I have spent altogether too much time with too many people recently.



Yes, the CBT counsellors accused me of distorted thinking patterns! Therapy felt like the very worst kind of negative criticism, like a fundamental assault on my identity.

I was thinking today that if you had absolutely no knowledge of left and right, then a half the time that you went to shake hands with another person would be awkward, and you would never know why. You might think that you were bad, or dirty, or unwanted because you couldn't do something simple and positive that all these other people do. Those negative emotions would not happen if only someone told you that there was left and right, and a convention of which one to shake. But I have the stalk of hay in the one hand and the stalk of straw in the other.

Wow, that's got to be the single most apt metaphor describing your situation I can think of...

The Emily Dickinson Poem is exquisitely apt also.

I need to go off and think about what you've said. Bear with me, I'll be back.

[I do not care if my behavior generates an awkward silence which can be interpreted as hatred . If I'm right I have duty to myself and others to point out the obvious . How we do that is the
more difficult question.]

OMG! The awkward silence - I've never known how to interpret that! I remember especially in discussions during my MBA courses, I'd raise my hand and say something, and the class would go silent and look at me as if I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. I didn't know if it was hatred, awe, or lack of understanding. It's gotten so bad that I second guess myself constantly. For example, I was at a conference and some of the other grad students were discussing their dogs. The one guy was saying that his dog kept getting painful kidney stones, and that it was some substance in the water. He thought there was nothing he could do about it, but I said, "why don't you filter the dogs water?" Isn't that the obvious answer? And yet they were speechless.

I will format my post like the OP
1) This person can see that I have done something really bad, or that I am a really bad person

I get this feeling a lot. I get the voice in my head that just insults me all the time.
Other times I feel like I am a really bad person because of what others around me have done.

2) This person dislikes me for being foreign / gay / strange
I am not foreign or gay but I feel like people don't like me because I am not what they think I should be.

3) I am going to make a terrible mess in this conversation
I have done this.
4) It feels like an argument, and I am in the wrong
I feel like I have done something wrong a lot.

Not so much a "belief" as a fact - particularly if you live in English Inner City areas!

Many people do automatically hate us. It's not you, it's in them -- in their reaction to a stranger who won't fit in and won't engage in bonding rituals with them.

Our social behavior (or lack thereof) triggers antisocial instincts in NTs and they will experience anger, ill-will and a desire to do us harm. If they have no cause or reason to resent and harbor ill-will toward us, they will invent or project one.

It's the negative, opposite side of their instinct that supports herd and community behavior: the need to shut out those who don't fit in and can't be understood, label them as "other" and "alien", take resource away from them, and harm them. Our inability to engage in bonding rituals and empathetic exchanges, and our differentness, makes us into dangerous other-strangers. Whether NT's realize it or not, they instinctively interpret our failure to bond with them as an intentional refusal to bond and that triggers a sentiment of being threatened or undermined by our presence (as if we were refusing to befriend them on purpose and for some evil intent).

When this ill will and suspicious resentment is triggered, they will then project or imagine reasons to support their bad feelings.

Last edited by ephemerella on 06 Mar 2010, 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And yet if you not mentioned it, had gone away, secretly marketed filtered water for pets, returned in a bigger car , wearing a $3000.00 business suit, and their dog, in the meantime, had painfully died of renal failure and you said "thanks for the water idea it made me a million dollars", this would be more acceptable to them . Weird, the lot of them, I am past trying to work this out. Just "Do", there's probably one or two of them who instinctively know you are more capable of
reaching a decision or solution quicker then they are hence they attempt to block you from doing this by suggesting it is impolite, hence they generate an awkward silence as a defense. Most will never like us , they don't even like each other so it doesn't matter. What matters is you make the social space to express you view if it is correct and reinforce you have made that a right.

Hell, why don't you just go ahead and develop Pooch Pouch- The Portable Percolator For Pets.
That will shut them up for a while.

In my youth, one sudden flash of insight that pretty much starved my paranoia to death was "what makes me think the world is so fascinated with little me that it can muster up the enthusiasm to hate me?" If I ever start to feel noticed by the world, I'll probably have to find a better argument.

Omg wow, I have a tear. Never thought Id see the day to find others who have the same understanding

I had a teacher who hated me. She always singled me out and encouraged the other kids to bully me. When I was looking foward to a certian project or subject, she would abruptly cancel it. I will dance at that b***h's funeral.