I had an amazing epiphany recently that has been just rewriting my brain. Most of my life I have suffered from pretty severe abandonment issues and a constant insecurity that people secretly don't like me and are all going to leave unexpectedly. Growing up Autistic, it's easy to understand why I'd have developed this sort of insecurity since, as a child, that sort of thing actually happened. This insecurity has been a seed for so many unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors throughout my life. Obsession, codependency, anxiety, manipulation, the list of toxic little brain weeds that sprout from this insecurity goes on and on.
Recently though, I read the famous Codependent No More by Melody Beattie which bestowed on me this incredible idea that it's not my responsibility to manage other people's negative emotions for them or protect them from themselves. I found myself feeling anxious, as I often do, about if my friends actually like spending time with me or if I'm unpleasant to be around; or if this guy I've been going on dates with was actually enjoying the dates or... just... continuing to go on dates with me because... ???? and that's when I realized:
If they didn't want to be here, they wouldn't be. It's not my problem if they're forcing themselves to do something that makes them unhappy.
Like, yeah, as children you often are expected to go play with kids who you don't like because the adults are making you do it, or because teenagers hang out in big cliques where you include the whole lunch table in everything. Kids don't have enough agency to fully control who they spend their time around. They're also more emotionally immature. So yeah, you're more likely to have experiences growing up where someone "pretends to be your friend" or where they act polite around you and you mistake it for friendship.
But adults have literally no reason to be doing this. If an adult is continually saying yes to spending time with you, it's because they want to and they enjoy your company. If spending time with you makes them unhappy, and they're forcing themselves to do it anyway, they are doing that to themselves and it's not your problem. You don't have to protect someone from the possibility that they are forcing themself to do something they don't want to do.
The irony, of course, is that this is only true if nobody is making them do it. So the more tightly I grip people and try to keep them from leaving me or disliking me for any reason, the more likely it is that I'm creating a situation where someone feels unable to make an honest decision about whether to spend time with me or not. The same codependent behaviors where I try to take care of other people's emotions for them, just in case they are secretly unhappy around me, are the same behaviors most likely to result in me wasting a lot of time around people who feel obligated to spend time with me when they don't want to. If I just trust other people to manage their own emotions and that if they're unhappy it's not my job to solve that mystery for them, then I'm also letting people have the guilt-free autonomy to decide for themselves that they want to spend time with me, or not.
Another irony is I realized that these same thought patterns of codependency and feeling the need to manage other people's emotions for them put me on the other side of my own nightmare scenario that all of these behaviors are meant to be preventing. Which is, to say, that I forced myself regularly to spend time politely talking to people I didn't really care for because I felt like they couldn't handle the emotional impact of me just deciding to not be their friend. But that's not true. I'm not so important that random pseudo-friends I talk to for thirty minutes or less a month are going to be devastated that we drifted apart.
It's all related to a similar principal I had fortunately figured out a lot longer ago: If a problem is not important enough to someone for them to confront me about it directly, then it is not important enough for me to be worrying about it either.
I'm not saying my social anxiety is cured or anything. Especially among new people it's still a total nightmare. But this revelation has just been blossoming and budding into more and more changes in my thoughts and behaviors. If someone is making themself miserable lying about liking me for some reason, that is their problem, not mine. Anyone who is in my life is in my life because they want to be and are actively choosing to stay. Nobody is making them stay but themselves. If they're unhappy with that, then they are making bad decisions that are not my responsibility to fix. I am not their caretaker. I should assume that other people have the ability to take care of themselves and make their own good or bad decisions, including the decision to spend time with me or not. Attempting to "take care of" that for them is an attempt at removing the same agency that is the foundation of a secure healthy relationship.