What should you do when you feel sad because you are not liked?
Dislike is inevitable. These tried-and-true methods will help you feel more comfortable around someone who dislikes you:
Making others like you is typically the ultimate goal. As people seek friends, partners, promotions, even playgroups with other parents, they hunt for social approbation from childhood onwards. Many of these activities are motivated by social acceptance.
For many of us, learning or fearing someone doesn't like us is upsetting. Dislike can be overt or subtle. You may notice ostracism from a group you believed was buddies. Or a coworker may seem colder. For example, a friend may claim they don't want to be your friend anymore or that your behaviour bothers them.
As a clinical psychologist, patients often seek assistance for social anxiety, a crippling fear of being examined and found inadequate. Around 12% of adults may develop social anxiety disorder, and many more will have subclinical anxiety.
Many people have told me about being bullied, ostracised, chosen last for team sports (which I remember with trepidation), forced to work alone on a group project, or when their peers turned their backs on them.
Many of us first realise that we may not be liked and may even be treated cruelly by others, which can lead to grownup feelings of not being “good enough” or not fitting in. Early experiences often cause anxiety about not being loved. But everyone has these anxieties occasionally.
Dislike is often inevitable. Most of us periodically interact with people who are very different from us and have very different opinions, which might generate friction.
Even if you have good intentions and carefully manage your actions and words, someone may not like you because you may unknowingly overstep each other's boundaries, your personalities clash, such as when an anxious person spends time with an outspoken person, or there may be a hidden jealousy or rivalry.
Evolutionarily, fearing dislike makes sense. Being shunned by a supporting and protective group would have meant near-death for our distant ancestors.
This hypothesis can help you understand your sentiments about being disliked, even though evolutionary assumptions about psychology are hard to prove. Although the world has changed since the cavemen, our brains haven't, and messages of dislike presumably fire the same neural circuits.
When dislike is deep-seated, stems from painful childhood experiences, or is close to a psychiatric illness, therapy is needed. For everyone else, a few easy steps can help them accept dislike.
Tolerating the idea that some people may detest you can assist you avoid catastrophising (This will be a tragedy for me), globalising (Not everyone likes me), or making things worse.
You may reduce your concern about being disliked, recognise and rectify any obsessive behaviours, and accept that being disliked is part of human relationships.