Paranoia around friendships - "I just want to know what I did wrong"

[tbourner]

Is this normal? I've always struggled with believing people like me, and think they may be pretending or whatever, but this last 12 months I made a really good friend and then lost them by becoming really clingy and demanding, because I felt ostracised by normal behaviour (being busy, forgetting to reply to a message, etc.). My weird expectations of how they should act made them wary of me, which made my paranoia worse, and it snowballed to the point they blocked me and basically cut me out completely.
There's a lot more to it than that, but is this kind of paranoia normal for GAD? I don't see much mention of it online, other than the self-worth anxiety which led to this.

NB: The title quote is because I had a bit of a moment of clarity when I spoke to someone else with more serious anxiety and paranoia than me, and they were saying, word for word, things which I'd had in my head for months - questions like "I just want to know why they're ignoring me". So thought it might be recognisable if people have had the same thing.

[Mrsmitchell1984]

Is this normal? I've always struggled with believing people like me, and think they may be pretending or whatever, but this last 12 months I made a really good friend and then lost them by becoming really clingy and demanding, because I felt ostracised by normal behaviour (being busy, forgetting to reply to a message, etc.). My weird expectations of how they should act made them wary of me, which made my paranoia worse, and it snowballed to the point they blocked me and basically cut me out completely.
There's a lot more to it than that, but is this kind of paranoia normal for GAD? I don't see much mention of it online, other than the self-worth anxiety which led to this.

NB: The title quote is because I had a bit of a moment of clarity when I spoke to someone else with more serious anxiety and paranoia than me, and they were saying, word for word, things which I'd had in my head for months - questions like "I just want to know why they're ignoring me". So thought it might be recognisable if people have had the same thing.

yes this is so like me- I don’t feel like anyone would like me (at school I hang around with girls that sometimes decided I would be invited out and then other times decided not to) and it left me really insecure-as if there was something wrong with me but I never knew what it was. I tend to do the opposite to you though - hold people at arm’s length and people feel the cold shoulder - and so it puts them off and it goes around in circles. I don’t think it is particularly a GAD thing as I think some people with other issues such as maybe control or just plain insecurity do it x

[tbourner]

Sorry I didn't explain it very well. The point about thinking people don't like me is separate but it's the reason I felt good about having a really good close friend - I know they genuinely liked spending time with me and I was scared to lose that. The problem and the thing that was similar with the other person who has GAD is that when that friend started "avoiding" me because they were busy, my paranoia kicked in and I thought they were hiding something from me, I thought there was some secret reason that they were ignoring me and I was obsessed with finding out what it was. Turns out they were just busy and I ended up pushing them away by being clingy, they were actually quite scared of me as I was acting a bit like a stalker demanding attention.

[Mrsmitchell1984]

You explained it really well. I guess it’s about not catastrophising and thinking the worst. You can do more harm to someone with worrying and trying to force information out of them rather than being confident and patient x

[Mrsmitchell1984]

Easier said than done though - I know x