Hi, this is my first post. I'm pretty nervous to be writing this cause I've never really spoken about it before.
A few years ago I had a friend who, at the time, I felt wasn’t doing anything wrong or being rude or abusive. Even though I was afraid of him, I felt that I was just being oversensitive and couldn’t take a joke, partly I think because that’s what he always told me. Anyways, after a year or so I moved schools and never really saw him again.
Around the time we were friends I got a lot of social anxiety, lost all of my self confidence and started hating myself. Now I think maybe it’s because of the way he treated me but I didn’t think that at the time.
I think I knew that it wasn’t a normal friendship but if I ever tried telling him he was making me uncomfortable he either told me I was being oversensitive or that I was being disrespectful and hurting his feelings. After I moved to a different school anytime I had any thoughts about it or something reminded me off him, I just blocked it out and told myself that I was overreacting.
Recently I met up with an old friend who started talking about him and all of these feelings and memories came back. This happens more often but I didn’t push them away this time, but now my brain won’t stop thinking about it and I’ve been experiencing a lot of anxiety and stress to the point where I can’t sleep properly and I feel sick.
I don’t understand why I’m getting so overwhelmed by it now. This happened three years ago and it’s never made me so upset and on edge before. It makes me feel like I’m just making it all up, overreacting and overthinking things. Is this normal?
I feel terrible for even posting my question in this forum because it’s not like he was always rude to me and we had good times too.