Severe mistrust in people preventing me making new connections/friends

I’m 42 and was diagnosed with AuDHD later in life. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to process what that diagnosis means, understand who I actually am underneath years of masking, and rebuild parts of my life after what feels like a multi-year autistic/ADHD burnout.

One of the biggest things I’m struggling with is trust.

For most of my life I’ve felt ostracised for being different, even when I didn’t really understand what was different about me. I’ve had quite a few situations where I genuinely believed someone was my friend, only to later realise that they didn’t see the relationship in the same way, were talking about me behind my back, were using me, or simply disappeared when I was no longer useful or convenient.

After enough experiences like that, I think something in me has become extremely guarded. People talk about building a metaphorical wall to protect themselves but my emotions and personality is currently locked in a nuclear bunker and they have swallowed the key. 

I also have what feels like chronic rejection sensitivity. I know RSD isn’t necessarily a diagnosis in its own right, but the experience of rejection, exclusion or even the possibility that somebody might not like me can feel disproportionately intense. Sometimes I can tell myself logically that I’m probably overthinking something, but emotionally my brain is already preparing for the worst.

The problem is that this mistrust now makes forming new connections incredibly difficult.

I know making friends can naturally become harder as you get older, but at the moment I feel like I’m trying to do several enormous things at once: unmask, process a late diagnosis, recover from burnout, rebuild my life, work out what my identity actually is, and somehow deal with chronic loneliness at the same time.

I honestly don’t know how to reach out to people anymore.

Something else I’ve realised since being diagnosed is how much I used alcohol and drugs in the past to get through social situations. They made me less inhibited, less self-conscious and much more able to walk into a room, talk to strangers and meet new people.

I didn’t fully understand at the time that I was using them as social crutches.

Now that I recognise what was happening, I know that isn’t a sustainable way for me to live. But removing those crutches has also shown me just how difficult socialising actually feels for me without them. It sometimes feels like everybody else was given instructions for how to connect with people and I was improvising for decades.

There’s also a strange contradiction in wanting connection badly while simultaneously distrusting the people I could potentially connect with.

Part of me wants friends and meaningful relationships. Another part immediately looks for signs that someone is going to reject me, ridicule me, take advantage of me or eventually leave.

So I end up protecting myself from being hurt by avoiding the very thing I’m lonely without.

Has anyone else experienced this, particularly after a late autism/ADHD diagnosis?

Did you find that your trust in people became worse before it became better once you started unmasking and reassessing your past relationships?

And if you managed to start building friendships again later in life, how did you learn to let people in without constantly expecting the relationship to go wrong?

I’m not expecting some magical answer. I think I’d just like to know whether other people have found themselves in this position too, because at the moment it can feel incredibly isolating.