by Mike Bendzela
Given that it affects about 2.4% of the population, most of you probably know someone with this disorder. Some of you may even have it yourselves. Continually absenting yourself from others’ company out of chronic fear should come with the preamble, “It’s not you, it’s me,” which in this case is not just a line of bullshit. But you never get around to saying such a thing because it is tacit, as tacit as water is to a fish.
Revealing a personality disorder is like coming out of the closet a second time, but worse. For all its woes, coming out as gay initiates a new way of fitting in, a more honest way of relating to the world and others. Then you settle in and everyone forgets about it. This revelation, though, feels more like a post hoc explanation for the impaired way you relate to the world and others. That the awareness of it comes so late does not really matter, as there is nothing you could have done to make things turn out differently. It is something that has shaped every day of your life, even though you never knew there was a name for it until recently. Using the analogy of sexual orientation again: Imagine it were possible to grow up being attracted to others of your own sex, to form a long-term relationship, and then only later in mid-life to read about a condition called “homosexuality.”
Oh, so that’s a thing, then, you would think. You find that you have already adapted to it. Your life is the hand in the glove of your psychological predisposition. The variability that inheres in a world presided over by evolution by natural selection means we are all cast as certain types in the drama of life. This makes the term “disorder” in “avoidant personality disorder” seem a misnomer, even offensive, but there you have it. You did not write the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Personality disorders come in different keys or modes called “Clusters”: Cluster A (odd, eccentric), Cluster B (dramatic, erratic), and Cluster C (fearful, anxious). Some of these might be thought of as charismatic: They are the stuff of crime novels, family tragedies, office gossip, political campaigns. The Cluster B folks are particularly notorious. Perhaps you know someone who had to step away from a volatile relationship with someone with borderline personality disorder. There is that transgressive friend from high school, the one who was in and out of jail all the time, who turns out to have antisocial personality disorder. The dazzling life of the party, the flamboyant artiste seemingly everyone has slept with, is an example of someone with histrionic personality disorder. And none of us can get away from the narcissistic personality these days — he sucks up attention like a tornado — and in fact we are sick of hearing about him.
Tucked out of the way amongst the misfortunate, fear-ridden Cluster C types is the friend who is easily forgotten about. And he prefers it that way. The attentions of others might be of a censorious nature, which would alarm him to no end, the same way a hairy spider crawling up your arm alarms you.
But, really, how does one know one is thus “disordered”? Is it as easy as diagnosing one’s own sexual orientation? The DSM lists seven telling traits (“signs and symptoms”), and if you have at least four of them, it means you probably have the disorder. You read them and check off the boxes. You have checked six out of seven! And you have the receipts! Furthermore, if you reword the seventh one a little, it applies to you, too. Let’s take them one-by-one (italics from DSM):
- is preoccupied with being criticized or rejected in social situations
The criticism and rejection are often not theoretical, and the actual rejection is too acute to be tolerated. Taking a buffeting from others is a normal part of growing up, but your skin tears too easily. Why did you go out for the baseball team when you were eight, when you knew you hated baseball? Because you craved approval, that’s why. So, you stood, bored, out in left field and could not even track the flyball coming your way. You held up your fat glove and hoped for the best, only to hear the thump of the ball hitting the grass behind you. You were among the first cut from the team, understandable given your incompetence at the game: The gazelle that doesn’t run well goes to the lions. The rejection felt awful, like being put out on a raft and cast away from the ship. You got on your bicycle and wailed all the way home. Call this a formative experience — the cylinder seal of social disapproval rolling its imprint into the soft wax of your personality — a precursor of things to come, your cue to avoid such situations.
- is unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked
In college you had no friends other than the ones you grew up with. Instead of being generally sociable, you had a tendency to have a special friend, who became your sanctuary. That you were secretly in love with this friend was a given. He thought you were funny and/or entertaining and was a perfect screen for you during infrequent social gatherings. It would be catastrophic if this friend were to go off by himself to mingle with others, leaving you there to figure out what to do on your own. At one gathering after your senior year of high school, you found yourself alone among others with whom you did not share a lot in common — jocks, cheerleaders, motorheads, salt-of-the-Earth types — provoking the feeling of being the square peg in a round hole. Unable to find anything to say, you pretended to have had too much to drink and smoke, and you feigned nodding off at the table, hearing the chatter and laughter swirling around you. The host came up to you and asked if you were OK, then led you upstairs to a bedroom where you could lie down for a while. You pretended to have passed out, but you were listening to the people partying below, until the friend you had come there with came to collect you and take you home. Much later, you would realize that you had been simply paralyzed with fear that night.
- is inhibited in new interpersonal situations because of feelings of inadequacy
As you became an adult, friends settled down and got married. A wedding reception was the last place you wanted to go to. The sociality, the pressures to pair up and be convivial, are so intense that there are actual reception rituals structured around them. You feared being the squarest peg in the roundest hole. So, when your close friend who liked you and whom you were secretly in love with invited you to his wedding, you panicked: You cannot just not go. Therefore, you invented a previous engagement — a trip out of town — as the excuse for not being able to attend. And to give this excuse the gloss of plausibility, to convince even yourself that you had somewhere to go, you stuffed a backpack and a sleeping bag into your car and started driving north to a wildlife preserve you wanted to visit, a place famous as a hawk migration route. It didn’t matter that it was cold and rainy and your car had no heat. You just had to be away from there for the night. You drove two hundred miles and ended up at the closed park gate of the refuge. You unrolled a sleeping bag and slept on the back seat, until a cop rapped on your window with a flashlight in the morning. You got up and walked through the park in the pouring rain, looking for hawks, but there were none to be seen, as it wasn’t even the season for hawks.
- shows restraint within intimate relationships because of the fear of being shamed or ridiculed
There was a great big red herring in your case that distracted you from gaining insight into why you held back in relationships: you thought you were inhibited because you were secretly gay. But even after you came out, your lack of candor and openness persisted, and a sure sign of avoidant personality disorder is its pervasiveness in multiple contexts. You had a good friend in grad school who put the lie to the red herring: He was like your twin — same age, same upbringing (working class, Catholic), similar adolescence spent in a medium-sized, industrial city in the Midwest — only, he was the opposite temperament: outgoing, chatty, attention-seeking, risk-taking. You were amazed that he could walk right up to strange men at gatherings and engage them in chit-chat and laughter. He told you that even as an adolescent he cleaned up when it came to finding partners: “I would go to the park at night, and as soon as one guy dropped me off, another car would pull into the park and pick me up!” You never got the hang of this art, cruising — you were too timid — so you lived like a monk through college, and this didn’t change much after you came out. Avoidant personality was the lock and key on your closet door.
- avoids occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact because of fears of criticism, disapproval, or rejection
Remember how graduate school cured you of graduate school? You were interested in American literature, but you were surprised to find that the primary preoccupation of many other grad students was status–that is, making an impression, cozying up to the right professors, adhering to the correct critical ideology, assessing who is sleeping with whom and perhaps whom you will sleep with, dishing so-and-so’s book behind their back after department functions, etc. Utterly inept at such politicking, you ended up ditching any pretense of going after a PhD after receiving your master’s degree. The adjunct teaching position you accepted while you figured out what you wanted to do in lieu of grad school turned out to be the perfect avoidant strategy: no department meetings, no committees, no conferences, no “publish-or-perish,” and absolutely no chance of advancement. Call avoidant personality disorder, then, chronic status allergy. You don’t have to deal with anyone except your students if you don’t want to.
- views self as socially inept, personally unappealing, or inferior to others
Get involved in any group, and this feature kicks in like swamp fever. You worry too much about what others in the group think of you while simultaneously trampling on group norms without realizing it. Again, square peg meets round hole. Later, you endlessly ruminate over your past episodes of ineptitude, indulging in sudden, unbidden daydreams about scenarios which you revise to highlight how you might have performed better. A public speaking organization would seem the last place a person like you would find yourself in, but like teaching it was a structured and largely scripted gig that allowed you to function before strangers and then go home afterward. This speaker’s bureau put gay and lesbian citizens before community groups to tell stories about their lives. Occasionally there would be hostile, religious people in the audience to deal with; while this could be stressful, it was nothing like finding the worst attacks coming from within the group itself. After speaking engagements, other members would express how they didn’t like the things you said, or the way you said them, or your retiring, “passive” demeanor, or your withering way with words. It didn’t take much of this criticism to send you scurrying away from the group. A positive outcome of this fiasco was the cultivation of a sense of your own intellectual independence.
- is unusually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because they may prove embarrassing
Teaching is taking a risk; functioning in a speaker’s bureau is taking a risk; but this indicator of the disorder could be reworded to fit you this way: In matters of sexual intimacy, you are unusually reluctant to take personal risks . . . etc. The recognition that being gay was a “red herring” meant it was not the cause of your distress; you were not inhibited because you were gay; you stayed in the closet because you were the avoidant type. The thought of going out there and finding someone was too nerve-wracking to contemplate. So, call it six-and-a-half out of seven checks on the list of signs and symptoms.
There are features of the DSM’s descriptions you find wrongheaded or even objectionable: the terms “anxious and fearful” describing Cluster C disorders seem quaint and inadequate; they are almost euphemistic-sounding therapy words. More precise, honest terms for the feelings provoked by various social situations would be “dreadful” and “terrifying.” And the “because” phrases in these signs feel utterly superfluous, even tautological — “because of the fear of being shamed or ridiculed . . . because they may prove embarrassing” — as if there must be reasons for your reactions. Avoids spiders because its legs are multiple and hairy. It is the nature of the thing itself to which you are phobic.
Perhaps this is the inevitable effect of the psychotherapeutic view, in which there must be reasons for everything, because if there are reasons there can be semblances of treatments. Nah. Your personality is your destiny. The creature is hatched with either stripes or spots. Deal with it as is. Your experience with psychiatrists is that they are fair-to-middling at treating your comorbidities — depression and anxiety — with medications. Your experience with psychotherapists is that they don’t even recognize the disorder in their zeal to talk you into the cult of “self-esteem.”
So where does that leave you? What does one do? You don’t have answers — you’re no counselor — but you seem to have lucked out: You found a friend who accepts you the way you are — being at home with him feels like a refuge — and you married him.
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Source
This is all sheer speculation, as your clinical psychologist has told you that clinical confirmation is very expensive, and you have adapted as well as you can at your age.
Avoidant Personality Disorder.
Image
“Lonely tree” by Dino ahmad ali is licensed under CC BY 2.0.