Avoidant Personality Disorder

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Name:     Christian
State:       USA

Date:        Sunday October 07, 2007
Time:        05:31:53 PM -0500

Story:

MY AVOIDANT PERSONALITY


 Over-analytical. Obsessive. Hypersensitive. Introverted. Lonely. Bored. Self-hating.
I am or have been all of these things. But being avoidant and fearing contact with other people has been the greatest factor until recently in determining the bleak trajectory of my thirty-five years of life on this earth, a life that has more often than not felt like one long solitary confinement.

  I both desire and dread intimacy. If by some miracle I do get close to somebody it makes me nervous. It’s like I’m never quite able to let go. There’s never a safe place. I keep my desire and my dread a secret and keep that I have such a secret a secret also, even to those I am closest to. Sounds like a joke but it’s not. When I like somebody I burn with shame for liking them. And love is the most unspeakable of shames. I am nothing sometimes.

 I am haunted by my childhood. I was fat. So for as long as I can remember I was baited and bullied relentlessly, not only by other children but adults as well. Our family was quite isolated socially in our neighborhood. Our parents were “self-absorbed.” Some parents who have been mistreated as children do not know to take true care of their own children if they should have them. My brother and I grew up in a house but not a home.

Our mother was volatile, anxious and depressed. Our father was mentally disturbed and abusive. There was a lot of ugliness between them that we witnessed before my father moved out. This ugliness, which we could not fully comprehend, sucked us in and destroyed our souls. As children, our feelings were viewed as either inconvenient or superfluous. I will say bluntly, that our parents failed to support even the most rudimentary emotional needs of my brother or myself as children. We had nothing to compare with these experiences and as a consequence it’s natural that we should begin life with the delusion that we were fundamentally flawed, lacking and unworthy of authentic love.

 Like a lot of small children, I resorted to prayer to solve my problems. Not surprisingly, God did not intervene. When He/She/It failed me I took refuge in a more practical style of magical thinking which is to say I took to living in my head.

 I think it was pretty obvious to any observant person that there was something wrong with me but nobody cared enough to do anything. Such were the circumstances…

 I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. When I’m around people I often feel like I’m on the verge of disappearing. Later, I torment myself with the things I did or didn’t say. I tell myself I have failed. Like I barely exist at all. Faced wih ambiguity I draw dark conclusions.

 I’ve always felt quite alone in my life and I have despaired of ever being normal.
The thought of suicide has been a companion all through my days.
Lacking any sort of life in reality I started living in the world of he imagination.
Reality was something other people did. I had no place there and the thought of participating in it as I grew into young adulthood filled me with a mounting sense of abject terror.

It was nearly impossible to find even the most menial job because of my shyness not to mention my lack of references or my inability say anything good about myself or just act like a normal human being period. I felt like a hopeless piece of trash, defective and untouchable.

 High school was a total nightmare. If I did go to school, I hid as much as I could.
I still have no idea what the cafeteria looked like. I’ve been dependant on my mother for financial support much of my life and felt rather helpless and disgusted with myself for it.

 I thought that given a choice people would sit as far away from me as possible, when in fact it was I who sat as far as possible from them.

 I find it very difficult most of time to relax or just enjoy myself in the company of others.
I kept my emotions hermitically sealed.

 I learned to hide my insecurity by being distant, or appearing to be aloof.
I can function socially if I fake it. I can fake not caring.
Faking doesn’t feel good. What’s use if in fact I do care?

 It is the perceived impoverishment negative identification, internal contradiction that generates so much psychosomatic discomfort in avoidants.

I lack a stable sense of self. I feel like I have nothing to offer. And no way to give pleasure to others. And of course being so inhibited will often lead others to the impression that one is  uninteresting. I also think that living in isolation can lead to certain eccentricities of behavior and thought that many less imaginative people find strange.

 I have a deep-seated fear, actually, an expectation of rejection.
When I got older I used alcohol to anaesthetize myself in social situations but with bad results. By the time I’ve drunk enough to relax I’ve drunk too much. Though ironically to others apparently I don’t appear drunk. So to compensate I started using cocaine.
Needless to say all this lead absolutely nowhere in the end.
My feeling of isolation increased and the state of my body and soul continued to deteriorate.

 My body and my mind have been slow to catch up with the idea that not all people are cruel and/or indifferent.

  I might also add that I believe the brutality of the culture at large, and the erosion of courtesy and goodwill symptomatic of a progressively more atomized society dedicated to the dehumanization and marginalization of its members plays no small role in the mass-production of spoiled identities which comprise a significant part of the Avoidant community.
I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention that this “disorder” (and many others) have a definite socio-political dimension. I dare say that in an arbitrarily punitive culture such as ours that the Avoidant style (however unrewarding) presents a not entirely irrational way of coping in a society where human relations have become increasingly de-regulated and perverse and the daily business of living made pathologically complex and redundantly oppressive.

 Loneliness is the central problem of Avoidance. And I must confess I have been all-to-lamentably celibate for longer than I care to fathom. My memory of sex is that it is a pleasant way to pass the time and well worth seeking out.

 It has hindered my professional life as well. I am a visual artist, and needless to say, it is hard to make one’s work public if one is completely ashamed of oneself and one’s work.
No amount of praise or encouragement seems to remedy this.
Underneath the fear of exposure is a resistance to being and existing in the eyes of the Other.
 I am afraid of owning my natural desire because I learned in childhood it was a dangerous thing. Desire had come to equal shame. Shame denies the existence of the self.

 Eventually my social phobia developed into full-blown anxiety and panic attacks that resulted in a complete nervous breakdown. My personal view of this is that it was my body’s response to what is called social death.
It’s taken me years to find a regime to subdue the symptoms. I take medications and see a psychotherapist regularly.

 Most crucially I think what has helped me most has been relearning my internal relationship with my feelings and past negative experiences; rereading them objectively and with greater charity toward myself. I’m just beginning to understand what my feelings really mean, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if my heart races or I feel faint.
Sometimes it’s just the excitement of making contact.

It’s the feeling that something unknown is nibbling at the edges of one’s loneliness.
It’s all too easy for us turn from it in the fear that some part of oneself is going to get lost somehow; that we lose something in being with others. The very opposite is true.
It’s a mistake to think that anybody has the power to annihilate us with a careless word or gesture. One must see this fear for what it is: The ghost of past experience.
And if it is something we’ve already experienced then it follows that is it something that we have survived (at whatever cost) and therefore it does not have the power to destroy us.

 I’ve been making considerable progress. My sense of identity, though precarious, is improving. I can be confident and out-going but I can also be withdrawn and avoidant.
It waxes and wanes with the days. But gradually I have come to see that whatever it is I think I need to be acceptable to others is utterly absurd. No such person exists!
Not every little detail is so important. You can’t learn to play the piano without making some mistakes. Mistakes let other people know that like them you are human too.

Sylvia Plath was right about one thing: Perfection IS sterile. Nothing can come of it.
It’s a fantasy we cling to when we’ve been taught not to like ourselves.
But we can be ourselves in the presence of imperfection.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is contagious. It closes people up and makes life boring.
One needs to remember that the judgments of the stupid and the cruel are essentially meaningless.

 The pain of going forward, like everything else in life is fraught with uncertainty.
But the pain of uncertainty is preferable to the dead certainty entailed by a life of self-imposed loneliness.

 There is no shame. Fear itself can be beautiful if it is not a prison and if instead we allow it to light the way out and toward the world of others.

 I hope that all this hasn’t been too much of a jumble to read. I am ADD and OCD as well as AvPD! However, I am pleased to have made the attempt and perhaps to have imparted some little insight to anyone who may suffer this all-to-common, troubling, and lonely state of being. It is most definitely not a hopeless situation, though it may seem that way from inside.

 Anyway, congratulations if you have made it this far. I give you my hand.

Sincerely, your friend in avoidance, Christian Rokicki.

(I sign my name because I am not the least bit ashamed of my condition nor of my writing abilities.)

 

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