I have it, too. No, it doesn’t go away. It’s like depression, in that regard, or bipolar. There’s no single surgery or pill you can take to just cure it. It can be managed via medication, therapy and practice. Unfortunately, there’s no one combination of therapy and medication that works for everyone. You’ll have to find a doctor you can trust and experiment with the medicines.
I don’t mean to be discouraging. You may well have a good result. But it will probably take work to get there. The good news is you don’t have to do it alone.
I second the suggestions for CBT. Do stay in touch with your doctor for this.
TV shows people with low-functioning schizophrenia becoming completely normal on a little Haldol. Meds don’t work like that. But they do help. I have a friend who is schizophrenic, and high-functioning even without meds, but there’s still something “off” about her, and she can’t live by herself. On meds, she’s married, has kids, a driver’s license, and now that her younger kid is in school, she’s working part-time and doing community theater (she has a beautiful voice, and did professional theater in NYC and London before her first psychotic break, when she was about 25).
My point is, a lot of people who are able to get through the day think they ought to be able to manage without medication, and that meds are for people who howl at the moon, or that meds somehow represent failure. That’s just not true, and it pisses me off that the media delivers that message. If something helps, use it. Just because you have a hairline fracture, and not a complex, protruding fracture, doesn’t mean you should refuse a cast, and just because you are not stark, raving mad, doesn’t mean that it’s somehow cheating to take meds if they help.
Even if you think people shouldn’t take them for transient problems (like getting through grief), a PD is not a transient problem.
Dialectical behavior therapy has had some success in treating BPD, which is considered almost impossible to treat. My guess is that it may help with your AVPD.
Even though I don’t like CBT too much, as I think it is too slow, it would probably work quite well. You might also want to check out NLP, EFT, maybe straight up hypnosis and the Human Givens method.
There are many techniques out there that can be used to get rid of the symptoms and you might be surprised at how quickly they can work. Look for good practitioners in the aforementioned therapies and see what they say. Good luck!
Stop having it completely, most likely no. Learn to manage it or even work it to your benefit, yes.
I’m from a place where arguing is considered a sport. It’s a very nice sport: you can do it anywhere, so long as there aren’t outsiders around (those scare easily); any types of outsiders who do not scare easily at raised voices are considered extra nice (you can argue in front of them and they don’t faint!).
I know two guys from that place who never argue with anybody (the cheats! How can you play with someone who refuses to join the game, uh?). One of them is a programmer, the other one is an agricultural engineer working with “at risk youth” (read, juvies). New kids will try to pick up fights with my cousin (yeah, right, the family gave up decades ago and you will be able to do it…), much to the “veterans’” entertainment: it just doesn’t work, and it definitely provides a very different behavior pattern from what they’re used to. This is a guy who says “today we’ll be planting petunias” and the first day you may or may not plant your own petunias but after a few days you figure out that planting petunias is more entertaining than scowling by yourself. Is he still that kid who would leave the house with his judo bag and spend an hour and a half sitting in the entrance of a neighboring house until he could go back without eliciting questions? Yes, although he’s a lot taller now. But both him and the people around him have learned how to deal with his “personal quirk”. He’s now capable of saying “I am not liking this”, we know how to ask for his opinion in a way that makes it acceptable for him to say “no”.
I’d think CBT would be good for this kind of thing- at its core, it’s a method for enabling one to be aware of one’s thoughts as they happen, and to rationally evaluate them and re-think them in ways that aren’t so irrational, damaging, etc… It does this by essentially changing the language you use in your internal monologue of thoughts.
For example, if you’re having self-esteem problems, CBT can help you identify certain unhelpful or negative thought patterns, such as thinking “I should have done X. I’m such an idiot.” and rethinking it into “It would have been nice to have done X.”, with the idea being that by framing your initial thought as “I should have”, it sets it up as a black or white thing- you either passed it or you failed it, and “should have” is pretty much failure language. By saying “It would have been nice”, it frames it as less black and white, and not as a failure- something that would have been nice, but not necessary, and nothing to beat yourself up over.
It sounds like you’ve got two different questions: ‘Can my personality disorder be cured?’ and ‘Can I live a normal happy life that isn’t defined by this personality disorder?’ Those aren’t the same thing.
My understanding is that no, personality disorders can’t be ‘cured’: they’re inherent to the person. But they can be managed, to different degrees. As far as personality disorders go, you’re wayyyy ahead of the game in that a) you know you have a problem, and b) you want to do something about it. Contrast that with people who have antisocial personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder: most of them will never think they have a problem, and even if they acknowledge that other people think they have a problem, they mostly don’t see any reason why they should do anything about it, because it mostly damages other people’s lives rather than theirs. So they’re very unlikely to change in any significant way. You’re an entirely different story.
You say that even if you behave in a way that isn’t avoidant, the underlying thought patterns are still the same. But over the long term, that won’t necessarily be true. Behaviour modifies thought processes, as well as the other way around. If you keep acting like you’re secure in social situations, for example, then people around you will start treating you as someone who’s socially secure, you’ll start thinking of yourself as that person, and the feedback loop will start to work in your favour - and also, your mind will get accustomed to the patterns of social enjoyment rather than those of social avoidance. Add in other treatments as needed - CBT and/or medication, whatever works - and you’ve got the possibility of a totally different situation. Yes, you’ll probably always be more sensitive and afraid of rejection than someone who doesn’t have AvPD - but not necessarily to anything like the same extent as you are now, and not necessarily to the extent that it defines your life in any significant way.
So, basically, the answer to the second question may well be yes, even if the answer to the first is no.
Seeing how AVPD is likely tied to abuse/invalidation as a young child, I don’t know how effective therapy is. Having said that therapies like somatic experiencing, emdr or brainspotting could be helpful for the condition.
I don’t know, I hear this a lot, but I’m not sure it really applies to me. I’ve tried ‘faking it until I make it’, but the severity of my condition is such that any attempts to break out of my normal pattern of behavior only reinforces it. I have no social skills (due to not talking to, well, basically anyone – except for my parents – since childhood), and am perpetually and obviously on edge when communicating with others. Perpetually. I doesn’t matter if I’ve been interacting with this person (say, a lab partner) for weeks; the anxiety and discomfort of talking to them never goes away. I give off the impression of being very weird and timid. Such attempts also cause me severe emotional discomfort.
I was literally too afraid to go shopping alone until I was 18, because I’d have to go through the checkout lane and interact with the cashier. I would rather go without items that I needed just to avoid this small, petty contact. I would avoid restaurants for the same reason. When I pass people on the street – complete strangers – I feel as if they must be judging me negatively, and I am hit with strong discomfort. I can’t make eye contact for the life of me. I will go the long way around campus to avoid people. I avoid looking in mirrors because it makes me think of how I must look to others, and how they must find me repulsive and ugly. I recently realized that I had developed a slightly hunched way of walking somewhere along the line to try to make myself smaller (am working on having better posture now). I have been this way since around 10-12 years old.
So yeah. Sorry for the life story, but I’ve literally never told any of this to anyone before (no friends), and I feel like I’m kind of going crazy. I’ve just started talking to a counselor with my school’s mental health services (without the knowledge of my parents), and she recommends ‘talk therapy’. I’m not sure how helpful this would really be for someone like me. But then again, I’m not sure anything would be helpful at all. I think maybe I’ll just have to go through life like this.
If there was a pill that I could take to deaden my emotions so I could just not give a crap, I’d take it. Even if I couldn’t experience positive emotions anymore, either. Is there anything like that?
I am a 39-year-old man and I have struggled with AvPD (Avoidant Personality Disorder) from a very early age. The cause/causes of AvPD are uncertain, but are thought to include childhood emotional neglect (especially by one or both parents) and peer group rejection. Children who are extremely shy and/or irrationally fearful are also at risk.
I grew up hating my father and refused to have any sort of relationship with him. He was verbally and psychologically abusive to my mom (and eventually tried to abuse both of us physically, but we fought back). I don’t really consider that emotional neglect, but I grew up in constant emotional turmoil that made me feel very isolated from other kids. I also avoided having close friends because I didn’t want anyone to discover the hell that I lived in…
I also realized that I was “different” from other guys in a profound way at an early age. I didn’t know what to call it but I knew it was something that I had to keep hidden…again, isolating myself from other kids was my defense mechanism. After 22 years of immersing myself in religion and religious ‘therapy’ that only intensified my self-hatred, I finally realized that being gay really wasn’t a big deal after all…
I spent most of my 20s with NO self-esteem at all and was so critical of every thing I did and said that I rarely socialized beyond my (only) two friends and a few of my family members. On the rare occasion that I ventured into a social situation, I was paranoid and certain that no one could possibly want to interact with me. Even when they actually said things like “you should come around more, you’re hilarious and we love seeing you”, they couldn’t possibly mean it! By the age of 26, I had THREE bleeding peptic ulcers from the hell I put myself through every single day…
I don’t know how old you are, but one of the best things about AvPD (compared to other Personality Disorders) is that most eventually outgrow most of the symptoms. By my early 30s, I was developing self-esteem for the first time in my life! I started making friends and learning to trust people (although I remained cautious and somewhat guarded and still do) but I actually started to like myself. And I could see why others might like me as well.
Now, a few months shy of the BIG 4-0, I hardly recognize the old me. Sometimes I mourn all those years that I wasted in fear, doubt and self-loathing. But it got me to where I am now and there’s nothing I can do about the past but learn from it and try to help others.
I’ve always loved the line from the Sheryl Crow song ‘Steve McQueen’- “I ain’t taking shit off no one, baby that was yesterday!”
I have taken heat before, because I have said that I think school that want to combat bullying need to have classes in tolerance and anger management control for bullies, but ALSO in social skills for the victims.
I have taken a lot of heat for that last one, because I’ve been told that this is “blaming the victim.”
I still think that a lot of kids who get bullied are in a vicious circle. They may be a little different-- only children with parents who don’t know how to provide peer support, or are actively rejecting, or kids who have a minor problem like budding AvPd (which might not come full-bloom if they come to teachers’ attention, but if they are withdrawn, it may never happen). Or maybe they have very high-functioning autism, so high that it is not apparent to adults when they are 4 or 5, but other children pick up on the fact that they are “different.”
So they get ostracized, and therefore, have even fewer opportunities to develop social skills, so they are actively bullies, and withdraw even further, and the snake eats its tail. You get the idea.
Special classes in social skills for the victims of bullying, IMO, would go a long way to stop it, and would make for healthier adults in the future.
Now, to tie it into the thread: people with PDs often have poor insight into their problems, as opposed to people with some other kinds of problems-- people with OCD, for example, are usually acutely aware that something is wrong, although they may not seek help because they are ashamed. People who have their first schizophrenic break when they are older (after 24, as opposed to having it as a teen) are often aware that something is wrong, and seek help, contrary to how the media usually presents the problem. I think if people with PDs did not typically have very low self-esteem (save for the ones that carry and inflated self of self-worth), they would be better at seeking help for their problem, because for one thing, they would feel they deserve to feel better. A lot of people with PDs have depression as a secondary issue, because they feel like they deserve all their problems.
Just one last thing: when I was working with disabled people, I read the borderline personality disorder and sever depression separately and together are common in children who were abused (abused in a way that probably would have been considered criminal, not kids who just had parents who didn’t have the best parenting skills), and that there are actually brain changes in abused children. I’m not sure how they determined the changed were real and not genetic, unless there were twin, or longitudinal studies, but it’s what I read, and I saw it more than one: once in college, and again when I was working with the disabled population.
I hope people found this relevant. If not, the mods can move it.
I dated someone with Borderline, and it was a nightmare. I don’t think she can ever be cured.
I think there are two main types of personality disorders: ones in which you are an asshole to others, and ones in which you are not. It sounds as though AVPD is the latter type. You aren’t a bad person; you just have some problems.
The human will can be very powerful and overcome a lot. The problem with the asshole types is that the will is in the service of, well, their assholeness. They don’t have the insight required to do the right thing.
In your case, if you have the will, you can probably make great strides. Good luck to you!
I have no problem with this at all. However, I think the intervention should be on all kids who “ping” as awkward and asocial. Not just kids who are victims of bullying.
For one thing, sometimes bullying shows up relatively late in the game. Perhaps a kid’s awkwardness doesn’t really manifest itself until they reach adolescence. Or maybe he happens to have a couple of protective friends K-7, and then he finds himself in a different environment in high school and all bets are off.
Secondly, victims of bullying sometimes don’t know they are victims of bullying. If the victims don’t even know, how do the adults come to their rescue?
Parents who scramble for fancy diagnoses for their quirky children pray that those labels will put them in line for special services, like social skills training. But I’ve always felt that this is unnecessary and unfair. Seems to me that if a teacher notices they’ve got kid in their class who has problems with making friends and getting along with others, this should be sufficient to get them some special help. Just like a teacher can recommend special tutoring in math and reading.
Another thing is that sometimes weak social skills are a secondary symptom. I had weak social skills as a kid, but I don’t think that was my biggest problem. I had an undiagnosed motor skills delay that made just about everything more difficult. Because I couldn’t play with others without embarrassing myself, I stayed to myself on the playground. Then I didn’t learn the social skills that come through play. And then when I started getting teased for being “retarded”, I took it to heart and continued to stay away.
My breakthrough in therapy wasn’t so much in learnng how to relate to people. It was in realizing that staying away from them actually made some sense…that my embarrassment around others isn’t a totally unwarranted feeling.
Made manageable? Depends on which day you ask me. I am bipolar 2 and today has been a little bit rough. I’ve had some huge life changes lately that I’m trying to get my head around but overall when I’m thinking clearly, I try my best to adapt and most importantly I try to remember that neither does the world revolve around me nor does anyone care as much about my actions as I do.
I know our disorders are not the same, but don’t give up hope and feel like nothing being said applies to you. Yes, yes, it does. Maybe not right now, but someday it will. You are not the first person in the world to have feelings like you are having right now.
