TYPE II: ATYPICAL OR COUNTERPHOBIC AVOIDANTS
Type II avoidants do relate, but their relationships take the form of isolating social rituals. The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual describes such individuals collectively under the heading “Converse Manifestation: Counterphobic Personality Disorders”: individuals who are “psychologically organized around defenses against their fears.” These avoidants handle relational anxiety through “denial [and] reaction formation,” that is, by using the characteristic pathological defense of “I can face anything without fear.”1 There are three subtypes, Ila, Ilb, and Ilc, which I now describe in some detail.
Type IIa
Type IIa avoidants characteristically display avoidance Sullivan describes as consisting of isolative social rituals. He calls these “pseudosocial ritual[s],” where individuals are “busily engaged with people, but nothing particularly personal transpires.”2
Coleman seems to be referring to individuals with isolating social rituals when he describes a kind of relationship discord consisting of numerous love relationships that are often short-lived, and generally intense and unfulfilling, in one of the following ways: compulsive cruising and multiple partners, where cruising is ritualistic and trance inducing; compulsive fixation on an unattainable (or deficient) partner; compulsive multiple love relationships; and compulsive sexual behavior in a relationship (sometimes associated with compulsive autoerotism).3
In the realm of selecting unattainable people to relate to, these avoidants pick distant, remote people who are already taken to convince themselves that they are attempting to relate but failing to do so for reasons not fully under their control. Their cry “it won’t work” is consciously or unconsciously part of their original plan to make certain that when it comes to their relationships, much goes on, but little actually happens.
A Case Example
A woman picked a married man to be her lover, then, when he “threatened” to become available, discouraged him from divorcing his wife—first by dissociating (not hearing his thoughts about marriage or, hearing them, passing them off as an aberration of the moment, not to be taken seriously) and second by becoming personally just remote enough to create sufficient doubt in the man’s mind to make him hesitate to take the final step. All along, she suspected that this man being a proven cheat on account of his record with her made him unlikely to be a suitable candidate for marriage.
On his part, the man, to ease his guilt about having an affair, selected this woman in the first place, suspecting that her need to have an affair with a married man meant that it was likely that she would lose interest in him should he actually “threaten” to get a divorce and propose marriage. He sensed that she would be intolerant of real intimacy because of her need to be “the interloper,” in her case, part of what he saw as her pattern of an all-too-apparent fear of success.
The man’s wife knew that her husband was cheating on her from evidence that would have convinced even the most trusting and innocent of people that he was being unfaithful. But because she, being an avoidant herself, unconsciously needed to permit and encourage the affair, she failed to spot the obvious, and even (when she could no longer fool herself ) refrained from confronting him and having a showdown, thus giving the affair her imprimatur: by being complicit in its neglect.
Many Type IIa avoidants are what I call “mingles” avoidants: individuals whose fear of closeness and commitment is either sufficiently mild or under adequate control to permit significant forays into relationships that are, however, tenuous because they are easily fractured, often by minor insignificant stress. Clara Thompson, describing such individuals, states, “Problems of intimacy are among the most disturbing interpersonal difficulties. . . . There are detached people who are not particularly hostile, who live as onlookers to life. They have an impersonal warmth so long as no closeness is involved, but they fear any entanglement of their emotions. . . . Many of these people get along very well in more superficial relationships. In fact, they may be the ‘life of the party’ or ‘the hail fellow well met’ so long as no permanent warmth or friendliness is demanded.”4
Some typical Type IIa “mingles” avoidants look hypomanic due to their tendency to quell relational fears by making numerous but superficial “devil-may-care” contacts. They become serial daters or serial monogamists who meet new people/partners easily but have difficulty sustaining and developing the ensuing relationships so that quality becomes a casualty of quantity as they keep others, often many at one time, at bay through a gun-notching hyperrelatedness that covers an underlying remoteness and isolative tendency, which together create the self-fulfilling prophecy that “I can’t meet anyone substantial and so am doomed to remain alone for the rest of my life.” Typically, never seeming to be able to settle down, they become overly active in the singles scene. They frantically socialize looking for a mate, only to jump from one situation that does not work to another that works just as badly, continuing that pattern in spite of its obvious frivolity and ultimate futility. They juggle many ongoing but resolutely superficial relationships within a chic and sophisticated lifestyle that fills their days with insignificant others who function for them as self-esteem enhancers: mere hood ornaments, pretty girls or handsome men on the arm, worn like a badge that says, “View me favorably because if I can get something this stunning, I must be someone special myself.” When rejected, hypomanic Type Ila avoidants make an especially frantic attempt to feel loved once again. They rush about looking for new lovers, grabbing the first accepting person who comes along, not for any winning quality that person might have, but to get unrejected, to undo a sense of despair and a feeling of emptiness, as they become too much the life of the party in order to deny the feeling that they have been disinvited from the ball.
A Case Example
A man put ads on the Internet just to see how many hits he would get, only he then did not reply to the people who wrote to him, or, what was worse, replied, in essence, “I’m a young, virile guy longing to meet you, rich and famous, and I’m sure we can get along because you sound just right for me, but I’m so busy now that I just can’t take the time to meet someone as wonderful as you seem to be, but I will get back to you as soon as I can, but meanwhile feel free to meet other men, though I hope you will wait, because I will call, if only you will be patient.” Although he consciously feared he would never have a partner, he nevertheless once abruptly arose in the middle of a date with a new, rather exciting, adoring woman to leave for home because he couldn’t wait to download a new love song from the Internet. Another time, under similar circumstances, he abandoned a woman to go home to check to see if he had left his sound equipment on—thinking he was afraid it would overheat and he wouldn’t be able to play soft, soothing music during subsequent sexual encounters. Still another time, under similar circumstances and for the same reasons, he left to check to see if he had scratched and ruined a CD by playing it on a damaged machine.