Projection also leads avoidants to unfairly blame others for their own need to withdraw. They weave the threads of their pathological fantasy, cognitive error, and the prophetic but unrecognized self-fulfilling consequences of their own provocative behavior into the cloth of external “stress,” then, coming to view their inner anxiety as external fear, attribute their isolation and loneliness entirely to the machinations of the world around them. Illustrative is the familiar example of singles blaming their loneliness entirely on the absence of suitable partners where they live, when such a conclusion is in fact an illusion, created mainly out of their own problematic concept of “suitability” and a false distor-tive environmental assessment based on externalization of self-hatred to become “others hate and avoid me.” Beck’s method of cognitive treatment, as revealed in taped interviews of sessions with a patient he calls Audrey, devotes itself in some measure to correcting paranoid blaming of others for having it “in for me,” as Beck shows Audrey how her withdrawal from others is in large measure a response to her belief that others are distancing themselves from her.2
Ultimately, paranoid avoidants even come to welcome their perceived “stress,” “bad luck,” or the nebulous “incompatibility” of everyone they meet, for it provides them with the excuse they are looking for to keep to themselves—the rationale they are seeking to distance themselves from others so that they can break free of them, exactly as they wanted to do all along.
COMORBID AVPD AND DEPRESSION
While nondepressed avoidants fear not being loved, depressed avoidants become convinced that they can never be lovable. Their cry is, “What’s the use of trying to relate to anyone, no one will want me.” Now they become apathetic, give up, accept the hopelessness of things exactly as they imagine them to be, inure themselves to the rejections they feel are inevitable, and steel themselves to the predictable loneliness they are convinced is bound to be their fate and as such will plague them throughout their lives.
As self-demeaning individuals, depressed avoidants become like the depressed hardware store salesman who told self-deprecating jokes on his first date: how when handing out a flier for his sale merchandise, he said, “Read this only if you are having difficulty sleeping at night.” As guilty individuals, they feel that to err is inhuman, to forgive themselves unallowable. They view themselves as sinners unworthy of loving themselves or being loved by others—partly based on a hypersensitivity to criticism that leads them to misinterpret a neutral question or positive remark as a personal devaluation, take a little joke as being seriously at their expense, and even interpret noncritical idiomatic expressions in a concrete, defamatory manner. To illustrate, I stopped using the expression “in case you haven’t heard” to convey something positive (“everybody has heard it, so I am sure you have, too”) because several of my avoidant friends thought that I was being critical of them, as if I were saying that the reason they didn’t hear of something was that they were completely, hopelessly, and stupidly deaf to the world.
Some Case Examples
A shy, depressed avoidant customer struggled to ask a salesperson in an upscale food store a question regarding the merchandise. The salesperson patiently explained his wares to her and then said, meaning it as a compliment, for he actually liked and took to this person, “I have never spent so much time with a customer before.” The customer, being depressed as well as avoidant, thought he was criticizing her for taking up his whole afternoon. As a result, she complained to management that he had sassed her, then refused to return to the store ever again.
A depressed avoidant emergency ward patient severely castigated members of the Department of Psychiatry for referring to her as a “walk-in,” a status she had convinced herself was somehow inferior to that possessed by “those who have an appointment.” In our interview, in the course of trying to assess the quality of her social life, I merely asked her, “Do you have many friends?” To this she replied that I was putting her down by criticizing her for being a loner and was even implying that “you are the sort of person that nobody could ever want.”
While nondepressed avoidants tend to confine their somatic complaints to those related to their anxiety, such as hyperventilation or tremor of the hands, depressed avoidants tend to develop a variety of off-putting messenger somatic complaints like the familiar “not tonight, dear” headache, Epstein-Barr “leave me be” chronic fatigue, or the physical weakness and need to “retreat in order to rest” of hypoglycemia, all of which are their way to proclaim, “I am withholding and withdrawing for physical reasons.” A hypochondriacal fear of catching an illness often leads depressed avoidants to become remote due to worrying about contamination, especially from sexually transmitted diseases, another isolating curtain they draw around themselves, having come to feel that “closeness is beyond emotionally precarious; it’s physically dangerous.”
For nondepressed avoidants, every new potential relationship promising a rosy future is a fresh sign of hope. For depressed avoidants, every new potential relationship recalling a dismal past is a new reason for despair.
COMORBID AVPD AND GRIEF
Grievers pull back into themselves and avoid others because they feel pain so unbearable that it fully preoccupies them and saps their life energy. They also pull back out of a need to uninterruptedly chastise themselves about the bad things they guiltily believe they did to the lost loved one. Additionally, they pull back for more positive reasons: so that they may think of the person they lost full time and recreate the lost relationship inside of themselves, in their fantasies. Then they stay remote because coming to overvalue the lost object, they feel that no one new can ever match up to that person and take his or her place.
COMORBID AVPD AND OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE PERSONALITY DISORDER
These avoidants tend to withdraw less out of fear than out of a need to maintain relational correctness, honor, and propriety. As perfectionists, they discard relationships because of others’ minor flaws, doing so just because the other person has merely made a single, insignificant social blunder such as “you passed me on the crowded beach without even saying hello.” They also remain remote because they fear making relational mistakes. As one individual describing her excessive perfectionism put it, “My record stands for itself: in my whole life I never made a slip of the tongue, because I rarely speak so that I can avoid saying the wrong thing. For me slips of the tongue are like wrong numbers. If you dial one you didn’t get a wrong number; you dialed the number wrong.”
As worriers over nothing, they hurt relationships by subjecting them to constant evaluative questioning, always asking, “Can he or she be the only right one for me?” then answering the question as “maybe, or maybe not,” then remaining aloof due to “not knowing the correct answer.” Uncertain as to whether they do or do not want to relate to others and to a given person, they tease, then disappoint, blowing hot and cold as they alternate between interest and detachment, playing Berne’s game of “Kiss Off,”3 as they beckon others to come, only to change their minds at the last moment and push them away should they actually arrive.