A Case Example
One such man entered multiple chat rooms then did not reply to the people who replied to him or told them that he was busy now and couldn’t take the time to get back—“but I will contact you, if only you will be patient.” In singles bars, he dressed to look alluring, stood in sexy poses, and gave others seductive looks. Then, at the first sign of interest on the part of others, he became aloof and disdainful and removed himself, even though he was the one who had first extended the invitation. In his relationships, he said, “We must get together sometime,” but never made a date, or, making one, broke it, reassuring the other person that this was the very last time that it would happen, just so that he could make it happen again. When having sex, premature withdrawal was the order of his day—not to prevent conception, but to first tempt and excite, then to frustrate by stopping short of fulfillment. Ultimately, he married to get away from home, but, feeling unfaithful to his mother, divorced his wife so that he could go home again, only to complain about the singles life, about his inability to tolerate living with his mother, and about the difficulty older men have in meeting someone suitable and getting remarried. Eventually, he met someone he felt strongly attracted to, only to then take a job that required him to work every weekend and on holidays so that the few days he could take off were on nonholiday weekdays—which, not surprisingly, was the very time his new partner couldn’t be at home with him.
Nonobsessive avoidants are detached, distanced, and disinvolved partly because they have difficulty expressing their positive feelings. Obsessive avoidants can and do express their positive feelings, but only in situations where they can take them back; when they can express them paradoxically, that is, when others, having given up, no longer anticipate or are open to anything positive from them; or when they can express them indirectly, for example, to a person other than to the one who is the actual recipient of those feelings.
Some Case Examples
One obsessive avoidant man gave negative responses to acquaintances’ positive gestures, reserving his positive responses for when the gestures had been withdrawn—because the other person no longer cared and had chosen to move on. For many years, he had saved money by only having one date, never to repeat the experience because he became intensely angry when she ordered the most expensive item on the dinner menu. Then, later in life, after he saved a nice nest egg, he thought, “It’s time,” and permitted himself to fall in love. Only now he found himself making bad investments in the stock market, thinking, “Better to lose it honestly than to have it taken away from you by some gold digger.”
Speaking of a new, suitable man she had been seeing regularly for weeks, a patient said, “He’s handsome, funny, very presentable, and I love how he deals with me, especially how he listens and remembers what I have to say. But it’s really confusing. I see him one time I like him, I see him the next time I don’t like him. He really wants me. I gave him my card and he called me right back. But I just cannot commit to him. I hear my mother’s voice going around in my head, saying, ‘What are you holding out for, someone who will treat you like a piece of crap?’ It’s the old story: you want the ones who don’t want you, you don’t want the ones who do. Anyway, my intense feelings for him completely disappeared when I discovered that his body type was all wrong for me. He doesn’t have any body hair, and his legs are too short, a shock when you see him naked for the first time. So I started telling him negative things about myself: how after all I am not perfect and that right now I’m not going to object if he pushes for a relationship, but I’m not going to encourage one either.” The final choice for this woman: a man who regularly criticized her for being a cheapskate for saving money by using in-store coupons, “something we just don’t do in my family, and where I come from.”
Additionally, obsessive avoidants are stubborn, controlling individuals. They may express this stubbornness in minor ways, for example, by sending “belated birthday cards” (with the additional element of a narcissistic shift in focus from “your birthday” to “my having forgotten your birthday”), or in major ways, as when they make an appointment then cancel at the last minute. Caught up in control issues, they don’t so much turn away out of fear as they run away out of need. They look for what others want in a relationship just so that they can refuse to give it to them so that now they can gratify their need to be the one to call all the shots.
Obsessive avoidants characteristically struggle with harsh matters of morality. They resolve their good versus evil struggles interpersonally by deeming others immoral so that they may now avoid them. While nonobsessive avoidants stay away out of a need to maintain safety, obsessive avoidants stay away out of a need to more closely approximate sainthood.
COMORBID AVPD AND HYSTERICAL (HISTRIONIC) PERSONALITY DISORDER
Histrionic avoidants exaggerate the dangers associated with closeness, intimacy, and commitment. In the milder cases, a cancelled dinner date becomes a signal that a given relationship, and every relationship to come, is troubled and doomed. In the more severe cases, closeness becomes commitment, commitment becomes entrapment, and entrapment becomes fatal smothering to the extent that we hear, “Freedom is completely out of the question within the bounds of a close, loving relationship; and complete freedom is what I want out of life, for I want to be me, and I need to be free.” Because of such fears, histrionic avoidants love unwisely so that they do not have to love too well. They typically display that characteristic fear of closeness by avoiding suitable men in favor of attaching themselves to men about whom they have mixed feelings. Typically, they ignore a potentially workable relationship in favor of relationships that are likely to sputter or fail. Not only do they react negatively in positive situations, but they also react positively in negative situations, forming strong attractions where the possibility of fulfillment is weak, and vice versa, as they get turned off by those who are warm, yielding, permissive, and available, and turned on by those who are distant, unfeeling, forbidden, and unavailable. In their pursuit of negative situations and unavailable people, they sometimes become enamored of movie stars to the point of stalking them. Basically, they favor oedipal triangular situations, pursuing people who are already involved with and committed to someone else, particularly “almost divorced” lovers who promise to leave their wives and marry them, but never actually do. All told, they suffer from what amounts to a fear of success, where they do attempt to relate—but only in those situations where they are virtually guaranteed to fail to do so.
COMORBID AVPD AND DISSOCIATIVE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Avoidants who dissociate undergo flight—not only from the possibility or actuality of rejection, but also from the possibility or actuality of acceptance. When acceptance looms, they flee to the distant, remote, unfamiliar, foreign, strange terra incognito where what they perceive to be the discomforts, harassments, and fears of the old world of relationships, or of a specific relationship, no longer pertain. If others approach them, they, in essence, tell them, “Corner me and I will retreat,” then pull the curtains around “me,” exclude “you,” and disappear out of what they perceive to be danger. They laugh off a serious approach or seduction that comes their way so that any work they have done until now to promote a relationship evaporates and the relationship comes to naught. Some, speaking of needing to take a break from an actual relationship, call for a hiatus early on. Others make it as far as the marriage ceremony, then, at the last minute, get cold feet, leaving their groom or bride at the altar. Some even have minifugues consisting of detached, trancelike, and confused states in which they might view a potentially satisfactory relationship virtually as a terrorist attack. At times, they develop a chronic and persistent aloofness to others that is the product of their constant detaching themselves from feelings they perceive to be dangerous or forbidden by the expedient of removing themselves from other people who elicit those feelings. They also become aloof to themselves—not allowing themselves to feel through creating a protective remoteness inside that, in essence, says not, “I am afraid you find me uninteresting and will reject me,” but “I find you uninteresting and reject you.”