Ultimately, they calm down and once again become rational, as they become painfully aware of opportunity missed. Now we hear recriminations about how they utterly ruined their lives and the lives of those who loved them. Unfortunately, however, their past regrets usually do not readily translate into improved future performance.
Developmentally speaking, these avoidants often describe a past marred by constant parental warnings of the dangers of relating overall and of those associated with forming certain relationships specifically. For one little girl, the danger consisted of the loss of family, and for one little boy, the danger consisted of a symbolic castration as the father told his son that “all marriage is a ball and chain around your ankle, just like the one with which your mother ties me down and ruins my life.”
Some Case Examples
A gay man who routinely dissociated when the big moment arrived—not registering it or, registering it, denying it—still remembers an incident 40 years ago, when a handsome sailor made it clear that he wanted him, but instead of replying in kind, he ignored him, sloughed him off, to use his words, “laughed off the approach like a silly girl.” He doesn’t know why he did it, but he suspects it was because he became anxious. Forty years later, he was still bothered by his tactical error, still had fantasies of making it with the sailor, and still brooded, “Was the pleasure dangerous—the pain desirable? Did I perceive danger though there was none, see risk in the absence of a reason for concern?” His only consolation, which he ceaselessly repeated to himself for reassurance, was that had he gone with this sailor, he wouldn’t have gone with the other man he met that night, and that was the man through whom he ultimately met his lifetime lover.
A wistful patient announced his future plans to live his life by himself, camped alone under the stars in an adobe in the Arizona desert, on a farm with only the animals for companions, or on an island off the coast of Maine. The following two dreams regularly recurred during his childhood:
He was running down a long corridor in order to escape an unknown danger. At the end of the corridor, an object variously described as the tassels of a riding crop, the straws of the head of a broom, and the feathered tail of a rooster appeared through the wall and shook at him, tracing an up and down trajectory. The sight of this terrified him, although he did not know why. He remained terrified until he progressed further along the corridor, when he saw a sign that read, “Safe to the left, danger to the right,” whereupon he ran to the left and into the “arms of safety.” In the dream’s aftermath, he wet his bed and awoke. In association to his dream, he recalled how one day, after his grandmother caught him playing doctor with a childhood sweetheart, she whipped him, then took him aside and showed him a picture from a Bible: a harp whose pillar was carved in the shape of a nude body of a man, genitals absent. The grandmother suggested that he would become that man if he continued to play such dirty little games.
The shaking tassels/straws/rooster tail both represented his being whipped and the whip itself, and so both his threatened emasculation and the symbolic reassurance that his phallus was still there and intact. His running in the dream was both a running away from being whipped and emasculated and a running to a place of safety.
In a second dream, there was a park “over there” with skyscrapers arising intact from an excavation pit. His childhood sweetheart in reality lived on a street bordering the park. In the dream, he wanted to go there but was afraid and couldn’t find his way. And at any rate, he felt he didn’t deserve to be there because he hadn’t the right clothes. Ultimately he arrived, only to discover her home had been bulldozed and in its place another, taller structure, a skyscraper, had been erected.
In his associations to this dream, he described himself as a distant and lonely avoidant preoccupied with futile searching for new people whom he would like better and for new places where he would be happier. In later life, he actually fled from city to city looking for a relationship in a new place, even when many satisfactory relationships were available to him in the old one. On one occasion, he moved for no better reason than that in the new city, the skyscrapers were taller than in the old. The old city without tall skyscrapers referred to being devalued, punished, and emasculated for his sexuality now, just as he felt his grandmother had threatened to do to him when he was a kid. Fleeing to the new city, the “park with big skyscrapers, and one big one in particular” represented a restitutive attempt to avoid/undo emasculation and become physically intact once again. Fleeing also represented heading to a place characterized by safety in numbers because a bigger city was “more anonymous, a place where no one would know who I am, and hurt and abuse me for what I do.”
For successophobic avoidants, dissociation is particularly “suitable” for “acceptance emergencies,” when by chance, bad luck, or in a moment of weakness, they find themselves in a potentially happy relationship they were unable to foresee and so avoid.
In an unfortunate turn of events, the avoidant “vanishing act” often comes across to others as rejecting, even though it is not, for the dissociating avoidant is not being rejecting of, only protecting the self from rejection by, others.
Too often, these avoidants’ protective aloofness filters down from personal to impersonal pursuits with distortive results that affect choice of profession or choice of job within that profession. As a general principle, with plenty of individual exceptions, serious avoidants tend to become physicists even when they really want to become doctors, and within the medical profession, anesthesiologists even when they really want to become psychiatrists.
COMORBID AVPD AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
Some avoidants pull back in the here and now to steel themselves from a potential or actual current relationship that reminds them of a traumatic relationship from the past. They confound new people they might love or who might love them with old people whom they loved once, only to discover that in reply, they hurt them badly and irrevocably. Unable to discriminate between bad past and good present relationships, they instead continue to generalize from old bad experiences to new, unrelated, good, and potentially satisfying involvements.
A Case Example
As a child, an avoidant was raised in the same bedroom as a delusional grandmother who regularly and, because of her age and status, with some authority, announced that through the window, she could see “kidnappers, and I worry that they will whisk you away.” Later in life, he stayed away from all involvements with people who were overly intense like her. Instead, he preferred people who were bland, unemotional, and uninvolved, which unfortunately, and predictably, meant that they were also remote.