On a more favorable note, passive-dependents are nonavoidant when they suppress their hostility in order to maintain their dependency. They act kind when we would expect them to be unkind, say “it doesn’t matter” when they should be setting limits, say yes when they should be saying no, suppress their sexuality should they deem it somehow troublesome to others, and generally behave in a selfsacrificial fashion—all in order to avoid offending others in a way that might lead others to retaliate by rejecting and dismissing them.
COMORBID AVPD AND MASOCHISM
Nonmasochistic avoidants want to relate well in order to avoid personal distress. In contrast, masochistic avoidants want to relate poorly in order to induce personal suffering. Some, looking to relate to people who cannot or will not relate to them, deliberately extend themselves only to those who are unlikely to accept them. Disinterested in people who overlook their flaws or see them as virtues, and wanting most of all to get approval from someone who already disapproves of them, they become unaccountably attracted to and actively seek out critical, humiliating, and rejecting persons, or at the very least choose those who are too different from them to be sufficiently compatible to make suitable companions and partners.
When these relationships fail to hurt and punish them as hoped and expected, they arrange to hurt and punish themselves through these relationships. After seeking them out, they stick with unfulfilling people and make a concerted effort to convert their harshest and most disdainful critics, the harsher and more critical the better, from negative to positive. They willingly (though resentfully) become submissive and do almost anything, even things that are not in their best interests, just to make these relationships work. They even gladly excuse the most outrageous behavior in their partners just so that the relationship can continue, as did the masochistic woman who excused her husband for cursing and reviling her in the foulest of terms on the basis of “anyone who hurts another person like that must be in pain himself.” And should their relationships “threaten” to work, they imagine negativity in a neutral or positive situation. A man might call and leave a message for someone on Friday and, “forgetting” about the weekend, think he was being rejected because the call was not returned until Monday. They look for, and find, flaws in others because now they can make a cause célèbre out of the deficits, deliberately marring a relationship that works so that they can give themselves the excuse they are already seeking not to make repairs, but instead, to give up and leave.
Some Case Examples
A masochistic bisexual avoidant avoided people who treated him with respect in favor of relating to people who were unpleasant, hurtful, or abusive to him. He shrank from people he sensed would accept and love him by placing ads on the Internet and then not replying to responders who seemed interested in him. He also turned down promising introductions from friends and family who wanted to fix him up when he sensed that the fix might work out. Instead, he felt most strongly attracted to remote women, prostitutes, in particular. In an attraction to heterosexual prostitutes, the money transfer was avoidant because it convinced him, “I don’t love, I buy.” In a sideline attraction to transgender prostitutes, he knowingly involved himself in a situation where “confusion precluded closeness.” (For the prostitutes, the avoidant attraction often was, “I do it with many people, not one, and not for love, but for money,” which both precluded closeness and provided them with an opportunity for expression of hostility toward people who can’t “get it” but have to “buy it.”)
A masochistic single woman came to me complaining of a burgeoning successophobia typified in a recurrent dream “that my driving phobia”—a symptom of which she long complained in reality—had “lifted enough for me to be able to drive, but when I tried to park the car, I would swing it widely, and into traffic, bumping, hitting, and destroying other cars in the process.”
When speaking of her relationships, she complained, “I have searched the world and there is no one in it for me.” I suggested she ask her relatives, who knew many eligible bachelors, to fix her up with blind dates. They did, and the dates were not bad. But to defeat herself, her relatives, and me, she announced, “Blind dates never work out,” and refused to accept ever being fixed up again. For her, blind dates got an undeservedly bad reputation because as a masochistic avoidant, she needed to be certain that no relationship would ever develop. To that end, she saw to it that her self-destructive behavior continued into the blind date itself.
Drawing additional inspiration from a successophobic belief that what was bad for her was good for her, and the reverse, she made a masochistic choice in her final selection of the man who was to be her husband. As she put it, looking back, “I avoided all the attractive men I met. Instead, I married the man who was unattractive, impotent, thin, reserved, self-preoccupied, and mother-fixated.” Later, after meeting her goal of getting married to a man she found unattractive, she was actually surprised, as if she were learning it for the first time, that they had nothing in common, or that, as she put it in more specific, sexual terms, “His penis doesn’t fit my vagina.” After some years of couple treatment, she decided to try to get along with him. “He is really not a bad guy,” she finally admitted. But then a new symptom arose— her “seven-year itch.” Unlike nonmasochistic avoidants, in whom the seven-year itch is a longing for variety originating partly in a sense of boredom that can be reality based, her seven-year itch appeared precisely in order to disrupt a relationship that was finally going welclass="underline" her husband had begun to respond to her positively, surprising her by becoming loving, just the way she once thought she had always wanted him to be, but which now “turned her off completely.”
Many avoidants act out as masochistically with place as they do with person. In a self-destructive geographical maneuver, they choose to live in a place where they sense they are not wanted and can never be happy. They have a civil right to be there, but more important, because they do not fit in, they get stuck in what is for them a hopelessly deaffirming culture, where they aren’t nearly as happy as they might be in another location, one where they had both a right and a reason to be.
In therapy, masochistic avoidants tend to be especially resistant to improvement. They find ways to keep their avoidance in order to continue their suffering. They call their loneliness preferential and attempt to convince their therapists of the same thing. They claim to value their privacy and independence over all else. They say that “marriage isn’t right for everyone and it’s not right for me.” They note that having regular sex is not all it is cracked up to be. In the words of one such avoidant, “The best things in life are only for the isolate.” Should therapy appear to be working, they find a way to defeat it by having a masochistic triumph that consists of cutting off their noses to spite their therapist’s face. This was the motivation of an unmarried woman who allowed her goal of meeting people to become secondary to her goal of proving to everyone trying to help her—family, friends, and me—that “No matter what I do, I still can’t find Mr. Right, and no matter what you do, you still can’t help me catch him.”