Avoidants who overgeneralize slide too easily from shaky hypothesis to incontrovertible evidence to irrefutable fact. For example, a patient viewing all new relationships as if they are repeats of old, traumatic ones becomes effectively blind to alternative possibilities so that because he fell in love with someone unreliable once, no one he loves can ever be trusted again.
Very frequently, avoidants negatively parentalize what are in fact positive relationships after basing their conclusions on trivial shared characteristics of new nonparental and old parental relationships, then emphasizing the inconsequential or inaccurately perceived negatively of the new based on a tenuous similarity to the less than satisfactory old. For some avoidant women, all men remind them of an abusive father, and for some avoidant men, all women remind them of a rejecting mother.
CATASTROPHIC (ALARMIST OR WORST POSSIBLE SCENARIO) THINKING
Catastrophic thinking involves histrionic exaggeration, leading to overcautiousness or to the taking of desperate (and unnecessary) protective measures, leading to serious personal and professional misjudg-ments or even to making a suicide attempt. Avoidants who think this way typically make “mountains out of molehills” as they indulge in “all is lost” or “for want of a nail the ship was lost” or “for want of a penny the kingdom was lost” thinking. They assign absolute rather than relative meaning to minor problematic events, then overreact to these as if they constitute major negative developments. They become unable to say to themselves “so what” and “big deal,” then remain calm and unemotional about things that don’t really matter, or even about things that do matter but not that much, or, if that much, are best overlooked for the individual’s overall happiness and peace of mind.
Serious perfectionism is a kind of catastrophic thinking, where the avoidant discards a potentially or actually viable relationship because of perceived minor flaws, pulling back completely from a valid social/ sexual interaction just because the other person has merely made a single, insignificant transactional blunder.
Many avoidants make two, or more, cognitive errors simultaneously. For example, a patient’s habit of taking criticism too seriously led him to feel too frightened and devastated to relate intimately to anyone. This serious fear of criticism started with similar equals the same thing distortive thinking so that if someone merely requested that he do something, that request became an intended criticism that that thing was not done. Also, thinking catastrophically, he perceived actual minor criticism to be a rejection and the rejection a warning that the relationship was in serious trouble, and that it, and his life, were going to end badly.
Cognitive errors do not develop or thrive in a vacuum; rather, they appear, take shape, and persist within a facilitating matrix of disruptive, often traumatic, developmental events; internal conflicts inadequately resolved by normative or pathological defensiveness; negative behavioral conditioning; distortive interpersonal perceptions first formed in childhood that persist into adulthood; comorbid emotional disorder; misguided existential and socially based philosophical beliefs; and ongoing real-life stresses.
In the realm of disruptive developmental events, often adults continue to think in an avoidant manner in the here and now because as children, they identified with parents who thought the same way, or as children, they long ago jumped to the only partly true conclusion that their parents were criticizing or rejecting them. For one guilty patient, his mother’s getting even a little angry when she felt his behavior was out of line meant that she didn’t love him at all. Now he believes that anyone who sets firm limits on him is, just as she did, furiously criticizing him and rejecting him completely.
In the realm of ongoing interpersonal stresses, a shy, hypersensitive avoidant patient carrying on the “great tradition” of early parental negativity felt uncomfortable meeting new people because he failed to distinguish making a minor social blunder from ruining himself completely socially. He believed that others’ basic feelings about him could change, without warning, from positive to negative, just the same way his parents’ basic feelings did change toward him when, as a child, he did something they disapproved of. He did not believe that adult interpersonal relationships had an in-built margin of error so that most peoples’ basic feelings did not change from positive to negative over something trivial or even momentous. Instead, he saw everybody as a parental clone who would turn on him the same way his parents did when he made childish mistakes.
I could not convince him otherwise because his family actually did continue to reject him over nothing—by showing a clear preference for his brothers and sisters now, as they did then, and seamlessly, essentially from the day he was born.
This page intentionally left blank
1
recently was given your book as a gift and I must say that I find some parts of it very helpful to my situation. I have spent hundreds on counselors in the past few months and have not received any direction from them on understanding why I do the things
CHAPTER 9 Development
EARLY PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES
Avoidant Disorder of Childhood
and Adolescence
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third revised edition (DSM-III-R), describes a syndrome it calls “avoidant disorder of childhood and adolescence,” whose traits survive in the adult avoidant in the form of interactive problems that disrupt intimacy. This DSM-III-R syndrome is characterized by interpersonal anxiety manifest in a “desire for social involvement with familiar people, such as peers and family members,” associated with “an excessive shrinking from contact with unfamiliar people” so that the child is “likely to appear socially withdrawn, embarrassed, and timid when in the company of unfamiliar people and will become anxious when even a trivial demand is made to interact with strangers,” and may even become “inarticulate or mute.”1
A Case Example
A 10-year-old has no friends of her age. Her only interpersonal contacts are her parents and a few of their adult friends. She never leaves her parents’ side, partly because the mother never lets her out of her sight, and partly because she is unable to go more than a few feet from home because she fears loud street noises, being stung by bees, and riding on public transportation (she fears she will drown when the train she is on crosses a bridge and falls off the tracks into the water), and partly because she fears strangers. (Her preoccupation with details—she is able to list 256 breeds of dogs as well as all the birds ever found in Colorado—suggests that she might be suffering from an associated Asperger’s syndrome.)
However, I have treated a number of patients who described their children as having emotional symptoms that seem to have been the opposite of those described in the DSM-III-R. In this non-DSM disorder, the child is both unable to relate outside the home and, while at home, makes the parents’ life into a hellish onslaught of disagreements and fights.
A Case Example
A patient of mine describes a son like this:
Last night, I drew the line and asked my husband to draw it with me, too, but I am still reeling in a mother’s desolation. There has been no movement in my eldest son’s life since the last time I asked him to start looking for a job so he could move out; his presumption was that he should live here forever not talking to us, find intermittent clerical jobs, and play tennis occasionally, while going to bars nightly, stumbling in in the wee hours of dawn.