Parents who are themselves avoidant often create an avoidant child in their own image. They can do this directly, by vocally warning the child about the dangers of getting close, or indirectly, by criticizing just about everyone else for doing normal, nonavoidant things. In one case, parents who vocally criticized their own friends’ small indulgences, such as having cocktails each evening before dinner, helped create a child who avoided others because she believed that there was something “evil” about getting together with people, having a drink or two, and just enjoying oneself.
Paradoxically, early positive experiences can also lead to the development of avoidant personality disorder (AvPD). Healthy, nonavoidant parents can unwittingly create avoidant children should, as commonly happens, the child counteridentify with them to become a counterparental isolate. A child reluctant to break away from a pleasant home life and an early, pleasant, too-close relationship with the parent of the opposite sex can later in life develop an oedipal avoidant syndrome rooted in a desire to remain faithful to the parent, specifically manifesting as follows:
• staying single or picking a remote, unavailable partner to marry
• then having a poor or nonexistent sex life with him or her
• while longing to meet someone new and more romantic
• and seeking or having an affair
• yet picking a new partner who is equally avoidant, especially one who is also already married, so that the affair goes nowhere and leads to disappointment and regret, which is
• one’s comeuppance for cheating on one’s original partner and threatening to wreck or actually wrecking one’s own and the new partner’s marriage
A Case Example
I had a strange dream once when I was younger. My mother was young and maybe in her 30s. She was very beautiful, and always dressed to the nines, as she was in the dream. We were ready to go to the produce market with my father, but my mother (I was a kid in the dream) looked at me and said mischievously, “Why don’t I go without him this time?” My father hadn’t woken up yet, and I was afraid that he’d beat us if we went without him. Yet I wanted her to have her freedom, so I said, “Go, Mamma,” and she did: right out the door, beautiful, in a dress, high heels, pearls, her hair and lipstick just so, and she looked back at me and disappeared into the crowd. Then my father woke up and demanded to know where my mother was. I realized I hadn’t put my bra on yet; it was still in my hand for getting dressed, and I panicked trying to get past him, covering my chest, hoping he didn’t grab me as I ran around him into the bathroom. Then I woke up in a panic.
I know, it’s a Freudian field day. I just hope it is one of those false repressed memories. But I always was extremely afraid of him as a kid (he has mellowed now, thankfully) and always repulsed by the way he grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go when he had a few too many. Which probably explains why someone like my asexual husband would attract me when I was young. At least in my dream, my mother broke free of her imprisonment. I believe I picked a remote man due to my fear that any close relationship would be incestuous, then, in response, spent my whole marriage blaming him for being that way, having affairs that went nowhere, and fantasizing dumping him if one of my affairs “clicked.”
EARLY NONPARENTAL RELATIONSHIPS
Rosenthal, in the New York Times, describes studies that show how the early “interplay between young siblings exerts a powerful lifelong force” as people “keep the relationships they had when they were young—such as rivalry or bossiness . . . color[ing] all their interactions in the adult world.”4
Additionally, peers, teachers, entertainers, religious leaders, and the medical profession encourage avoidance directly or through the media by word and/or deed. Mill on emphasizes the role played by peer group ridicule in the development of AvPD.5 The media have a pro-avoidant effect on the adolescent when they extol the benefits of Zen withdrawal and do-your-own-thing philosophies that overstress the importance of freedom, independence, and individuality, while by implication, fully condemning that submission and deindividuation necessary to form close, loving relationships. Religious leaders who are excessively moralistic, and therapists who encourage and maintain avoidance through long, drawn out, harsh therapeutic regimens meant to ready the patient for having a full life that never comes, also belong in the category of “gurus,” whose so-called expertise in fact involves “expertly” encouraging avoidance.
BIOLOGICAL FACTORS
Ballenger views avoidance as a way to deal with anxiety/panic attacks that appear when a “brain alarm system . . . fires . . . too easily”6 so that the patient responds to the events of everyday life with excessive anxiety.
In some individuals, shyness is the product of constitution/tem-perament. Millon refers to “a genetic or hereditary . . . ‘interpersonal aversiveness’ ” displayed in early “hyperirritability, crankiness, tension, and withdrawal behaviors” in “easily frightened and hypertense babies who are easily awakened, cry, and are colicky [and who] rarely afford their parents much comfort and joy [but who rather] induce parental weariness, feelings of inadequacy, exasperation, and anger [accompanied by] parental rejection and deprecation.” Millon speculates that anatomical (an “ ‘ aversive center’ of the limbic system”) and hormonal-biochemical factors (“excess adrenalin and rapid synaptic transmission”) might account for this genetic interpersonal aversiveness.7
Kagan, according to Ruth Galvin, says that at one time, he assumed that “timidity was acquired through experience, the repeated avoidance of challenge strengthening a childhood tendency to withdraw. Now he . . . wonder[s] whether he had overlooked something: temperament.” He describes a “small group of people . . . who are born with a tendency to be shy with strangers and cautious in new situations,” a temperamental quality Kagan calls “inhibition,” which is related to shyness. He remarks how some children, like some puppies, are born inhibited and remain so throughout their lives. Kagan believes that this temperament is inherited. Kagan also notes that “although society sees [shy people] as underreactors, inhibited persons may actually have a stronger-than-normal response to novelty—too strong, in fact, for their brains to tolerate, with inhibition and shyness appearing as the self-protective result.”8
EVOLUTIONARY FACTORS
Becoming a civilized human being entails a degree of loss of “animal” warmth, spontaneity, and connectivity. The cat that, knowing that its owner is aggrieved, sits on a foot to offer sympathy, companionship, and comfort, with evolutionary “refinement,” becomes the human who responds to another’s suffering with “grin and bear it,” “cut it out,” or “go get professional help.” Thus a cat, after having lost her lifetime companion, another cat, became inconsolable, meowing all night, uncomprehending. When the cat’s owner died, the cat, not the family, was the first to notice that she had passed. The others were all in the kitchen, eating. The cat was at her owner’s side, howling.