Here are some examples of advice I have given to avoidants that they subsequently told me they found to be helpful.
Develop a Nonavoidant Outlook
Avoidants should recognize that the downsides of being alone are far greater than the anxiety associated with closeness, intimacy, and commitment.
Seek Consensual Validation
Avoidants can benefit from confiding how anxious they feel to others. Doing so avoids their seeming to reject others, for most people predictably mistake personal shyness for disdain targeted at them, leaving others less sympathetic and more antagonistic.
Learn the Art of Positivity
As emphasized throughout, avoidants should try to act as positively as they can toward others, becoming kind, generous, and forgiving, instead of being testily unwilling to extend themselves halfway and refusing to negotiate and compromise. They should become empathic as they eschew narcissistic self-preoccupied pulse taking, thinking only of “my anxiety,” without also considering others’ feelings, needs, and motivations. Sensitively addressing others’ emotional needs, not only one’s own, consists of being as apologetic, supportive, generous, and unsadistic as one’s anxiety and need for withdrawal will allow, while whenever possible offering others an explanation of one’s avoidance: “I am not being antagonistic; I am simply feeling afraid.”
Think Twice before Hooking Up with Truly Antagonistic Individuals
Examples of individuals best avoided follow:
• those who serve as bad examples because they themselves are seriously avoidant and proud of it, such as people who put things before people, like fussy housekeepers who won’t invite anyone over to the house because they fear that they will ruin the furniture
• rationalizers of their own inappropriate aggressiveness as mere assertiveness
• pessimists who tout tragic fiction and sad songs to affirm their belief that few, if any, relationships ever work out—one reason why “life sucks”
• paranoids who can neither trust nor be trusted
• hypermoral individuals who condemn as sinful anything spontaneously and characteristically human, especially human sexuality
• infantilizing individuals who encourage staying home all of one’s life to devote oneself completely to taking care of faltering children, needy siblings, or elderly parents
• friends who attempt to act as substitutes for romantic relationships—particularly devastating are “close” companions who, when they find their own intimate relationship, dump the avoidant suddenly and without warning. For example, a psychiatrist leaned heavily on and formed a codependent relationship with a psychologist friend who willingly listened to her troubles for many years. Then, when the psychiatrist got married and no longer felt so needy, she told the psychologist, “I am out of the shrink realm and into the art realm, so because now we no longer have anything in common, I won’t be seeing you anymore.”
• jealous individuals who ensnare then guard avoidants, luring them into isolating groups, like therapeutic support groups, whose members too readily substitute themselves for individual relationships, then demand group cohesion at the expense of individual freedom and group loyalty before personal achievement and fulfillment. Thus in a group house on Fire Island, whenever the members of the house sensed that one of the roommates was about to connect, the other members suggested that they all go to the local ice cream parlor and look for men: a place significantly called “Unfriendly’s.” Other isolating groups are those whose members espouse a Zen-like philosophy of removal as the best or only way to reduce interpersonal anxiety; advocate antisocial behavior, as do some rumbling motorcycle club members; or advocate bigotry by word or deed, for example, putting seriously exclusionary by-laws into place to keep out others they deem unacceptable because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Don’t Stay Overlong in a Relationship
That Isn’t Working
Doing that is a particularly bad idea when it is being done out of an excessive sense of guilt about leaving and a masochistic need to change the minds of those very others who are most set against one.
Never Use Sex as a Vehicle for Expressing
One’s Avoidance
Hypersexuality should not become a way to display one’s fundamental unrelatedness or a way to rebel against a society believed oppressive.
Never Use Sex as a Vehicle for Overcoming
One’s Avoidance
Sex should not be a masochistic, self-punitive begging, where one reluctantly submits sexually just to retain a relationship along the lines of “I’ll do anything you want me to if only you will love me and not leave me.” Nor should avoidants make “good sex” the sole criterion for pursuing a given relationship, especially if they are planning all along to abandon the relationship when the sex loses its luster.
When Involved in a Committed Sexual
Relationship, Try to Practice
ioo Percent Fidelity
Especially for avoidants, cheating tends to be more an avoidant problem than a nonavoidant solution—something that puts distance between people by creating personal guilt and partner resentment, even in partners who at first seem willing to go along. Therefore avoidants should confine their “extramarital relationships” to incomplete relationships selected to supplement, not replace, “spousal” relationships: a relationship with a pet (where the nonhuman aspect makes the closeness both acceptable and tolerable); a nonsexual relationship with a friend (especially a member of the same sex in a heterosexual marriage/opposite sex in a homosexual marriage); a nonsexual relationship where, additionally, age differences are reassuring (so that homosexuals/heterosexuals may more comfortably adopt an older man/woman as a close companion than a younger one or one of the same age); and close family relationships as distinct from equally close relationships with strangers. To avoid distancing, avoidants who have any strong outside relationships should always emphatically reassure their partners that “I will not allow this person to come between us or take me away from you.”
Avoidants often ask me as their therapist whether they should try to meet people in singles bars or attempt to connect over the Internet. I advise avoidants that, used appropriately and in moderation, these places of approach can help the avoidant find a lasting relationship—but only if avoidants first overcome their avoidance enough to “mingle” and work any contacts creatively—looking not for quick sex or a merger, but trying to network with the long-term view in mind. Networking involves slowly but surely, and patiently, making as many acquaintances as one can, deliberately spreading oneself thin in the beginning, making multiple contacts, developing a circle of acquaintances, then narrowing the newly developing wide band of relationships down to one significant other, the most important individual in one’s new life: Mr. or Ms. Right.
Needless to say, avoidant behaviors can be as disruptive in singles bars, or on the Internet, as they can be anywhere else. Thus an avoidant man I finally convinced to go to a bar to try to meet women “accidentally” negated my advice by carelessly saying loudly and convincingly, “There isn’t anyone in this bar that I would sleep with”—thinking he was just talking to one of his friends, only, as he knew from experience might happen, to find that as he spoke, everyone else fell silent so that “the whole world heard what I said.”
Because all contact is by nature nonavoidant, avoidants desiring to network need only begin somewhere, almost anywhere, for starters forming distant relationships in anticipation of gradually getting closer as their anxiety subsides. Avoidants can start by being nonavoidant in some small respect, such as by saying hello to strangers. They can also form experimental “practice” (transitional) relationships that serve the purpose of loosening up, conditioning themselves not to fear rejection, advertising their availability, and getting a nonavoidant reputation via showing others “I want, and am willing, to accept people.”