I believe that avoidance, among other things, is a way to say, “I fear you because I fear your making me mad.” I also believe that avoidant hostility is partly defensive: both a way to avoid getting close and a method for maintaining one’s (shaky) self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others through disparagement and ridicule.
A Case Example
An avoidant woman pursued a cyberrelationship with a man from Germany, who at first told her that he was royalty, only to later confess, somewhat ashamedly, and to her consternation, that he “picked up waste materials to be moved from here to there on a dispersing truck.” “Nevertheless,” as she put it, she agreed to welcome him to the United States. But after he promised to cross the Atlantic to visit her, he made one excuse after another for not being able to come, for example, “I can’t get time off from my job.” Eventually, however, he made the trip and, as she said, “turned out to be a great guy after all.” That is precisely when she picked a fight with him, condemning him for his bad grammar and complaining about his using too many towels, always taking a new one instead of reusing the old ones until they absolutely had to be washed. She justified her feelings and subsequent actions on the correct but trivial grounds that any lover of hers should have known without having to be told that doing the laundry took time and effort and ran up the electricity bill. But in actuality, she had become angry with him as her way to get what she wanted: that he pack his bags, stomp out the door, and take the first available flight back to Germany.
Avoidants often get angry when others won’t welcome them and let them become as dependent on them as they (secretly) want to be.
Some Case Examples
A housewife saved her money for months to travel to the big city to attend a salon for a complete makeover. Her husband, more dependent on her than he admitted, disliked her leaving him even for the day because he saw that as her rejecting him and even suspected, without reason, that she might be meeting a secret lover. As he put it, “You wouldn’t be making yourself over for me, I never cared how you look.” Upon her return, instead of telling her, “You look beautiful,” he launched into a tirade, displacing his own angry disappointment about how she had left him onto their cat, who, according to him, acted “pissed off because you left her alone all day.”
A patient, feeling rejected because her next-door neighbors did not invite her over to join them for a barbecue, got back at them by condemning them for letting their ivy grow onto her fence. Shortly afterward, the next-door neighbors’ child was sitting quietly in her own yard, watching the birds over the fence feed at the feeder in the patient’s yard. Because the child was part of “that family that had caused me great harm and left me bereft and depleted by not including me in their festivities,” the patient yelled at the kid, “Stop watching my birds, and stop it right now!”
Angry avoidants often express their rage by getting others to act out for them. It was pets for the patient who kept a half-dog, half-wolf that he didn’t discourage from snarling at passers-by, and for the man who let his dog off the leash so that it might wander about upon, soil, and uproot his neighbor’s lawns and gardens. It was his spouse for the man who maintained the outward appearance of being the “perfectly delightful one,” while he egged his wife on to be the troublemaker of the family. It was her children for the avoidant who publicly played the role of “pillar of the community,” while privately encouraging her sons to cut the neighbor’s flowers (by wishing aloud for a certain bouquet) and to shout antigay epithets (by criticizing homosexuals within the children’s hearing range). It was underlings for the boss who used them to live out his own petty, interpersonal antagonisms, taking A into his confidence, telling A that B had made nasty comments to him about A behind A’s back, then saying to B that A had made nasty comments to him about B behind B’s back, getting both A and B fighting. It was colleagues for an employee who provoked fights among his coworkers by misquoting them: “repeating” their passing comments out of context and with the qualifiers left out, subtly changing their remarks from positive to negative in the telling. It was patients for a therapist who, unable to get the divorce he longed for, fulfilled his own wishes in fantasy by encouraging his patients to leave their spouses, when instead, he should have been encouraging them to at least try to smooth things over and attempt reconciliation.
Excessive Relational Idealism
Avoidants, as exacting individuals overly idealistic about relationships, will, before they agree to get involved with someone, demand that the relationship meet certain, usually impossible, conditions. Only they soon discover that their self-imposed irrational, impractical, and overly perfectionistic standards are unachievable, so they pull back in disappointment and withdraw to avoid injury to their pride.
Excessive Defensiveness
Avoidance is not a static, but an active, dynamic condition—what Millon and Davis call an “active detachment,”25 that is, one with important defensive components. Sullivan describes avoidance as a “somnolent detachment,” the protective dynamism “called out by inescapable and prolonged anxiety.”26 In equating avoidance with inhibited function, Fenichel views avoidance as the product of a tendency to neutralize wishes with “countercathexes,” that is, with equal but opposite forces. Fenichel also notes that “analysis always shows that the specifically avoided situations or the inhibited functions have unconsciously an instinctual (sexual or aggressive) significance. It is this instinctual significance against which [avoidance, that is, the defense of avoidance] really is directed. What is avoided is an allusion either to a temptation for the warded-off drive or to a feared punishment or both.”27 Therefore some observers, emphasizing how the avoidant inhibits important aspects of living to reduce (social) anxiety, suggest that the term inhibited personality could substitute for the term avoidant personality disorder.
Avoidant detachment is made up of the following defenses, among others:
Identification with the aggressor. Avoidants create expected losses actively to handle the possibility of experiencing unexpected losses passively, for example, “I fear your rejecting me” becomes “I reject you to avoid being rejected by you.”
Masochism. Self-sacrificing, self-abnegating, and self-punitive responses are an avoidant’s way to counter forbidden desire. Avoidants commit a kind of social suicide to punish themselves for what they consider to be their unacceptable instinctual urges. They suffer now to avoid suffering even more later.
Repression. Repression is the avoidant’s way to detoxify anxious thoughts and feelings by suppressing them, then acting as if they no longer exist.