Elevating an avoidant’s self-esteem therapeutically can diminish his or her need to withdraw defensively. This process starts with distinguishing low self-esteem that is rational and appropriate from low self-esteem that is irrational and inappropriate. Low self-esteem that is rational and appropriate originates in self-criticism and criticism from others that is all too well deserved. When this is the case, enhanced self-pride has to come not from altering one’s thinking, but from
doing things differently. Low self-esteem that is irrational and inappropriate appears when avoidants, for little or no reason, come to dislike themselves or begin to feel that others dislike them. Here enhanced pride has to come not from changing one’s behavior toward others, but from changing one’s mind about oneself and treating oneself better, as a more worthy object of one’s own affections. Following are some ways (adaptable for self-help) therapists can help avoidants do just that.
UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS OF THEIR INAPPROPRIATELY LOW SELF-ESTEEM
Avoidants can better recognize the distortive nature of their low self-esteem if they comprehend its origins in what is often their nolonger-relevant past. Developmentally speaking, low self-esteem often starts with parental deprivation of love and even physical abuse that the parents tell their children they deserve. Now their children, lacking a standard of comparison, and believing their parents are both fair and omniscient just by virtue of being both adults and parents, buy into that. Then, as adults, these children continue to seek out, or actually beg for, parental approval, but now from people other than their parents. They form present-day relationships with negative-thinking parental substitutes just to try to reverse their negativity. They seek to be made whole again by creating positivity in people who, by their very nature, can only feel negatively toward them. Of course, the devaluation continues anyway. Then they view the continuing disdain as a further reason to self-blame and withdraw because, as they conclude, it’s not that these people don’t love them for reasons of their own, it’s that nobody can love them because they are completely unlovable.
INTERRUPT SELF-PERPETUATING VICIOUS CYCLES
The therapist interrupts low self-esteem-creating/enhancing vicious cycles such as “I can’t do this because I am deficient, and I am deficient because I can’t do that,” for example, “I can’t socialize because I don’t feel worthy enough to attend social events, and I don’t feel worthy enough to attend social events because I can’t socialize.” Effectively interrupting vicious cycles allows the avoidant to experience satisfying small successes that ultimately break the impasse through incremental achievement, leading to less withdrawal and enhanced motivation to go forward. A simple supportive therapeutic statement meant to interrupt low self-esteem-inducing vicious cycles might be “in my eyes you are a worthy person,” and a typical behavioral intervention might be our familiar “habituate yourself to avoidant anxiety by acting more and more nonavoidant each day, and doing so in small increments.”
REDUCE EXCESSIVE AND INAPPROPRIATE GUILT
An excessively guilty conscience, a crucial element of low selfesteem, takes multiple forms: excoriating self-criticism; excessive “don’t make trouble” submissiveness; painful brooding with depressed mood; and pathological, self-destructive acting out.
Speaking cognitively, avoidants develop a guilty conscience because they
• view a few of their negative past actions/present attributes as constituting the entire, inadequate, valueless, or evil self
• think catastrophically, guiltily overreacting to their minor peccadilloes as if these are major sins, then withdrawing, feeling sheepish, ashamed, and shattered by thoughts that they are “stupid” or actual criminals
• see any sign that they are not fully accepted as evidence that they have been completely rejected and feel thoroughly bad, even if one person reacts badly to them
• unfairly judge their behavior in similar = the same thing terms along the lines of assertion = aggression = murderous intent = homicidal action, so that simply thinking bad thoughts becomes the equivalent of doing bad things
• think projectively, changing anxious, self-punitive attitudes into feeling disliked by external malevolent forces and people
Avoidants need to engage and talk back to their guilty, critical, punitive conscience and demand that it be less critical of and more positive toward them. They need to continue to affirm their humanity in spite of their imperfections. They need to accept their reasonable sexuality without suppressing it due to an unreasonable, rigid, all-pervasive, crushing hypermorality. They need to accept their anger, recognizing that everyone, even avoidants, has some justified annoyances toward some people, such as those who are troublesome, scary, and rejecting without even being provoked. They need to permit themselves to be successfully competitive without undue survivor guilt accruing from the belief that the world is a zero-sum place where because there is a finite quantity of X, anything they get by definition they get by taking it away from Y so that instead of experiencing guilt over doing well when others are doing comparatively poorly, they can come to view themselves as separate entities entitled to fulfill their own destiny regardless of whether others fulfill theirs.
Avoidants also need to reduce their guilt over being avoidant. They might do this by making creative excuses for themselves. For example, they can tell themselves not “you shouldn’t be that way,” but “I am that way not because I am bad, but because I am different. That is who I am, and I am being true to myself.” They can soothingly remind themselves that they, like anyone else with an emotional problem, can’t always control their anxiety and so shouldn’t blame themselves unduly for becoming frightened, especially in situations where many people would feel a bit scared such as upon entering a room crowded with strangers. Emphasizing the bright side of what others perceive to be their flaws, they can tell themselves, “Many people like distant, remote people.” They can excuse themselves for being modestly neurotic, “for everyone is.” They can allow themselves to make relational mistakes without necessarily viewing one relationship peccadillo or major failure as a sign of full personal deficit. They can lighten up enough to accept some relationship anxiety as integral to, not an unfortunate or catastrophic complication of, connecting, so that now they no longer masochistically respond to partial relational failure with complete, selfdestructive, apologetic, self-protective, across-the-board withdrawal.
For avoidants, the two magic words of guilt reduction are “so what.” These words can help avoidants recognize that all is not completely lost just because all is not entirely well. Now they can stop thinking “I ruined myself completely” over the slightest, and often entirely imagined, interpersonal “misbehavior.”
Finally, avoidants can profitably allow healthy avoidance to become part of their defensive repertoire. They can and should stay away from people who make them feel guilty, or guiltier, recognizing that these people have problems of their own and that it’s better to withdraw from them than to socialize with them—and stop going back, convincing themselves that they are returning for satisfaction, when they are just going back for more.