anxiety responses, that is, distinguishing what I do fear from what I should fear, then responding accordingly.
Journaling also provides avoidants with an opportunity to review their progress as they ask themselves and write down the answers to such questions as “what have I done to avoid whom today?” After they answer such questions, they should write down possible areas of improvement and change accordingly. For almost certainly they have done something that they should not repeat. They have looked right by someone good then retreated to remain invisible. They have overlooked someone who would like and even love them if only they would have let them. They have shied away from someone who is right for them using a flimsy excuse—because “he is a longtime friend and so we can’t get romantic; because you shouldn’t mix business (getting close to people at work) with pleasure (having friends and even meeting partners through the job); because she is someone I met on one of those ‘stupid blind dates’; or because he has some (all too human) frailties and misfires from time to time.” They have not listened hard enough to others’ positive feelings mixed in with their negative feelings toward them. Having heard their words without listening between the lines, they have taken the expressed negative arm of another’s ambivalence too seriously and, having also overlooked the good in the other person, failed to rescue a relationship they could have formed and sustained if only they had been a little more charitable, and a lot more understanding.
Avoidants should consider using the methods of Kelly, a psychologist, who, in the 1950s, used a technique called “fixed role therapy” to change people’s perceptions of themselves and help them break through their self-imposed limitations. In a clinical setting, using a technique applicable to avoidants, he had clients write a self-characterization describing their strengths, values, weak areas, and the like. Then Kelly would “rewrite” the script, using much of the original, changing what the clients wished to alter. Then he would ask the clients to become this new character, in other words, to act “as if” they were the star of a play featuring the new, improved version of themselves.2 (Of course, avoidants can rewrite their relational scripts on their own and give them the happier, more satisfying endings of which they dream.)
MAKE HELPFUL REAL-LIFE CHANGES
Avoidants who feel exposed/trapped in the small town they live in might try traveling to a big, anonymous city to meet old friends and make new ones. Avoidants who feel isolated in an unfriendly, large city might try visiting friends in a small town and ask them to introduce them around in the new surroundings.
MASTER YOUR ANGER
Avoidants should try to avoid getting angry in the first place. They need to spot exactly when they get angry; understand why they get angry; question if their anger is appropriate to the circumstances or is coming more from within than from without; and stop using anger as a defense against relational anxiety—getting angry to thwart loving and being loved. For example, they should not do what one of my patients did when she first sought blind dates, only to then look for something about the individual that would allow her to express her preconceived negative notion about how most blind dates are “bad news.”
Many of those avoidants who were unable to avoid getting angry in the first place had some success changing their anger style from aggressive to passive-aggressive, with the goal of minimizing the even greater harm to their relationships that can come from hurting others’ feelings less in subtle and more in open and direct ways.
FACE AND OVERCOME SHYNESS
Overcoming shyness starts with recognizing that shyness, and the withdrawal that accompanies it, is an active, dynamic, not a passive, static, condition. Avoidants shyly withdraw not passively, but actively, because they withdraw defensively—taking motivated steps to pull back from and even give up on looking for new relationships. Individuals should determine for themselves if they shyly withdraw for one or more of the following reasons, with, in each case, remedies implied.
Low Self-Esteem
Avoidants with low self-esteem are shy because they feel that they don’t deserve to meet anyone because they feel too unworthy to form/ enjoy relationships, and even wish to spare others the pain and perils of having to relate to someone as unworthy as they believe themselves to be. They are also shy because their low self-esteem leads them to lack confidence to the point that they do not feel sufficiently comfortable relating unless their relationships meet a number of reassuring conditions in advance, particularly those involving the certainty of constant and unconditional approval and the promise that the relationship will not sour in any way in the foreseeable future, or ever.
A Pathological Need to Meet Others’
Expectations and Impress Them
Avoidants are overly attuned to and sensitive about what others think of them. The opinions of peers, teachers, entertainers, religious leaders, and the media count for too much. They overworry about their image, convince themselves that others think poorly of them, think poorly of themselves, then shyly withdraw as their way to pass negative judgments on themselves—judgments that are even more negative than the ones others pass on them.
An Inability to Master Inner Fears by Harnessing Soothing, Reassuring Defenses
Shyness is due in part to the absence of reassuring defenses, which include denial defenses that say, “That is just the way some people are, it’s their problem not mine, and I will simply refuse to let them bother me or get me down,” and healthy projection, where avoidants blame others for scaring them, instead of acknowledging their own responsibility for being anxiety-prone.
A Surfeit of Unhealthy Projection
Here, after viewing the world as their personal inkblot and attributing their inner anxiety to external fear, they come to see the universe as a place full of frightening potential or actual adversaries, whom they shyly retreat from as their only possible response to what they imagine to be their personal difficult or impossible environmental circumstances.
ENHANCE SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem enhancement in great measure involves becoming more permissive toward oneself. This involves allowing oneself to be simply human—permitting oneself to make some mistakes, without constantly self-spectatoring and criticizing oneself for being imperfect, and instead, in a balanced way, congratulating oneself for doing some things right—although not necessarily for doing all things perfectly.
RELEASE THE HOLD OF PAST TRAUMAS
Avoidants can prevent past old traumas from becoming present posttraumatic stress disorder by discriminating between bad past and good present relationships so that they do not generalize from old bad past experiences to sully new, unrelated, potentially satisfying involvements. This tendency to generalize is exemplified by the cat that, burned by jumping on a hot stove, fears and avoids not only hot stoves, but cold ones as well. Avoidants need to regularly remind themselves that just because, as children, they experienced ill treatment at home does not mean that everyone outside the home will treat them equally badly so that as a consequence, they must avoid all men and women in the here and now as “hot stoves,” when in fact, as “stoves,” they are safely “cold.” Not all new acquaintances are old, fearsome, problematic parents, siblings, or friends who once demanded that they impress others favorably as the only important thing, then rejected and deprecated them if they didn’t; parents who double-binded them by criticizing them no matter which way they felt and whatever they did; peers who bullied them; people who stifled their humanity, especially their rational anger and perfectly acceptable sexuality; or people who told them, in their controlling fashion, “Either be exactly like me, or be gone.”