It helps if avoidants keep in mind that contiguity between past and present is so often illusory and simply coincidental. For since humans can behave in only a few really different ways, everyone in the present is unavoidably, and in some respects likely, to remind all of us of someone from the past.
DEVELOP TRANSACTIONAL INSIGHT
Avoidants need to document why exactly they fear opening up and getting close to others. Table 20.3 summarizes some of the possible reasons for easy self-help access.
Table 20.3
Problems with Getting Close
They fear they will reveal something they don’t want to feel, know about themselves, or display to others.
They fear being overwhelmed and tied down emotionally.
They fear being controlled and dominated.
They fear merger and need to maintain their identity fully intact.
They are too self-absorbed to be “just” one part of a couple—this though successful relationships, by definition, lead to a positive, often matura-tional, change from “me” to “us.”
They are reluctant to make the personal sacrifices that relationships require.
They fear being hurt again in the present and future in the same way they were hurt in the past.
They are jealous individuals convinced that anyone they love will only betray them and leave them for someone else.
They are competitive individuals who feel guilty due to the zero-sum belief that what they win, others must therefore lose.
They fear success in all areas, and especially in the area of relationships.
(continued)
They have a masochistic need for failure, especially when it comes to relationships.
They have bought into social messages about the wonders of splendid isolation.
They actually like being loners, meeting nature by themselves in a test of strength and mettle, one that, if they win, they believe will make them strong and powerful enough to be able to endure and survive, no matter what.
ROLE-PLAY
Through role-playing, avoidants can put themselves in the place of others so that they can see exactly how they come across to people, then make necessary repairs to harmful interpersonal trends and fix potentially off-putting character traits such as obsessive rigidity and paranoid suspiciousness. Videotaping themselves and showing the results not only to themselves, but also to their significant others, can provide them with feedback as to how they can improve their appearance and behavior in a way that will lead others to become more accepting of and welcoming to them.
MAKE TRIAL FORAYS INTO NONAVOIDANCE
Becoming less avoidant requires actually giving nonavoidance a try. Too often avoidants decide implicitly (by only thinking about it) whether they do or do not wish to remain avoidant. Instead, they should embrace the simplistic but true principle “Try it, you might like it.” Then they should say to themselves, “I will focus on, and single-mindedly make, relationships my ongoing concern. I will not allow myself to be sidetracked in my quest for nonavoidance. I will fix on my nonavoidant goals and head for my nonavoidant objectives in a straight line, with as few side trips or time-outs as possible, while not letting anyone or anything get in my way.” They should then take themselves in hand and force themselves to act less shy and be more related, telling themselves, “You can do it, and you can do it now,” even though they find themselves at the start behaving in an inadequate or embarrassing fashion.
TAKE CONSULTATIVE ACTION
Avoidants can profitably share their fears with others. Instead of retreating in silence to save face they should own up to their interpersonal anxieties, bringing them out into the open not only in order to expose them to the cleansing light of day, but also to get others to understand and sympathize with, instead of reflexively reacting negatively to, them. Asking others not to mistake their shyness for hostility makes it clear that they are not bad, but fearful, people, not individuals who dislike, but men and women who are afraid of, others. This effectively throws avoidants on the mercy of a, it is hoped, understanding “court” that will give them credit for their honesty and appreciate, understand, and respond positively to their frankness.
SEEK OUT HELPFUL FRIENDS AND FAMILY
At some point, avoidants should try to become sufficiently nonavoidant to be able to approach friends and family they can enlist to help them cope with and master their avoidance. These third parties can
• exhort avoidants to at least try to relate.
• act as good companions who provide avoidants with practice relationships and therapeutic corrective emotional experiences that can generalize, for relational successes with familiar, accepting people spread to facilitate or actually become relational successes with strangers, who, in their turn, likely will become more accepting and less difficult to approach
• promote healthy identification, leading by example—the example of model people who are less fearful, less guilty, more selftolerant, and more self-assertive
• provide the avoidant with a warm, reassuring, healing holding environment in which there is less or no reason for anxiety; evidence that patient perseverance will lead to relief; positive feedback that says “you are too good to fail,” “that’s great that you have succeeded,” and “your low self-esteem is lower than by rights it should be”; and good nourishing fatherly/motherly advice such as “there are other places where you will be happier/more welcome/ more popular than in the suburbs.”
• introduce avoidants to others, hoping that potential or actual rewarding relationships with them might result
• offer avoidants constructive, not destructive, criticism, as tolerant friends giving avoidants a fair and balanced ongoing assessment of the effect they are having on others, and as amateur life coaches offering avoidants specific suggestions about what needs to be done to make future improvements, without repeating past mistakes
• Offer younger avoidants-to-be (children and adolescents) an avenue of escape from parents, countering extant unhealthy parental attitudes by offering the young people a positive view of their true worth and a place of escape, saving them, it is hoped, from becoming more seriously troubled than they otherwise might turn out to be
Avoidants can profitably consult with ex-avoidants to discover how these others got over their avoidance. They can do this one-on-one or through joining therapy groups (if they can find the right one) composed of group members who are also having problems with avoidance.
Of course, avoidants, already too highly impressionable and sensitive for their own good, need to be very careful in picking third-party assistants. They should not ask for help from people who infantilize them with their own avoidant philosophy of life or who keep them in tow because they do not want to let them roam free. They should challenge gurus who advise or recommend avoidance in subtle ways—such as through advocating Zen-like removal philosophies, which, though useful for nonavoidants, are ultimately bad for avoidants, who are already too removed for their present and future good.