Displacement. Many avoidants find it advantageous to express their avoidance indirectly by expressing it symbolically. For example, instead of actually staying away from someone, they “merely” avoid shaking hands and so touching the person.
Intellectuatization. Avoidants frequently disguise avoidant compulsion as avoidant philosophy, for example, their “philosophy of splendid isolation” is in fact a rationalized fearfulness of connecting. Regression. Avoidants act like children to avoid having to act like adults. Many deliberately if unconsciously revive old negative childhood fears and actual past traumas to discourage adult interaction, often almost deliberately hanging on to ancient painful parental attachments so that they can view anyone available as forbidden because they are “just like my mother and father.”
Also regressive is the typical avoidant tendency to too readily form conditioned responses so that they can reflexively shrink from a new situation because it elicits an old displeasure. Regression also accounts for avoidants’ too readily forming transference responses that facilitate their viewing present relationships in the light of troublesome relationships from the past and present so that they can respond to people as if they are old problematic parents, rival siblings, difficult childhood friends or enemies, or one or more other of their current bête noires.
Associated Characterological Problems
Obsessionalism. Avoidants are worrisome individuals, brooders with one eye always wide open to the potentially negative consequences of everything they say and do to others, and others to them. They are often rigid, inflexible people who, stuck in routine, have difficulty adapting to unexpected life changes. Also, ambivalent about relationships, instead of settling in to a given relationship, they do and undo it: attempting to relate, becoming anxious, pulling back, then trying again either with the same person or with someone different, ad infinitum. Thus an obsessional avoidant went to New York City, had a successful career and lived a sophisticated lifestyle, gave it up to get married and move to the suburbs, got a dog, and had children, when, unhappy about and bored with being a housewife, she hired nannies to help care for her children so that she could resume working at something “more gratifying than just being a homemaker.” Her outside work then gave her the money she needed to become independent of her husband, and her independence gave her the emotional foundation she needed to get a divorce, whereupon she returned home to her birthplace and family, which, as she now believed, she should never have left in the first place.
Paranoia. Avoidants are hypervigilant individuals who fear something bad can or will happen to them unawares, “when they are not looking.” They take impersonal matters far too personally and see rejections that are not there as a clear and present danger, or actual attack. A difficulty with basic trust leads them to become highly skeptical of everyone, convinced that no one will show them any goodwill whatsoever, and certain that either they will trust everyone and get burned, or trust no one and get dumped.
Passivity/dependency (fear of being assertive). Avoidants fear selfassertion because they believe that being assertive means being aggressive. Peers, teachers, entertainers, religious leaders, and media all seem to be warning them that assertion, like dissent, means not being “healthily individualistic and productively rivalrous,” but “aggressively killing off the competition.”
Narcissism. Avoidants tend to be pulse takers who think more about how they feel than of how they make others feel, for example, “I fear what you do to me,” not “I worry about what my pulling back from you might do to you.”
Depression. Avoidants tend to be depressed individuals with intense negative moods that often commence when someone does not compliment them adequately or rejects them openly. In the absence of daily praise, they experience full and permanent stroke deprivation, associated with a sense of hopelessness about ever winning in the relationship game. They hold the pessimistic view that when it comes to relationships, there is no sense even trying since there is little chance of ever succeeding. Depressive cognitions prevail, particularly the tendency to think catastrophically in the “for want of a nail the ship was lost” mode, so that they readily come to believe that any sign of disinterest in them constitutes a turndown, a turndown a rejection, and a rejection an epochal tragedy.
Neophilia and neophobia. Avoidants paradoxically display both neo-philiac and neophobic traits. As neophiles, they are always seeking new people because they are easily bored with the old. Some become serial daters who, as Freud notes, show “a lack of stability in object-choice [evidenced by a] ‘craving for stimulus’ ” that is the product of a need to have an “endless series of substitute objects, none of which can ever give full satisfaction.”28 As neophobes, avoidants seek not newness, but familiarity. They fear being unprepared and taken by surprise with their defenses down. So instead of trying new situations, they strive for sameness, as Frances and Widiger note, avoiding rejection by retreating into routines with the same few old friends, “going to the same restaurant, the same table, and eating the same entrée.”29
Identification with One’s Peers/Society
Avoidants are often most attracted to friends, family, and society who are avoidogenics, that is, avoidance makers encouraging avoidance in others and having an especially devastating impact on avoidants as individuals already prone to shyness. Avoidogenics typically embrace and advance in-vogue avoidant philosophies such as religious (biblical) damnation for positive/sexual feelings; the Beatles’ exhortation to not trust anyone over 30; Zen philosophies of withdrawal aimed at reducing personal anxiety by the expedient of removing oneself from others and the world; and “do-your-own-thing” philosophies that overstress the importance of freedom, independence, and individuality, while fretfully condemning even the relatively modest submission and deindividuation that are in fact necessary to form close, loving relationships. Avoidants who do obeisance to this avoidant crowd come to view committed long-term relationships as the essence of boorish and uncool, and antithetical to their only true and meaningful goals in life—to be free of encumbrances (“a man thing”) and to be fully emancipated (“a woman thing”).
For one avoidant, embracing the belief that all intimacy is troublesome dependency was her way to be politically correct and so to gain approval from her equally avoidant peers. Hoping to belong if she accepted her group’s avoidant ideals, she went along when the group proclaimed, “Never cling too hard, it makes you into an invasive vine that only grows well with support from the very people it will ultimately strangle.” She, like so many other people today, clung to this avoidant philosophy because she valued her reputation with others over her satisfaction with herself.
Case Examples
A patient, after having gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to move from the “crowded large city in which I live to a small town with fewer inhabitants where I can have less contact with people,” could do no better than complain about the daytime noise in his new home— the leaf blowers, the gas company repairing the mains, and the like, really because they were the accoutrements of life and living. To “get
away from all the oppressive activity,” he moved again, this time to a farmhouse surrounded by acres of land and enclosed by a high fence to keep intruders out—only to move still again to an even more remote place in the desert because “on the farm, I’m frightened by the shadows in the woods at night.”