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Her anger was especially fierce when she believed that men were trying to control her—to “get me to do their bidding by roping me into a relationship I am reluctant to pursue”—and when she believed that men thought they were better than she was simply because they were men. Even fiercer still was her anger over the possibility that a close relationship with a man might be compromising her identity—by keeping her from being herself, stifling her right to be free and emancipated, and thwarting her creative urge to do what she wanted without interference by any man. As she put it, “I hate having to change myself around just for men I don’t respect or care about that much anyway. I am an independent woman. For me closeness and intimacy with a man overwhelms, strangles, and pulverizes me into dust. Doesn’t it do that to any woman alive?”

We also discussed how she was too much the relational perfectionist for her own good: a woman who sought the ideal man, while refusing to consider and accept any man who was less than perfect. Thus, before contemplating getting serious with a man, she demanded full compatibility. A man had to be not a calm, stoic type, who thought that all fretting was a waste of time, but as much in touch with his worries as she was. He wasn’t for her unless he was “the sort who gets hysterical over nothing.” Shared interests became much too important for her. Thus she left one viable relationship because “he loves boorish baseball and I love the much more sublime chamber music.” She would also demand full exclusivity right from the start and break off a promising relationship at the first sign that she was just one of several in a man’s affections. Otherwise, she was just “lowering her standards by hanging around with someone beneath me; someone who doesn’t deserve me, or merit my faithful love.”

We profitably identified and worked on two of her counterproductive security maneuvers. The first involved identifying with the aggressor. She would actively abandon men to deal with her fear that they might abandon her. She would also deal with her fear of being devalued by men by actively devaluing them so that it wouldn’t matter if they devalued her. As she put it, “I actually like weak men because they lack power over me: the power to put me down.”

We also worked on her paradoxical fears: that giving herself any breathing room in a relationship would mean that she was going to be abandoned; that retaining her identity in a relationship would result in her being left out in the cold, punished and sacrificed for being an individual by being thrown over for another more cooperative, compliant, conciliatory, and passive woman; and that involvement with a man necessarily meant compromising her career only to find herself not only alone, but also unemployed. Too, we worked on her destructive competitiveness, marked by her need to turn a cooperative relationship into a struggle for power and supremacy. For she saw friendly, cooperative men as rivals, turning a relationship into a contest either over small things, like who would be the one the dog came to first or whose lap the cat always sat on, or over big things, like who was or would be more successful than her professionally. This competitiveness led her to actively rejoice when something bad happened even to a man she liked. For that way, she could win, without feeling guilty about having caused him to lose.

Throughout, and not surprisingly, she complained that she was “dead in bed.” She postponed having her first sexual experience indefinitely because she believed that abstinence alone was conducive or even essential to moral superiority. As she once put it, not entirely humorously, “The only way I can even think of having sex would be in the missionary position, with a Bible in one hand, and a washcloth in the other.”

She saw sex not as lofty or spiritual, but as dirty and animalistic: to the point that she often provoked an argument to avoid having relations. On those few occasions when she actually tried sex, she would stop prematurely because she couldn’t relax, lost sensation, and felt cold. To avoid self-blame, she convinced herself that “I really don’t like how the man looks, or the way he behaves in bed, so it’s best that I see to it that it is over immediately.”

We discovered that much of her sexual difficulty developed out of the early fear that men would hurt her now, as her parents had hurt her when she was a child. She saw all men as father clones, who terrified her the way her father had done when he threatened to whip her if she didn’t “behave” and “cooperate.” All men had also symbolically become her hurtful mother, who never supported and always criticized her, even for a thing and its opposite, such as being messy (for not keeping her room clean) and for being excessively neat (for being a compulsively finicky dresser). Too, she believed that all men would infantilize her the way both her parents did—treating her like a helpless child with no rights or acceptable ideas of her own, yet demanding that she grow up fast so that she wouldn’t be a burden to them forever. Worst of all, as she put it with tears in her eyes, “when, after a good deal of effort, once I managed to tell my parents that in spite of it all, I loved them, they nevertheless remained unmoved. So I never uttered those words to them again. Or to anyone else.”

Unfortunately, she resisted therapy throughout. Rather than admit to being avoidant, she developed a number of rationalizations to normalize her behavior. She transformed fear into disinterest, and disinterest into preference, so that a fear of rejection became a fond desire for personal isolation, and that was “not something we ever need to discuss.”

Ultimately, after a few months, she left treatment, saying that her life wasn’t so bad after all and she didn’t need to waste her money and time working on something that didn’t really amount to much. For, as she put it, almost incredibly, “I am not hurting at all. If I am an avoidant in the first place, it gives me very little grief personally, and no trouble whatsoever professionally.”

Just recently, I heard from her once again. Therapy had worked after it ended, for she could accept treatment from me now that she was no longer struggling with me about “how to think and what to do.” She had gotten married, had a large family, and made a peace with her parents that was, however, imperfect, for “I still resent them for making me an avoidant, causing me to lose so many years out of my life to all the fearful isolation I had to endure all that time, and strictly on their behalf, and account.”

CHAPTER 2

DIFFERENTIATING AVPD FROM BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

CHAPTER 9 Development

BEHAVIORAL THERAPY

CHAPTER 18

Notes

CHAPTER 2

Counterphobic Avoidants

I divide avoidants into two broad classes of individuals: Type I, typical, classical avoidants; and Type II, atypical, counterphobic avoidants.

TYPE 1: TYPICAL, CLASSICAL AVOIDANTS

These avoidants, discussed in detail in the last chapter, display the classical Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) profile of pervasive shyness and fearful isolation. Within this class, variations of severity exist on a continuum. Some of these individuals live by themselves or with their family, either staying at home and not socializing at all, or socializing only with a few selected individuals, attempting to meet people but having difficulty connecting as they try, but fail, to form sustained and sustaining relationships. Others form relationships that are only partially avoidant: limited in degree or of reduced intensity such as bicoastal marriages; serial monogamous relationships; or relationships that are stably unstable, dysfunctional because being with unattainable partners makes the relationships unlikely to come to fruition, or if they do, sooner or later, they are destined to dissolve.