Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant personality disorder is characterized by a need to avoid people, support, and compassion, laced by an inadequacy component. People with avoidant personality are sensitive to what people think about them to the point of paranoia. Avoidant people feel like they can’t make it socially, imagining their own ineptitude. People with avoidant personality avoid school, work, anywhere people scrutinize them. Any human interaction there is avoidant people, avoid because they feel that inadequate. They want to avoid people and that’s their bottom line. Avoidant people are shy, or timid, the quintessential loner. They have low self-esteem and are hypersensitive to rejection.

Personality disorders are diagnostic labels attached to a person who doesn’t conform to the individual’s culture. Avoidant people have incredibly high-stress levels due to their constant hyper-vigilance or looking for approval from their social scene. People with avoidant personality avoid jobs where they will be heavily scrutinized. They cannot get involved with people unless they are sure to be liked.

They restrain themselves when it comes to intimate relationships. This is because they are afraid of getting close to anybody. Avoidant people are often obsessed with being rejected or outright criticized in social situations. They find themselves inhibited in social situations because of their feeling that they are inadequate.

An avoidant person feels socially inept, unappealing or basically inferior to others. These people are shy about taking particular types of risks or to get into activities that might be embarrassing. The avoidant style personality disorder occurs in 2.4 percent of the population. A psychiatrist or psychologist is the person that generally diagnosis personality disorders instead of the internist or other specialties. Personality and temperament are shaped by the environment. Shorter term therapy involves thinking about immediate problems in the person’s life, attempting to give them coping skills to deal with those problems.

Avoidant people get uncomfortable in group situations, making them avoid contact with groups of other people, in general. New ideas have come up in recent years that personality disorders crop up with families who have a particular dynamic. Avoidant can be triggered by peer or family rejection, which makes a sufferer anxious. Avoidant people are easily hurt by criticism or disapproval. Avoidant people have extreme anxiety in social situations, as well as fear of social settings, making them avoid those or jobs having to deal with others. For fear of doing something wrong, avoidant people experience anxiety they struggle to cope with having few close friends if anything, just to make sure that they do not deal with mean people in any situation.

People who are avoidant go out of their way to avoid criticism or scrutiny. They are dreadfully shy individuals. They cannot get involved with a person unless sure that the person likes them. People with avoidant personality fear being humiliated because the fear of this occupies their every waking thought. Some avoid social situations entirely. You fear taking up new activities for fear of embarrassment. People who avoid things like this are very fearful of this embarrassment. They do not like that emotion, so they try their best not to be scrutinized. Some manage to work from home. Bridges to Recovery feels that avoidant personality is not just anxiety based, but an outright phobia that impairs day-to-day function. People with avoidant personality live under self-imposed isolation. People who have avoidant personality have experienced an abusive childhood, featuring both physical and emotional abuse, which prevents an avoidant from making stable friendships with other people. The treatment of choice for this disorder is a few different kinds of therapy including art therapy. Holistic therapies also work on people with avoidant personality disorder. It should also be pointed out that avoidant people are not sociopathic because they have feelings but are not on the sociopathy spectrum.

Works Cited

https://www.bridgestorecovery.com/blog/avoidant-personality-disorder-goes-beyond-social-anxiety/

https://www.healthline.com/health/avoidant-personality-disorder#symptoms

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9761-avoidant-personality-disorder

https://psychcentral.com/disorders/avoidant-personality-disorder/

https://www.psychforums.com/antisocial-personality/topic183169.html