So,
do I have it or don't I!?!?
I am not sure that I would ever meet clear diagnostic criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder. I don't literally avoid socializing or risks of criticism/ridicule to that degree. I have friends, I CAN be quite the social butterfly, I generally have warm feelings towards people, I feel secure about certain aspects of myself, and I successfully work with the public in a very busy environment (although at times I do find that highly stressful).
However, I have learned that many people have traits of personality disorders - I seem to fit somewhere in a diagnostic no-man's land between social anxiety and recognizable AvPD. I can answer "sometimes and mildly" to most of the diagnostic questions, and "frequently" only to those involving risk avoidance and feelings of inferiority and being unappealing. I have noticed other forum posters mention that under specific situations their social anxiety symptoms can suddenly balloon and they enter a sort of "Avoidant Personality Mode" where their thinking and behavior DOES fully match diagnostic criteria for a limited time. Me too! It makes me want to call it "Social PTSD", because there are specific triggers (which btw I never see coming!) causing sudden radical increase in symptoms including social hypervigilance, deep feelings of inadequacy and humiliation, sudden loss of all assertiveness, defensiveness, and desire to remove oneself from the situation. I find these reactions can persist anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, if they are triggered severely enough.
What really bugs me is that on the "back end" of the disorder - the underlying and chronic tendency to see oneself as inept, unappealing, inferior; the fantasizing about an idealized self and life with the neurotic thinking and behaviors removed; the self-directed anger and frustration; the shaky faith in one's abilities; the ridiculous tendency to fall for "guilt trips"; the overabsorption of criticism; the feeling that there is some "core of Self" that it is too risky to
fully reveal to anyone else unless it is absolutely safe to do so; the risk aversion and passive lifestyle; making big plans with insufficient actual action; the chronic low assertiveness, etc. - I fit THAT description of the disorder all too well!!! I sometimes think the diagnostic criteria are frankly too strict and overly focused on lack of socializing specifically.
Many of the Avoidants' stories I have read in articles include more risk avoidance, unwelcome social inhibition and lack of faith in one's abilities than
overt social avoidance per se. I am beginning to think what we call AvPD is actually a psychological syndrome that manifests itself a bit differently in different people, has a wide spectrum of severity, and has several "entry vectors" as I call them - ways of developing the syndrome. It only gets called a Disorder if the number and severity of symptoms hit a specific, chronic threshold. What complicates things, so I have read, is that
some Dependent Personality traits are often comorbid with Avoidant Personality Traits.
Okay, so I'll say I have significant Avoidant Personality TRAITS, then (and probably a handful of Dependent ones too), and be content with that (my last PDoc did mention I have "classic AvP traits").
At any rate, I have come to recognize that my issues with depression and anxiety seem to be directly influenced by (and I strongly suspect they are
caused by) these AvP traits (I see it as primarily a poor self-image problem
combined with social anxiety), interacting with learned helplessness (the all too common "defeatist attitude"). What gets me down is how I act - the self-defeating repetitive behaviors that perpetually shoot me in the foot, based upon how I see myself and my (former!) lack of insight into how learned helplessness works.
I find it interesting and revealing that,
prior to and overlapping with my first couple of (undiagnosed) depressive episodes, I had recurrent and terrifying nightmares ALL of which included themes of being personally powerless, negatively judged, and/or socially irrelevant. It wasn't so obvious to me then; it is now!
I am educating myself daily about how to disrupt these negative thinking patterns and self-defeating, habitual behaviors, and looking for an affordable therapist - multiple medications have so far proven ineffective except in the very short term and in alleviating a narrow range of symptoms only (don't even get me started on the laundry list of side effects).
Does anyone else see themselves in what I've written here? Perhaps I am simply getting too obsessed with identifying and labeling a "major maladjustment"?

It does feel somehow comforting to be able to say, "I have disorder
X".