I think I already know the answer to this question will be "not many" for most people. But it just baffles me every time I see a post on Facebook and there's all these people talking about how they suffer from anxiety or depression or both, even when it has nothing to do with the original post at all. It's like people can't even write anything anymore without mentioning those things. I just don't understand why people would feel the need to tell this to the world. Of course it's in the nature of AvPD to not share such personal details. (And this forum is different because it's anonymous)

For me, only my parents know, and I've told one friend. And only because she's just as big of a mess as I am, and I know all of her issues. And obviously some people I've been in therapy with know about my AvPD.

I'm afraid I will get in a situation soon where I might have to tell my team lead at work more than I want to share, because she wants me to do a training for social skills/first impression/presentation and I really don't want to do that. If years of therapy hasn't helped much I really doubt some one day training will make a difference. I'm afraid it'll do more harm than good if I'm confronted with all my issues/shortcomings and how different I am to other people, and having to share personal things with complete strangers and get judged and have my flaws pointed out to me. And not in a safe environment - a company training led by an occupational psychologist, not a therapist. My company also offers a lot of trainings where you give a presentation ON CAMERA and then the WHOLE group watches the tape and analyzes it. There is no way in hell I would ever do that.

We made a compromise that this year, she let me do a different training that I picked (time management), but next year I have to do one of those. I will have to explain to her why that would be a bad idea. She doesn't need to know my full diagnosis, but I will have to admit that I have issues that run very deep. Which will probably turn into a disaster because I can't really talk about it without crying and I am NOT going to cry in front of my team lead.

And that just went into a whole different direction to what I was thinking about when I started writing this topic Guess I hadn't realized how worried I am about this.