Decent Resources on Emotional Avoidance?

I've been learning about having an avoidant personality over the past few weeks. It started out with a checklist in a depression self-help workbook & into conversations with my therapist. It's been enlightening but not very helpful.

My therapist doesn't believe that I have a full-blown disorder (yet) because I'm still able to go to work, but I'm starting to wonder about the validity of her beliefs about that. Life is usually more than just going to work, or being able to go to work - it's about relationships and one's internal state as well. I know here in the US at least, a person's relative wellness is usually based on employment, but at this point I'm not getting anywhere career-wise either with my current behavior.

A big manifestation of avoidance for me is that whenever I do anything that makes me emotional, I stop doing it. It doesn't matter if it's something exciting, something that elicits hopefulness, or if I get seriously angry... I just stop. Dead in my tracks, won't go any further, won't try to work past it... I just stop. I've given up on anything that I feel strongly about because if it makes me feel something strongly, I don't want to deal with it. I can't deal with it - it's like I just lose all ability to communicate or move in a coordinated fashion. I am embarrassed, ashamed even, to have emotional displays. I don't like it when other people have obvious emotional displays where I can see them and for me, laughing out loud, yelling, crying, etc. makes me feel like I've just wet myself. About the only thing I can tolerate are irritation, annoyance and mild amusement (and the Autism/Asperger's spectrum has been firmly ruled out for me).

Before I came across the avoidant personality description, I was researching modern stoicism because, as a philosophy, it seemed to be one I was born into. However, even stoicism acknowledges that not having any, or trying to prevent, emotional responses at all is unnatural & unhealthy.

The four or five books I've found that focus solely on APD seem to hold relationships to be the primary manifestation of the disorder. While I do have relationship issues (mainly that the minute anyone tries to 'get to know me' or go beyond my boundaries of shallow co-worker involvement, I push them away like they smell bad), I know not being able to make or maintain friendships isn't the totality of my problem.

Does anyone know of any decent resources for the more internal/personal issues of avoidant personality or APD? Or even books/websites that generally deal with personality types & disorders that might prove useful?

There is a spiritual bent on this website I found (which you may or may not relate to) but this is one of the most insightful and in-depth descriptions of avoidant personality styles I have found yet. Hopefully it will be useful to you: http://www.ncfliving.org/bk_124_avoidant1.php Printed out its about 16 pages.

While it sounds to me like you do have indicators of some avoidant personality orientation (could be on a continuum somewhere short of full-blown APD), I get a strong sense, maybe just an intuition, that there is another dynamic going on that is from something that is not avoidant personality orientation. If you did have APD (or trait), that wouldn't rule out having some other major issue To me, there is something so different between avoiding people and avoiding emotional states, that I think it would be unlikely that both of these are being generated by the same factor. It just sounds to me like you have a complex mental makeup and that it might be simplistic to try and boil all that you describe down to being various manifestations of one particular perosnality disorder.

This may not be where you'll find exactly the answers you are looking for (I think the kind of resources you would like to find have yet to be produced), but I recommend doing some reading on the approach to PD developed by THEODORE MILLON, PhD. I would say you can benefit from continued learning about APD; just consider that something entirely "other" could be going on also. Feel like this is kind of rambling; I had little sleep.

I totally hear you on how, in USA, extent of gainful employment is taken almost as a perfect index to how well one is. Can be very frustrating.

There is always other crap, yanno? I've got a history of abuse & neglect, a dysfunctional family, and depression.

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To me, there is something so different between avoiding people and avoiding emotional states, that I think it would be unlikely that both of these are being generated by the same factor.

Most of what makes me avoid other people is because of the emotional connections. I do have a ton of self-analytical, self-monitoring discomfort - I never say anything off the cuff or spontaneously - I always plan everything out a few sentences ahead of time. There's always an underlying feeling that anyone who wants to get to know me has ulterior motives - as though they are setting me up for a huge, humiliating practical joke at my expense.

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This may not be where you'll find exactly the answers you are looking for (I think the kind of resources you would like to find have yet to be produced)

That's one of the first things I've found out about avoidance personality typing & APD - it is under-resourced & under-researched compared to the other personality types & disorders. It shares so many traits with other problems, like social anxiety, general anxiety, various phobias, the Autism spectrum, & has even been added onto schizophrenia & schizoidal disorders.

Hi Perz, a topic near and dear to my heart! I like this website (below). It references Millon, but also Harry Guntrip (old dead guy) and Jeffrey Seinfeld (still around), I admire both greatly and have their books. Hope this helps, would love to talk with you more on this. Also look at attachment? I get you - I once made a new year's resolution just to say yes when a coworker asked me to join them for lunch. How pathetic is that?!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiz...ality_disorder

To Perz
Regarding your last point above, I am asking myself why that is so. Also, what does it tell us that it is so, which it is.

Could it be that society cares about you having a problem to the extent that your problem creates problems for others? Isn't that kind of resonant of what you pointed out above about being employed? I think that if I am employed, then I am less of a problem to society, or my family, etc. I think that if I have antisocial, or borderline, tendencies, then I am more of an immediate problem to "the system."

If my problem largely makes me a problem to myself, I think that makes my problem of lower priority to anyone except me. Where this seems to me to be particularly cruel is in the fate of very socially avoidant children who just don't trigger the system into intervening to help them.