Reasons why you avoid

As each individual is different and it's very difficult to find someone who only has a personality disorder but on the contrary, there is what is known as comorbidity, and even the primary and secondary disorders. I'm curious about all the reasons lead you to avoid contact with other people.

Mine are:

- Fear of failure ( not being good enough).
- Fear of not being liked or being criticized.
- Fear of being hurt ( sensibility, my borderline traits)
- Fear of hurting others. ( I think this is due to my borderline traits as well)

I was thinking lately, of something I always have suspicious and now, I find it some sense. I would like if you feel related to it.
I always had the sensation that there was a rage, a streght, an energy...don't know how to call it, that I always had under control bc I didn't know how to use it in a good way. It's like if I would give it freedom it could bring me problems and hurt other people. My way to keep the control over it is avoiding situations and people.
I don't know if I explain myself very well. I hope someone feel related and I can share with him/her.

Thanks for reading!

I have fallen short in so many areas of my life. For someone who had so much potential in their youth, my life has become one big belly flop. It's humiliating when people ask me about my personal accomplishments and my responses spotlight my inadequacies and failures. I have no explanation so choose to change the topic, redirecting focus away from myself or make up excuses to avoid the personal encounters altogether. What tears me apart is that my parents feel compelled to cover up or downplay my failures. I bring so much disappointment and shame to them and I am devastated.

I avoid certain things because:

- I feel like I'm worthless
- feel like I will annoy someone
- feel like I'm wasting someone's time
- worry over being terrible at something
- worry about embarassing myself
- worry about making mistakes
- worry about being abandoned
- worry about being rejected
- worry about being a burden
- worry about pissing someone off
- worry about not being good enough
- worry that I'll say something rude or inappropriate

etc etc etc.

Interacting with other human beings causes me discomfort, so I avoid it as much as I can. Plus people will dislike me if they get the chance to know me, so I want to keep that from happening.

Yeah, I'm sure people don't like me either. I have proofs.

Have you realized Mountain Human of the unfair of your sentense, unfair with you? Of course, you are afraid of not being liked but saying people don't like you if they know you is completly unfair with you. Of course, there will be people don't get on well with you but I'm sure there are many more than are going to like you.

I'm always friendly to people on a very superficial level. What I fear is 'developing a friendship'. I never know the steps to the dance, so to speak. Since I abhor the telephone, I don't know if I'm supposed to call them to 'chat' ~ which I always talk myself out of... and I'm so uncomfortable in any interaction, even just having coffee somewhere, I nearly always decline invitations til they get tired of asking. The few times I have put myself ' out there ' it ended in disaster!

Azul: Liked your reference to the weird 'power'. I've felt for ever that I can 'read' people and see what they are really like faster and better than normal people.

Fraidy: mine is not a strenght to read people, indeed, I think I'm a disaster in the topic bc I don't have the patience to know people well. So, I base myself on details, on the last behaviour to make an idea where is the person coming from. It's a very childish way to interpret things. I'm realizing now of this fact that I have been in contact with some people, bc like you, I tend to avoid even going to have a coffee with someone.
It's curious how I realized now of the habit to ask my people around for helping me to interpret other people.

Same reasons as have already been mentioned. Fear of rejection. Afraid of making a fool of myself. Fear of being judged, criticized, not being good enough.

I avoid because I tend to do things in unconventional ways and I dislike being singled out and questioned because it.

.... and anything that makes me uncomfortable... which is a lot of things.

I want to know how it will turn out in the end before I try something.... I want to know who a person is before I get to know them. How the hell did I come up with this way of thinking?

Before you get to know them or before you let them get to know you? The latter sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy to me :P

I've avoided my whole life, people, feelings and now I even seem to avoid myself, it's inability to trust that anyone could ever truly like or love me, .
Feelings have been avoided so that I don't have to feel painful emotion, unfortunately now I literally don't often feel at all, which is very depressing,

Both I guess, it I can't really know someone before 'getting to know them' unless I find out through others which is unlikely due to social phobia.

Another reason I avoid is because I'm afraid I will get into a situation I won't be able to get out of. Or that it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I avoid people because I'm afraid they will bother me when I need to be left alone. I'm afraid too that if I prefer not to be friends with them how do get rid of them. I kind of ashamed of this.

That's like you just pulled words right out of my head, in a way that it is much more understandable than how it was in my head!

I definitely have the same fear and discomfort!

I also feel the same. Contact with people involves a certain grade of commintment and I haven't got so much energy. On the other way, it request an ability to set bounderies. I fail in both.

Hmm, I just assume people will get bored with me very quickly and not want to be friends, so I don't really worry about getting rid of people.

Right! I don't think I have much to offer to anyone. I'm a very simple person and not very intelligent or funny so why bother.
All my life I felt this way. And this time is not a question of low or high self-steem, it's simply, reality.

Azul! I'm telling you you are intelligent and funny!

Break too! I try to learn from your writing style- you express yourself so well. You and Azul both speak two languages.... something that I am in awe of.

Two is nothing, I wish I could speak 9 languages like this guy!

Never is enough. This is the point.

Honestly I don't really know anymore. I guess to avoid anxiety. I am so used to avoiding that I don't really know why I do it anymore.

I avoid so I don't feel uncomfortable or anxious. I avoid so nobody figures out how much I suck (or think I do) and would prefer people to not know. I want to avoid humiliation at all costs as it sends me into a depression that lasts 2 weeks.

Me too, I am afraid of being humiliated.

I avoid bc I consider myself inferior to other people, different and I don't wanna bother them with my presence (nothing to contribute to others).
It's only after a time in therapy that I could feel more cofident and I feel more able to leave my shell and also when I see that the other person accepts me.