The way your family responds to your emotional needs causes you to change the way you deal with your emotions. There are two common ways you can do this – turn your emotions down (avoidance) or turn your emotions up (preoccupation).
If you’re rejected by your parents when you have emotions like sadness (e.g “suck it up”), you learn to suppress those feelings in order to be accepted. Turning feelings down like this is called “avoidant attachment” because avoiding your feelings helps you be closer to (attach to) your parents.
Sometimes turning your feelings down isn’t enough to resolve relationship issues with your parents. If you grew up with neglect and/or abuse, you might be guarded, withdrawn, self-sufficient, and anxious around people in addition to turning your feelings down.
With this in mind, we don’t view Avoidant Personality Disorder as “something wrong”. We view AVPD as a specific collection of changes a person made to adapt to their environment. This set of changes leads to the symptoms of AVPD.
In your original family environment, those changes made sense and were helpful. You faced challenges that were not appropriate for your level of development, but you figured out a way to cope. Your ability to do this means you’re resilient and adaptable.
In a new environment, around new people who don’t behave in the same way as your family, those changes aren’t as helpful anymore. As an adult, you may recognize that the ways you cope have downsides you don’t like.
Maybe distance from people historically prevented a critical parent from making you feel bad, but now it means you’re lonely and miss out on fun experiences or professional opportunities.
Maybe asking your parents for things like sports, lessons, help with homework, care when you’re hurt, or money to go out with your friends lead to ridicule or disappointment, and being independent from a young age prevented those negative experiences. As an adult, being unable to ask others for help means you might feel overwhelmed, alone, or frustrated with the “neediness” or “laziness” of others.
Luckily, humans don’t ever stop being adaptable. If you recognize these traits in yourself or if you’ve received a clinical diagnosis and you’re ready for change, check out our team in the section below to find the right therapist for you.
