How to live with someone that has Avpd - Understanding - Part 2
This is part 2 of my blog on how to live with someone that has Avoidant Personality Disorder (aka Avpd, Avoidant, or Antisocial Personality Disorder).
In the last article, we talked about why people that have, or may have Avpd, don't ask for help or refuse the accept it.
The last category that we touched on were those that know they have Avpd, suspect they have it, or know they have a related condition, and want help.
It is these that we will focus on here, but before I get to that, I need to make sure you understand how bad this disorder is and why your loved one is having such a hard time with it.
To the extent you understand Avpd, is to the extent that you will find compassion for your loved one and be able to help them.
Avpd is a container like the ones that you put left over food into after dinner. Open up the container and inside you will find a smorgasbord of just about every phobia, and mental issue known to man.
- Fear of going outside
- Fear of People
- Fear of Authority
- Fear of, and inability to be intimate
- Severe Depression
- Severe Social Anxiety
- Hyper sensitivity to Criticism
- Fear of Rejection
- Severe Anxiety Attacks
- Additions to Smoking, Substances both legal and illegal like Alcohol and Drugs, Porn, Video Games, etc,
The Avoidant can also seem like they have multiple personalities, struggle with eating disorders, have symptoms similar to schizophrenia, struggle with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and even have symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
Any one of these conditions by themselves is crippling and is very difficult to overcome. Pile all these conditions into this container and you will get an idea why Avpd is so complicated, so paralyzing, and why its so difficult to find healing from.
Many that have Avpd become so parallelized by all these conditions that they wind up committing suicide, in jail, or they take out their anger on others. Now I don't mean to scare you, but it is important that you understand the severity of what they are trying to deal with.
In the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, the computer called "Hal" is in complete control of a space ship. The computer is artificially intelligent. Hal was given the instructions to be incapable of not being 100% truthful.
Then in secret, Hal was given another set of instructions. He was told the true nature of the mission and to not divulge this information to the crew of the ship. So in other words, Hal was instructed to be deceitful and to lie.
Hal was not able to reconcile the 2 sets of instructions because they were completely opposite of each other. The result was that Hal became paranoid and developed schizophrenia and killed the crew,
This is very similar to what the one with Avpd is going through on a daily basis,
- They desperately want friends, but they cannot stand people because they fear being rejected
- They desperately want to go outside and be part of the world around them but cannot because of fear or being rejected
- They desperately want intimacy but cannot because of the fear of failure
- They desperately want to be free of their addictions, but cannot because this is the only safe place where they feel good
So they have one set of instructions that is telling them to have friends, and love people, but another set of instructions that is telling them to stay away from people and they can only be safe when alone.
These opposing sets of instructions will sooner or later cause them to loose touch with reality and they might even go completely off the deep end and hurt themselves or others.
Now that you understand a little more about Avpd, we will go into more about what you can do to help them. I will cover this in Part 3