Lived Experience Forum

[wellwellwellnez]

.....Does anyone out there have A.V.P.D. (Avoidant Personality Disorder)? or maybe just know a thing or two about avoidant troubles. I'm not diagnosed, but I'm identifying and I'm currently in a tiny room instead of at best friends birthday party (because one single person that I don't trust might be there).

I reckon I've made a bunch of progress but still got a ways to go. Been puttin' myself out there till it hurts, just to bit by bit reclaim my lost emotional development. I'd better have A.V.P.D. Otherwise I've been throwing myself in front of everyone's penetrating judgement for no reason. That would crush me. I would dissapear for a month of embarrassment if it turned out I didn't have avoidant issues.

So now I'm at a "so now what" stage. There's not a heck of a lot of research. Apparently though, we're EVERYWHERE!

[Corny]

I don't suffer from a PD @wellwellwellnez but I can relate to chronic social anxiety and feel the same 'penetrating judgment'. I was on social media for a while, there were lots of reasons I don't want any accounts, but one of the reasons was reading people's opinions of people with mental illness. It was having a negative impact on my health and that's when I realised I had to delete it all. It's not worth it. It says its 'social' media, but I found in the end it was not social at all. Quite the opposite. 

Let's face it mate people do judge us. And its probably never really going to change. You are doing better than me, pushing through your symptoms and trying to re-wire your brain from the inside all by yourself. 

I used to get very hung up on diagnoses, it made me scared and anxious about my future. How low could I fall. I think that once you have passed that line from the worried well to functionally impaired due to your mental illness your perspective changes. After all my hospitalisations I realised it doesn't matter what the diagnosis is; what matters is 1. What are the treatments available, and 2. will they work at all. 

There were so many treatment resistant patients in hospital, it was very upsetting. It was there I realised that it is a lottery, and it is the treatment I need to focus on. If I focus on treatment I will focus on taking action, and that's when changes happen.

I wish you all the best on your journey and try to be kind to yourself, 

Corny 

[wellwellwellnez]

Yeah. Coping vs dealing. Totally. The science is in.

dealing = improvement

coping = more coping (hopefully)

One keeps you above water but the other one gets you closer to some nice dry land (and with a bit of luck maybe less to "cope" with and more to actually enjoy.)

I want to thank you for the validation. I feel like I've been circling this thing for long while now (and only recently realised that it was always in my blind spot). I was defeating my fears for song I underestimated how much my fears were more afraid of me. I had to quickly dump my ammunition and arm the love canon. Probably the right canon to use if you intend on firing at yourself.

It is weird how diagnosis leads to stigma's and defence mechanisms. They're not supposed to. But maybe that's just an inherant problem with labels in general.

[wellwellwellnez]

You're making me realize that to truly understand avoidant attachement I have to also understand anxious attachment. I've got scenarios like the ones you described. Got some patterns to let go of and some relationship wounds to heal. And I do want to let people in. That was always the plan. It still is. It has to be. Even if that does mean people seeing the terrible mess I made in here.

It also occurs, from a statistical point of view, that anxious attachment is more common in females and while avoidant attachment affects males and females about equally. That's scary information no matter where you sit on either spectrum. Actually means we got heal the disorders and the socio-political consequences of those disorders. Good thing we're all working on our anxiety.

[Corny]

We all go through it @wellwellwellnez , those stages where we are obsessed with the labels and the diagnosis. It can loop around and around for months, if not years. And that is because a diagnosis does not only have personal consequences, but it has social consequences too. We want to be a part of the group, none of us wants to be different, we are all human. 

I think we delude ourselves that we are focused on the personal consequences or our diagnosis, when in reality, we are all probably more worried about the social consequences. 

None of us want to be a social pariah, and yet we have to some how move through the world, when we are clearly not functioning very well because our symptoms are so debilitating.

My social anxiety is  made worse by the fact that I know how the social world works. I am not stupid. I am on the NDIS for my mental illness and my support worker is trying to help me move past it, in small steps, but I just can't! Whenever we are placed in a new situation with strangers, the first questions that everyone asks is:

What do you do?

Me: I do nothing.

Sexy huh.

.......I am not the BeyondBlue type of mentally ill, I come from a lineage of the Callan Park (a NSW reference, dunno what State ya' are in mate) mentally ill......

Corny