The Essential Guide to Overcoming Avoidant Personality Disorder

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Sufferers from avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) fear forming and maintaining relationships because of ongoing, engaging, deep, pervasive, multilayered interpersonal anxiety. This anxiety causes them to have difficulty meeting, connecting with, getting close to, and staying involved with other people. According to Oldham and Morris, the disorder occurs in fully “10 percent of patients of outpatient mental health clinics,” 1 whereas Dalrymple and Zimmerman have written that “social anxiety disorder (SAD) [including AvPD] is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United States with a lifetime prevalence rate of 12.1%.”2

I believe that even these disquieting statistics underestimate the extent of the problem, with this disorder far more widespread than most patients believe and clinicians acknowledge. This is because avoidants themselves overlook AvPD because they don’t know it exists, or they downplay AvPD because they believe that having social anxiety is somehow shameful. And their therapists, equally misinformed about, or reluctant to recognize, the disorder, dismiss their suffering as normal shyness, reticence, unfriendliness, cliquishness, or as just part of growing up; or, spotting the disorder, they tell their patients that the problem is insignificant or condone it as acceptable, justified, and even romantic. They then offer reassurances that all is well and say that no therapy is necessary, or if it is necessary, it should be for something else entirely.

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