The Loneliness of AvPD

I'm not quite sure how to stop thinking like this, or if perhaps most people think like this and it's just we worry about it more.

I don't think "waiting for the other shoe to drop" is that much of a problem anyway, except that it can make you feel unnecessarily miserable to always be expecting the worst.

I worry quite a bit that he doesn't really want to hang around someone so much older

May I remind you that a few posts up in this thread you made it clear that he was making an effort to get you to commit to another get together.

I really do have sort of a phobia with phone calls.

Once again, I'm the same. I can only really make a call when someone is expecting me to. When I have to make an unannounced call, I'm always afraid I'm imposing, so I prefer to avoid it.

With a lot of the advice I've handed out here I tell myself "Yeah, sure, now YOU try doing that!".

Gentleman Geek wrote:With a lot of the advice I've handed out here I tell myself "Yeah, sure, now YOU try doing that!".

Haha... I do that too. Thanks again, GG.

Hello,

I have been following this thread for a while. There is some great advice here. But I have to admit that some of the talk about "the loneliness of an AvP" can be quite discouraging.

Now that we are young, maybe we are coping with the loneliness in positive ways. I mean there are always plenty of things a person can do even when he or she is lonely or alone.

But here is my fear: What happens when an AvP reaches old age? What if an AvP gets sick and needs someone's support? What if it is both old age and sickness? In this case there has got to be someone there for them. Where will this person come from? How is possible when all we AvP's have done is convey to people that we want to be alone!!

Anyone else have opinions on this?

bigdeal_1 wrote:But here is my fear: What happens when an AvP reaches old age?

Isn't it supposed to become easier as we get older at some point? Or is that only the case for "normal" shyness and/or social anxiety?

It has been my impression that older people (let's say beyond middle age) are worried less about the opinion others hold of them than younger people. So maybe socially inhibited people will be able to form a social support system at a much later age than most others.
Then again, even if that's true, AvPDers might be an exception.

So basically, I don't know

bigdeal_1 wrote:Hello,

I have been following this thread for a while. There is some great advice here. But I have to admit that some of the talk about "the loneliness of an AvP" can be quite discouraging.

Well... it wasn't my intention to discourage anyone, but I am sure you know that. Being avoidant is lonely; at least, it is for me anyway. That's why I need to stay diligently on the course towards beating this thing. For instance, I need to continue to accept invitations to socialize, especially when my avoidance-voice says "They don't really want you to hang out with them, they're just being nice."

I think the message I want to send out here is that remaining avoidant in behaviour will lead us down a lonely path. But I don't believe it's an unavoidable sentence (lol, hope my choice of words doesn't confuse things). It is our choice: remain avoidant or seek help and work hard at changing out beliefs and behaviours. We (I) need to be willing to risk rejection and to feel discomfort.

But here is my fear: What happens when an AvP reaches old age? What if an AvP gets sick and needs someone's support? What if it is both old age and sickness? In this case there has got to be someone there for them. Where will this person come from? How is possible when all we AvP's have done is convey to people that we want to be alone!!

Anyone else have opinions on this?

I think that those of us with AvPD, if we do not see help and work hard at changing their behaviours and irrational beliefs, we will get worse with age. This need not be discouraging, but it better be a wake-up call for us to be vigilant and do anything possible to get better.

I hate to sound dismal. I wish there was a magic wand I could wave and the AvPD would disappear. But it doesn't seem to work that way. It takes hard work to get healthy.

On another note, I was thinking about you guys this afternoon (when I was out with friends, of all things! ), and I realized how glad I am to have you guys to talk to about this stuff.

Well, I AM the older person you talk of and I can tell you in my experience it does not go away on its own. You just get used to it. For example, I used to have panic attacks and those, I have learned how to manage, but I still have a deep need to be in isolation. Say, if I force myself to go to a party just to not be rude, it takes me about 2 days of "aloneness" to recuperate from that experience. Two days of telling myself things like, "Why did you say that? That was stupid," and "That person interrupted you and it's a good thing because what you had to say was stupid anyway." I am currently on the "warpath" to find an answer to all this and have enlisted the help of a new psychiatrist. One medication that seems to help more than the million that I have tried is one called Provigil. At least it is helping me to handle things better until I can find an answer to this life-long painful state of affairs. Feeling as if I look human, and behave human, and am successful on human terms, but that I completely don't belong here and am on the outside looking in. Can't connect with people in a healthy way. My greatest desire is to connect with people but I can't seem to get it right and I try so darn hard. Have tried all my life. The only reason I like to be alone is because it is less painful than trying to not be alone and living with the pain of how I couldn't get it right. Well, I think we all need to fight, no matter what age, to find an answer to this. There has got to be an answer. I told my new doctor yesterday that I am really counting on him to get to the bottom of this. I'm putting all my eggs in one basket this time. Life is too short to live it wondering why you're not part of it and spending fruitless years knocking from the outside trying to get in....living a facade and keeping up a front to not "shock" people of your true self. It takes so much energy to do that. I feel so drained by the end of a day from trying to figure all this out that I just live to come home and rest. We need to help each other.

I've read this thread with interest and am replying to it as someone at the other end: someone rejected as a friend by someone who seems to have AvPD. Frankly, I've been taking it pretty hard for a lot of reasons. One of which is that after ruminating on it for months, I still can't figure out exactly what went wrong. I have some of the pieces in place, but the puzzle remains largely unfinished.

I have issues of my own, the most relevant one being that I sometimes don't seem to know when to give up. My other friends told me to write this one off a very long time ago. However, I valued the friendship *very* highly and if there is a good chance of repairing it, I'd take steps to do that (after some time has past). On the other hand, I have my own reasons for not being up to a repeat of this bruising so if this is hopeless I need to move on.

My general question to people with AvPD is this: do you consider repairing lost friendships? I get the very strong sense from this former friend that this is just a "done deal."

I'll include more details if it seems this question generates interest. Like most relationships, it's complicated and I was not without my own flaws.

Well, I can only tell youabout a recent relationship ending that happened to me. He was my only close friend for many years completely platonic. While he was MY only close friend, he had many other friends and a lively social life. I just had a difficult time knowing that he had tons of other friends. It reminded me of how I could not be social like he was and made me feel inferior. I just know that I can't live in his world and so rather than be upset, I just let it all go. I know that sounds cold, but it ended up being more painful to be friends with him than to just detach.

rosewood5 wrote:Well, I AM the older person you talk of and I can tell you in my experience it does not go away on its own.

Well, I guess it was too good a notion to be true.

I tend to overanalyze and berate most of what little I've managed to say spontaneously, too. Though not to the degree of fretting about it for days.

Is there anything wrong with your true self (other than AvPD) that requires you to put up a facade? If AvPD's the only issue, then you should try to be open about it sometime. I recently made some friends through the internet by doing just that.

I hope you can still manage to gain some headway.

lotis678 wrote:do you consider repairing lost friendships?

The friendships I've lost (if you can even call them that) were all lost many years ago, so I think it's too late to salvage them.
What I have noticed in aforementioned new friendships is the feeling expressed by rosewood5, that those friends all have a lot of other friends and that I'm just one of many. So I think the main danger to friendships with Avoidants is that we are prone to think we're not that important to our friends.
So if you're not absolutely sure that your former friend knows that you appreciate her/him and that you'd like the friendship to continue, my advice would be to make that as clear as possible. If you think it's already crystal clear, do it anyway the next time you try to reconnect, because we also tend to miss very obvious clues that there is a genuine bond.
If that doesn't work, I can't understand what went wrong either. I for one would not turn off a friend who is gracious enough to be interested in me.

I want to thank rosewood5 and Gentleman Geek for their posts. I've already got some insight from those and the earlier messages on this thread. I've got some thoughts (really more questions), but I'm going to postpone sending them so that I don't bias the discussion.

Meanwhile, I hope some other readers post a reply.

Thanks again.