I'm Bisexual BECAUSE of AVPD!?

Hey guys, so I am bisexual and a lot of this adds up for me. It blew my mind. Any thoughts? (From Martin Kantor's "Distancing")

"AVOIDANT PERSONALITY DISORDER AND BISEXUALITY
Bisexual avoidants behave homosexually to avoid heterosexuality, and the other way around. They both deal with the fear of rejection by one sex by finding solace with the other, and go to one sex to reject the other. Of course, the fear of rejection/need to reject returns with the new partner, and the cycle begins again. (Some choose an alternative to cycling: they have one or more lovers simultaneously, but in different ports.) The following is a case history of a bisexual avoidant man:

A professionally successful and wealthy man simultaneously “married” a woman of a different religion and “married” a man of a different race—spiritually, if not legally, compounding bisexuality with bigamy. A dream that he had in the beginning of therapy illustrated his conflict between homosexuality and heterosexuality. In the dream he was in a heterosexual singles group house in a well-known summer resort. But he was bored with the dull, pedestrian, straight people there, and desperately longed for his homosexual soirees where he could be himself again, dressed in expensive stylish clothes, his sense of self-worth increasing in direct proportion to their elegance, admired not for such of his personal qualities as kindness and love, but for his clever opening and exit lines and the sophisticated badinage in between. He missed his male lover and feared he would never see him again. He made a phone call to this lover, saying, “Come rescue me from all this.” Then he dreamt he had gotten together with this lover, then had broken up with him and gone back to his wife. He thought, in the dream, “If there is any further question about the wisdom of giving up my lover for my wife, read the obituaries and see that some of the world’s most successful homosexuals seem to have died alone.” He next saw himself applying, with his wife, for membership in a straight health club. But no one was there to take his application, and he didn’t really want to apply because the club was duller and more boring than the gay health club around the corner. But then he saw the image of the gay health club, merged into another image, one previously seen on television, of people swimming in a pool in a retirement community, which he interpreted (while still dreaming) as referring to “growing old gay with- out children.” As he saw it, his shifting sexual preferences were due to fears that could be traced to the following developmental events. First, there was humiliation by peers. As a child he was at first heterosexually oriented. But, as he recalled, “I threw a baseball underhanded, my friends humiliated and abandoned me, and my self-esteem fell.” As an adult, bisexuality protected him from rejection and consequent loss of self-esteem by allowing him to surround himself with “two different kinds of people in case one kind humiliated me.” Next there was overattachment to and identification with his mother. He believed his homosexual fantasies took strength from his attachment, really overattachment, to his mother. From what was the result of this overattachment or his identification with her, he first acted toward male companions in a way that re- produced his mother’s seductive behavior toward him, then fled from homosexual relationships because he felt too much like a woman. He also firmly believed that his mother’s unwelcome infantilizing and engulfing him turned him away from all women. In addition he felt that he turned from women because his mother and her friends squelched his earliest romantic interests and experiments in infantile heterosexuality by saying, “It’s silly, and shameful, to be interested in girls at your tender age.” As he also believed, he reacted to his wife as if she were his mother. Every time his wife was unpleasant to him she “sent him to men” because she reminded him of his hostile mother, while every time she was warm/seductive toward him she “sent him to men” because she aroused an oedipal/incestuous anxiety due to “my mother-fixation.” Finally there was disrespect for his father. He felt that a damper on his heterosexuality was his inability to identify with/a need to counteridentify with a father whose appearance he disliked and whose behavior he believed shameful on ac- count of a number of what he considered to be revolting personal habits. He believed the resultant counteridentification with this “slobbish” father accounted for his fetishistic attraction to clean, well-turned-out men, men who were Adonis- like, that is, as unlike his father as possible. Yet a continuing love for his father was to account for his paradoxical, Pygmalion-like, never-ending search for an imperfect man whom he could make over into an ideal father. When pursuing the perfect Adonis-like man he was involved with such trappings of sophisticated life as theatre and fine restaurants—when the goal of life became not the solid, monogamous, reciprocal relationship but the hard table in the trendy eatery and being seen in all the right places by all the right people. Soon he gave that up as being superficial in the extreme. Then he began pursuing the imperfect man to make over. But now he felt uncomfortable being associated with people from a lower socioeconomic class and their relatives, people whom he condemned as “low rent” and whom, after an initial honeymoon (when he thoroughly enjoyed their refreshing crudity), he began to humiliate for their pedestrian attitudes and low-life behaviors. Finally, with supreme gall, after driving them away, he announced, when they left, that they had missed a tremendous opportunity to participate in a joint endeavor with him to “get them out of their personal ghetto.”
Throughout, he rejected overtures from all suitable people, men and women, plain, simple lovers who were really interested in him. Referring to their need to settle down and set up housekeeping, he criticized them for demanding that he “walk out of New York Magazine and into Working Woman.” Indeed, whenever a suitable person of either sex approached, he felt mysteriously drawn elsewhere, and began to dissociate and fugue, not only in fantasy, but in reality as well. Once, for example, after moving from New York to San Francisco to get away from a woman to be with a special man, he suddenly returned to New York and to the woman on a flimsy pretext—really because the man in San Francisco suggested they get an apartment together and settle down for life. As he concluded, “I use my bisexuality to serve two masters so that I never have to call one place home.”"

I don't know if it caused your bisexuality but at least the text you quoted states quite clearly, that the AvPD person uses the bisexuality for something and not that AvPD caused bisexuality (see first or last sentence). In the middle part it's not formulated that clearly though.

So you might have already been bisexual and that functions as a sort of self-defense mechanism for you. Or your brain came up with the idea to be bisexual to protect you and cope with AvPD more easily. But if that was the case, you would, deep down, probably still know which gender you really like.

I think OCD would be most likely to force a wrong sexuality on you.

First of all, I didn't read the entire thing. Kantor's work has been called into question by a lot of knowledgeable people, so I wouldn't take it as gospel. Having said that, I do think being avpd can lead a person to search for certain needs to be met by the same sex. It eliminates, somewhat, the fear of rejection. Or it did for me. I've never been attracted to men (ok, some of those speedo models are amazing) and always had a healthy attraction to females, and still do. But I've always sort of had bi "thoughts". I think "bi thoughts" are really normal (look at the Kinsey scale). As a male, I never felt quite adequate and together enough for women. Yet I have the same human need as everyone to please someone sexually. So, and this was years ago, I started meeting anonymous men and doing sexual favors for them. I was always drinking when I did this, I don't think I could've done it sober. The problem for me was I felt just as empty emotionally the day after. The stupid factor was I'd let complete strangers into my home. I'm not saying that you're doing anything similar, I'm just relaying info about the topic. So, yes...I think avpd had a lot to do with my period of experimentation. On the other hand, you could just be bi and also have avpd and they could be totally unrelated.

AvPD turned me into a pornosexual.

That whole thesis sounds wrong to me. Mostly because I strongly believe that peoples' sexual preference are built in and not created.

I don't think my avoidant traits are the sole cause of my bisexuality, but I do believe they have helped nudge me in that direction and I'm not sure if my bisexual inclinations would ever have surfaced otherwise. Basically I can relate a lot to jackbolin's post (though in my case it goes a bit beyond drunken experimentation).

When I look for a partner I am primarily looking for a close, trustworthy friend. Someone I can feel completely comfortable around so I don't have to constantly worry about rejection for being inadequate or doing something "wrong". It's almost impossible for me to feel that way with women, which I think is closely tied to my complete lack of success with girls as a teenager. I was nerdy and awkward in high school, got turned down by a girl I had a major crush on and came to associate girls with strong feelings of rejection, inadequacy and shame. These feelings have stayed with me and often surface when the adult me interacts with women. I do struggle with many of the same feelings around men as well, but they tend to be a bit less extreme and it's much easier to find men that I feel somewhat comfortable around.

My first and only relationship so far was with a man, and it started out as a friendship centered around mutual interests. The relationship was a short-lived but great experience, and I came out of it knowing that I can definitely feel physically attracted to men as well, provided they're at least somewhat effeminate in appearance and behavior.

skyflyz wrote:That whole thesis sounds wrong to me. Mostly because I strongly believe that peoples' sexual preference are built in and not created.

There was a time i thought i was bi because of my avoidance. Because girls emotionally trigger me less in long term .
but now i am sure i am straight . especially reading about pds makes it clear.
If i would ever be lesbian mine would be created.i can feel it lol.The built in is straight.