i don't know what to do anymore

i recently discovered AVPD when i was sitting in my social relationships class and the professor started talking about avoidant personality types in relationships, and nearly everything he said applied to me. most days i feel like i'm going to explode. i have so many things to say to people and so many things i want to get out there, but i can't bring myself to say it. it's getting so bad now that i can't even answer the phone when someone calls. my therapist has been trying to contact me and i just don't pick up the phone, even though i want to and i know i should. i'm constantly fantasizing about conversations i should have with people or situations i want to be in. whenever i talk to anyone i'm obsessive about what i say. if i make a joke and no one laughs i beat myself up about it literally for hours and hours after it happens. if someone criticizes me for anything, even if it's something completely trivial, i can't let it go. i obsess about what i should have said and what i should change so the next time i make sure they laugh. i change the things i say based on who i'm hanging out with or who i'm around, so i can make sure that whoever i'm with likes me. my roommate is concerned about me and had a long talk with me the other night (and by long talk i mean she was talking for an hour and i was quietly sitting on my bed saying nothing). she told me she's there to talk and that she's noticed a whole bunch of things about me that have gotten really bad lately, but she doesn't know how to help me or what to do. i couldn't even respond. all i could say was that i don't know what's wrong with me and i don't like being this way but i can't help it. i was always kind of shy and i never really had a lot of friends, but things didn't get really bad until my dad was arrested when i was 15 for selling child pornography. i had no idea this was going on, and a whole bunch of other things about him came out at the same time. my whole world pretty much crumbled. i started therapy then but there was only so much i could do at the time, and my therapist told me that there were a lot of problems i would have that she just couldn't help me with because they wouldn't effect me until i had more life experience (like problems with relationship intimacy and things like that). i can't get close to anybody; i can't even tell my best friend that i'm sad. i feel like i'm trapped inside myself, it's horrible. i despise everything about myself, and i don't understand why anyone would ever want to be around me. i have no idea why my best friend hangs in there, i don't feel like i have anything to contribute to her life. when i date someone i'm certain it's only because they want sex, and it has nothing to do with who i am as a person (after all, how can it when i don't let anyone in at all?). i want to be better and i want to be able to talk to people and tell people things. i want to talk about what happened with my dad and how it's affecting me now, but i can't. i have no idea what i should do. how do you ask for help when you can't bring yourself to do it?

Can you write it down?

Well welcome aboard the ship of LOST SOULS

Cheer up and don't worry about the way you appear to other people, they have no saying on who you are and you don't have to react in specific way in front of them.

shubby wrote:How do you ask for help when you can't bring yourself to do it?

Here's a short story of mine

I had this very problem just a couple of months ago. I badly and urgently needed to ask out for help for some homework, I was alone in the study room the only other person taking that class around was a total stranger studying in the room next door.

And so I went there naively to ask for help, I was just about to get into eye range when...

STOP!!! What do you think you are doing?
I'm going to ask for help, there's no way I can do this on my own on time.
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?
Don't be foolish I'm just going to ask for help. What could possibly go wrong that scares you so much?
WOULD YOU JUMP OFF A CLIFF?
No
Then DON'T DO IT YOU BLOODY IDIOT, your going to expose yourself to world and let them see just how weird, clumsy and stupid you really are.
OH, I'm tired of your Bull $hit! Do you truly want to have me fail this class and become a vagabond, MOVE DAMMIT!
NO

And so I was stuck there frozen in time, unable to go through this invisible barrier. I went back and forth trying to move past it, but every time visions of the future will come up to literally scare me to death and so I just froze up again.

STOP IT! we're running out of time.
I'm afraid I cannot let you do that.

And that's about at that point where I decided to hurt myself until he would let me through. I pinched myself a couple of times and then started to slowly but painfully scratch my left arm. It was only later that I would realize that I had scratched myself to blood.

LET ME THROUGH, or do you want more of this?

Then enough fear went away for me to get through and ask for help. it turned out he didn't know anything, but I was able to find someone else who did without having to tear off my left arm this time. That was the first time I initiated contact with a total stranger of my age in over 10 years if not more, you can only imagine just how impossible it was to my mind for me to do something like that.

Now, I wouldn't go as far as to say that you should hurt yourself to get around your fears, but just know that there's a whole world of possibilities of things you can do to get yourself to do things you think you would never do,

Who cares what's going to happen, it cannot be possibly worst than doing nothing.

"If you do nothing, then nothing will change"

Great quote, but I still do nothing. Interesting story LS - I deliver pizza with a schitzo kid who has scars all over his left arm from similar self-inflicted wounds. I thought he had leprosy when I first met him.

Shubby - writing down stuff is critically important. Like you did here. Saying things out loud is so incredibly hard; even though i've told my story out loud to myself, in my room a BILLION times to practice actually telling it to someone without crumpling up and existentially dying, I still can't tell anyone in person. After posting on these forums last week though, I summoned up the courage to text-message my shrink the gist of my problems. I meet with her in 45 minutes.

As far as dating - yeah, guys want to have sex. But so do girls... WAY MORE than guys. I would never, and I know I don't speak for the majority of our gender, but I do speak for me, have sex with a girl I was uninterested in.

First impressions are like interviews. I was gonna say first dates, but who the hell am I kidding? I've never been on a real date. As a rule, you're the girl, you don't have to do anything. You just decide if you like what you see.