You know you're AvPD when...

I’m a man in my early 50s who only learned about AvPD earlier this year. It has been my lifelong companion. I also have ADD and some OCD, maybe a bit of Asperger’s as well. My wife and daughters love me and keep me from worrying too much about my own precious self.

Naturally I fear ridicule for posting a long list on a thread that’s no longer fresh! Thank you, everyone, for your honesty and insight. I pray we’ll all know relief from the murkiness and static of our own thoughts.

So. You know you’re AvPD when—

• You dread leaving any type of social gathering (even work) because you think the timing and the way you say goodbye will cause people to think you’re rude, brusque, strange, arrogant, or some combination of all these. So you stay until only a few other people are left in order to keep the perceived social awkwardness to a minimum.

• The type of conversation you feel most comfortable with (i.e., least prone to screwing up) is platitudes.

• When you’re in public, you spend most of your mental energy on metacognition—not on other people and their needs and wants, but on moment-by-moment, hypercritical self-assessment of how you’re performing.

• You tell yourself you’re getting pretty good at a task because you haven’t made a mistake in a while, which promptly causes you to lose your focus and make a mistake.

• You feel anxious and insecure when you review all the minor mistakes and omissions that you made in a social encounter. And if you make an actual social gaffe, you shower yourself with vicious verbal abuse that you’d never use on another person.

• You’re usually so far up inside your own head that it takes effort for you to think of people who aren’t physically present or to focus on how events affect people other than you.

• You envision sudden disasters happening around you—earthquakes, lightning strikes, explosions, wall collapses, etc.—but never in ways that help you mentally prepare for these events.

• You usually try to offer encouragement, but almost always resist receiving it.

• You can’t trust your perceptions of your own actions or reactions. All you know is that they’re substandard, not normal.

• You’re a perfectionist less (you hope) because of arrogance than because the prospect of messing up seems so agonizingly humiliating.

• You feel flattened when you reflect on your own habits, thoughts, behaviors, and failures.

• Having your motives impugned makes you want to disappear or die.

• You want your home to be a haven where you can do whatever you like because being out in public is so distressing to you.

• You procrastinate on or abandon DIY projects because you’re embarrassed at needing such elementary instruction to help you do something you should be able to do on your own but are convinced you can’t.

• You think whatever you’re doing at any particular moment is lame, mostly because it’s you doing it.

• You think potential friends’ lives are already full and they’d have no place for you anyway.

• You love the Van Morrison song “So Quiet In Here” because you ache to know that interior calm, free from the constant metacognition.

• You put off making important phone calls because you’re sure you’ll forget to ask the obvious, crucial question(s) and it’d be too embarrassing to call back to get the answers.

• You get so lost in distractions that you literally forget to do the top-priority things that you’re supposed to do, and you have no sensible answer to your boss’s/partner’s exasperated question, “How could you have forgotten that?”

• You think castigating yourself first for your faults should somehow exempt you from others’ criticism for those faults.

Épareuil wrote:So. You know you’re AvPD when—

Very comprehensive list there. I have AvPD and also might be on the spectrum. I'm gonna check out that Van Morrison song.

I can't talk on the phone.i have no logical explanation why it is so difficult.is this an avpd thing related?

sakura1 wrote:I can't talk on the phone.i have no logical explanation why it is so difficult.is this an avpd thing related?

There's too much information to try to guess. All the more possibilities of what they're trying to say. It may be pretty uncomfortable to have a real convo, but if you're me you're only looking at them through your peripheral vision 97% of the time anyway and that kinda gives you a way to monitor them but without the massive emotional information assault of direct eye contact. They may not be able to see you, but on the other hand, there's the added challenge of figuring out how best to convey what your'e trying to say without them seeing you.

^maybe this is not going to sound avoidant,but i prefer way more to face them than the phone feels way worse.i don't know why.face to face feels more comfortable than phone.
although i want to avoid often in person too

sakura1 wrote:^maybe this is not going to sound avoidant,but i prefer way more to face them than the phone feels way worse.i don't know why.face to face feels more comfortable than phone.
although i want to avoid often in person too

I kind of agree with you on this one.. maybe it's the lack of visual feedback that makes talking on the phone so unsettling.

i am afraid that i would alone because i do not want anyone too close.

i am afraid that i would be completely alone because i want to be alone and i do not want others but i do not want to be alone

it feels better being alone than being with most people.

sometimes talking to people feels like labor.

when you don't want to write or post anything because you think there is no point,plus others said it better

You eventually get made to go to the doctor for the check up you've been needing to get for years and when you get told your weight is becoming an issue you don't actually go to the gym or eat differently because you don't want people to judge you - you just hide from everyone so no one will be able to judge your eating habits or your weight. :/

I'm reading this thread and crying. I feel so sad for you all. I have just split from a lovely man. I knew he had severe anxiety and self-esteem issues. What I didn't know is he had AvPD. I think if the things I did that hurt him sometimes. Things that he must have taken to heart so desperately. I am not sad for us, but for him.

He has at times experienced most of the things I'm reading on here. I'm doing fine, but I'm sad that he goes through life so deeply troubled. So uncertain and anxious.

I don't know why I posted, maybe just to say I hope you can all find happiness, in even the smallest of things.And you aren't alone; you have each other here. Take care x