Avoidant Personality Disorder and Low Self-Esteem

"in anxiety the dominant theme is danger,and that the person with avoidant personality simply minimizes social interactions in order to protect himself or herself from the danger of developing low self-esteem"(Martin Kantor,The essential guide to overcoming avoidant personality disorder,pg.179.

I am agree with above mentioned position.Please kindly give your opinion.Thank You.

TYK wrote:"in anxiety the dominant theme is danger,and that the person with avoidant personality simply minimizes social interactions in order to protect himself or herself from the danger of developing low self-esteem"(Martin Kantor,The essential guide to overcoming avoidant personality disorder,pg.179.

I am agree with above mentioned position.Please kindly give your opinion.Thank You.

Yep, pretty much. That's the first time I've seen it put in that particular order though. I've seen it phrased as: "avoidants HAVE low self esteem, and they minimize social interactions to protect self from danger of REJECTION"

Interesting twist though...as I do feel a lower self esteem when I interact socially...

It all twists and turns inwardly on itself though...some sort of horrible endless feedback loop...

Kantor is messed up. He's very "blame the victim," probably because his own daughter is avoidant and doesn't want to take responsibility for the abuse that made her that way.

There is nothing more frustrating to me than suggesting that avoidant people have a choice. Also, check the guidelines, you have to have low self-esteem FIRST, and there's nothing we can do to avoid having low self-esteem. If you have high self-esteem, you are not avoidant.

Self esteem is a buzzword and psychology is a Babel Tower.

inverse wrote:Kantor is messed up.

inverse wrote: probably because his own daughter is avoidant

Yeah, doesn't he talk about her in his book?
Not only is that unethical, but what kinda dad uses his daughter as a case example, without disguising her identity???

After reading this the situation of: "Why don't you get involved with people? After all what's the worst that can happen?" comes to mind. Maybe in people who just have low-self esteem and nothing more, this may be relevant. But in my own case (and I guess others as well) rejection or disapproval actually hurts my self-esteem and makes me withdraw more. So there's actually a legit reason (among many) why I avoid social contact. I also agree with what Kantor wrote.

oh i agree and disagree. I developed low self-esteem a long time ago. When I'm alone though it's irrelevant. I don't think about it in isolation. Put me in a room other people however and suddenly my mind is racing with paranoid thoughts that i'm inferior and other people will notice. I'm not as funny as him or intelligent as her, etc. That sort of thing. I want to be around people but as soon as i am those thoughts come and I go.

"in anxiety the dominant theme is danger,and that the person with avoidant personality simply minimizes social interactions in order to protect himself or herself from the danger of developing low self-esteem"(Martin Kantor,The essential guide to overcoming avoidant personality disorder,pg.179.

While I do agree that anxiety is the real issue, and that Anxiety Avoidance Disorder would better reflect this problem, I am not, however, convinced that self-esteem is the underlying issue here. I believe it is more in tune with the concept of schemas or early childhood traumas that has caused the individual to retreat from the world. It is an incorrect or biased view of the world precisely because the view has been ripped out of its context and generalized across the entire humanity.

From this perspective, self-esteem is only the end-product of the real issue, the self-perpetuation of a child's distorted and unhelpful view of the world. Once beneficial and required, now ineffective and strongly damaging.

So from Dr Kantor's point of view, we need to tackle self-esteem, from my point of view, we need to tackle why the person is still holding onto a child's distorted view of the world and how they can challenge these views in order to overcome their irrational (phobic) fear of others.

Maybe because Kantor has badly worded that paragraph, or maybe because I'm misunderstanding it, but it sounds like he's saying that we're Avoidant to protect from developing low self esteem.

I think we already have low self esteem due to our early experiences. Through those experiences we have developed a pattern of thinking, feeling, relating to the world and behaving.

Whilst through therapy, or whatever, we can learn new behaviours, I do not believe you can change how you think and feel.

How we are programmed and our self esteem also perpetuate the cycle.

The feeling I get from that one paragraph is that we simply have to stop avoiding and everything will be perfect. There are many times where I force myself NOT to avoid, but it doesn't stop my lack of self esteem or my paranoid negative thoughts. Afterwards, I always feel I should have avoided in the first place

snookiebookie wrote:Maybe because Kantor has badly worded that paragraph, or maybe because I'm misunderstanding it, but it sounds like he's saying that we're Avoidant to protect from developing low self esteem.

That is exactly what he is saying. The guy basically made stuff up as he went along.