Psychotherapy/cognitive behavior techniques?

Has anyone every sought treatment for their avoidant personality disorder? What do they mean by cognitive behavior and what are some examples?

I've had quite a lot of therapy. With CBT, first you look at the thought patterns, then you break them apart to figure out what is real and what is imagined or assumed. Then you do something in your life to confront those fears and get an actual outcome.

For example, I think I'm worthless and a burden, but I do a pretty good job at work. Major dissonance there. So my "homework" (I had 2 or 3 months to do this, by the way) was to ask my boss for a raise. I never quite got there, but I did ask for a performance review, and I've since had 2 raises.

Because I have AVPD I would never have done that. Are you kidding? Asked to be judged? God, what might they come up with - talk about walking into the lion pit. I never would have done it without therapy.

Yes, I went to therapy, but not specifically for AvPD. I was pretty sure that I had it, but my therapist told me that it didn't matter what it was called, she wanted to deal with my avoidance of my feelings and to get me reconnected with my emotions. You see, avoidance is a self-defense mechanism in which we protect ourselves by shutting down our emotions. While this serves us well in childhood due to traumatic events or emotional neglect (lack or parental nurturing is an example), it also cripples us in adulthood as we are not emotionally developed enough. The simple and best solution is the one my therapist helped me with. But many avoidants are too afraid of going back to the root cause of their avoidance and they just treat the symptoms. This may help the avoidant somewhat, but this is the equivalent of putting a bandage on a compound fracture when what you really need is surgery with a metal plate and screws. 

So can I ask what sorts of solutions your therapist provided you with? I want so get therapy, but I want to go to someone good. I want to go to someone who knows what they'er talking about and it seems like many don't even consider avoidant personality as an illness by itself or a disorder, but more of a symptom of another disorder, for exampke Social anxiety disorder or OCD.

I will gladly share everything that my therapist helped me with. But I believe that you should change your mindset before you actually go to therapy. Your attitude about therapists in general is very negative and you are setting yourself up for failure before you even begin, a self-sabotage that you will likely blame later on your therapist being no good. 

You should really first decide whether you would feel more comfortable opening up to a man or woman therapist. Once you've decided, look at reviews of therapists in your area, I'm sure there are plenty of online reviews you can find. Only look at the sex of the therapist that you prefer and go to one with great reviews. Tell yourself that this person is a very good therapist before you even see them, there are many great therapists out there, trust the reviews and believe that they can do the same for you. 

I believe that you have some negative false beliefs embedded in your subconscious, these can be reprogrammed. Your belief that everyone is the same and everyone will judge you (other posts of yours) told me this. Also, as I suspect you already know, yes your pickiness regarding men is actually your avoidance to vulnerability. You find fatal flaws with everyone you could potentially date so that you don't have to connect with anyone, and you justify this in your mind that there just isn't anyone out there for you, a common self-defense mechanism for avoidants.

I will repost later today with what I did in therapy, I just have to do something right now.

You can also feel free to pm(private message) me anytime you like.

The treatment that helped me overcome my avoidance to vulnerability was very straightforward. 

I would say the process was also simple, because objectively it works very simply, but what can make it "difficult" is the intense fear and anxiety that a person who has shut off to their emotions feels. They feel fear and anxiety when they become close to getting in touch with their core emotions from their past traumas which caused them to shut off in the first place. 

But, I just allowed myself to let go and feel the pain of these unprocessed emotions of my past so that I could move past them and out from under my avoidance which was controlling my life. 

There comes a point when you just have to say "enough already" and just do what needs to be done, regardless of the accompanying fear that comes along with it, because, believe it or not, the fear will go away as soon as you've fully dealt with those unresolved feelings. 

So, just ask yourself, "do I really want to heal myself and get over these issues, or do I want to stay the same as I am now. The correct answer is to confront the issues and emotions from your past, but so many people can't seem to do this, which is truly unfortunate, because if they only knew that the short term fear and pain will go away when they release these feelings. I've explained to to many people who really need to do this, but they continue to not do it. I actually end up getting a little depressed when I try to help someone and they are unable to take the necessary actions. Not sure if I should continue in my attempts to help people who are in the same situation that I was. I felt like it was a good way of giving back and helping people, but I've been unsuccessful thus far. 

Now, for what it is that I'm talking about, you've probably been asking yourself. 

It doesn't matter about the AvPD diagnosis. What matters is that you tell your therapist that you want to get reconnected with your emotions. You tell her/him that you became disconnected from them in your childhood due to a self-defense mechanism, and you've never been able to reconnect with them. They will know what to do from that point. There will be a lot of talking about your childhood, what it was like, your relationships with your mother and father, their relationship with each other....your sibling relationships.....your memories..etc...etc...etc...
This is all to get you back into that time period, back to where you can envision yourself as a small child and what happened to you emotionally back then. You need to be completely open and honest during this process, you need to completely trust that your therapist is there to help you, which of course they are. 

Do not distract yourself with avoidance tactics like questioning why they are asking you all this, or not complying with them, or missing appointments, it is an important process that you must go through if you truly want to get reconnected with tour emotions and live an emotionally full and healthy life. 

My therapist had me visualize myself as a young child(when I was ready) and told me that I to get over my emotional issues that I needed to go back to that time and relive them in my mind so that I could feel those emotions so that I could deal with them and release them out of my life forever. Does this make sense to you? 

She helped me with my vulnerability issues of opening up my deepest and darkest feelings in front of her, and to myself, since I had been running and hiding from them for so long. to do this, she gained my trust over the course of a few sessions, and when she felt the time was right and I was ready to be able to access those feelings, she had me envision a genie bottle in the middle of the room with a cork on the top. She told me to envision all of my childhood feelings where inside that bottle and when I opened it, all of those feelings would come out and fill the room and we would them talk about them, and at the end of the session, we would envision all of the feelings going back into that bottle and we would put the cork back on. She said that it was only in that room and only with her that I had to go back to those feelings. This did a lot to alleviate my fear and anxiety, and I was able to start the process. It took me 2-3 months to get through my backlog of unprocessed, unresolved emotions. There were a lot of tears along with anger and sadness that I felt along the way. At first when tapping into those emotions I was very, very afraid, but the fear left and was replaced with the actual emotions that I was afraid of facing....fear and anxiety had been masking my true emotions, forcing me to run away and not deal with them. 

When I could finally connect with and my emotions, the fear and anxiety were completely gone. 

There were other things I did for homework while going through this process, like keeping a feelings journal and a dream journal, and reprogramming my subconscious with positive affirmations to take the place of the negative false beliefs that were embedded in my subconscious. These are customized for whatever your false negative beliefs happen to be. I also would write down 3 things or people every night about what I was grateful for in my life, usually things that might have happened that day. Later,  I would learn to express gratitude to others. I would also learn to be pro-active about life, not passive like I had been. I would set up goals for myself, both short and long term, and I would actively do things to get those accomplished. This did wonders for my self-esteem. 

Anyway, I know this is a lot to digest. Please feel free to contact me for any specific questions that you have. Good luck with your journey, and please, do not give up, your future self will be very grateful to your present self that you finally did what you need to do to get back on track with your emotions and your life. 

One thing I forgot to add in my post is that you need to actually FEEL your emotions, not just talk about them. Talking about memories and experiences is the way to get back to the point where you can relive what it was like, but then you HAVE to feel them. Talking about them is just intellectual and not emotional and will do nothing to let you move past and deal with these unresolved emotions.

I want to give you a couple of good examples of people going through this process, since seeing is believing. So, before the end of the year, watch the following 2 movies to see how this transformation actually can work for you and improve your life so much.

Good Will Hunting
Antwone Fisher

Believe me, I know that the thought therapy is taunting, full of fear and anxiety. Wondering how you are going to get the strength and courage to muster up the effort. But, I want you to know that getting over your past traumas and reconnecting with those emotions, feeling them and then releasing them (and thereby healing yourself) is nowhere near as difficult as your mind is envisioning it to be. Please, trust me on that...

Actually, once you've decided that you WILL do it(not try), you will SUCCEED because; 
A) You want to change your life-path, and 
B) It is actually easy...
you just have to face the fear, not back down...move through the fear and anxiety to the pain and anger, and then sit and FEEL those emotions...scream...cry your eyes out...by allowing yourself to feel them in this way, you are then going to be able to release them. Feelings don't have a long shelf life once you feel them, it is only when you avoid them that they linger endlessly in your subconscious until you decide to deal with them and kick them the hell out of there.

This will allow you to release them and move forward with feeling all of your emotions in the present, not running from them ever again, and not ever again becoming fearful and anxious about feeling them. You don't know me, but please trust what I am telling you...there is no reason for me to lie about this....I just want to help you get yourself to the place where you are able to experience your life the way it was meant to be(not forever altered because some bad stuff happened to you). 

Take charge of your life...you can do this...and when you do, you will likely feel compelled to send me a pm and thank me for pushing you towards doing this....because your life will not feel anything like the life you were living...it will feel so different and wonderful to you....like a rebirth. I am not exaggerating there, that is what I felt like...and btw, I am not religious at all..."reborn" in the sense that your life is full of feelings that you haven't felt in a very long time. And you will have many new life possibilities that your former self could have never have imagined having or feeling. 

You will no longer be a spectator in your life, but an active participant. You will always feel present and you will feel alive and that you just fit....this will be your new normal. You won't have to try to fit in or fake emotions anymore, you will just feel them, and this will take no effort on your part. 

I want to leave you with a couple very good quotes that are fitting in this situation for you right now.....

"Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are." 
Norman Vincent Peale 

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake...”
Francis Bacon

First, to formeravoidant, that's several quality posts that you wrote. I hope the original poster gives them the attention they deserve.

To that poster, you might check out a couple of books by John Bradshaw:

Healing The Shame That Binds You
Homecoming

He goes into dealing with childhood scenes and "remapping" them (not sure if that's the right term). He's also got quite a few videos on YouTube. Careful, there's a wrestler by that same name and sometimes the writer's videos haven't appeared until I included both his name and the title of his books.

There are also process called NLP (Neurolinguistic (sp?) Programming that deals with remapping old emotions. I don't know much about it but Bradshaw has referred to it.

Yearn2connect:

I want so get therapy, but I want to go to someone good. I want to go to someone who knows what they'er talking about

But you aren't going to really be able to determine whether they're "good" until you get out there and go through the process. Sure, somebody might give you a recommendation or you yourself might THINK a therapist is good but later may decide differently.

Reminds me of when I was a kid. My aunt, who is several years older, said she'd like to learn how to bowl but she wouldn't want to try it unless she had someone good teaching her so she wouldn't pick up any bad habits. Made sense to me but I was about 12. Let me just say that I never took up serious bowling and to my knowledge neither did my aunt.

Get out there, try it and THEN adjust. You aren't going to find the perfect person from your couch or computer terminal.

Paul950,

Thank you for the compliment. And, your Bradshaw book recommendations are good, I read that first one many years ago. 

I'm hoping too, that yearntoconnect has read my posts, and even though it would be nice to get a response back, the important thing is that she reads them and gives it some thought. She seems to be at the very beginning of the process, but seems to have a pretty good understanding of her issues. 

I think the fact that a person is able to post in the first place(especially an avoidant person), shows that they want to make a change in their life. And change is not easy from a psychological point of view, humans by nature are somewhat averse to change. And this, even though humans are extremely adaptable. But this is the very reason why people can continue to live in this very limited way, they adapt to living in a way that we were not intended to live(without being emotionally connected), and this becomes familiar to us, and after awhile, we just choose to continue living like the way that we know, instead of making a change into the unknown. 

The only way someone can make a significant change from being emotionally disconnected to being emotionally connected is to be so frustrated with their current way of living, while at the same time being convinced that the unknown way of living is attainable to them. That is why I try my best to assure those who I can identify with in this forum, and my life, that they can and should make the change in their lives. If I can do it, really anyone can do it. I am intelligent, but so are all of the people that I am talking to about this. The woman in my real life(not online) who is dealing with this, is extremely intelligent, much more intelligent than me. But, like I was, she is not emotionally intelligent. Fortunately, this can change. 

Intellectual intelligence(is that even a term) is genetic, one cannot change that. But, emotional intelligence is different, it is innate in all human beings, but sometimes we adapt to a situation in our childhood as a defense mechanism in which it is easier for us to deal with our unfavorable situation if we use only our intellect and not our emotions....as we(humans) are very adaptable. 

But emotions can never be completely turned off, they are always lurking under the surface. And, even though we may find ourselves out of touch with them, we can always get back in tune with them, and become very emotionally proficient. It is only the fear of the unknown(feeling our emotions) that stops us.  And, ironically, we unknowingly are making our situation much, much worse by not dealing with our emotions. We think we are doing ourselves a huge favor but avoiding the process of dealing with them, but we are actually doing ourselves the biggest disservice that we could possibly do to ourselves, so, we actually become our own worst enemies. 

This is my message to anyone who is dealing with the issue, not just avoidance, but emotional disconnection in general.