Skip to main content

Understanding Avoidant Personality Disorder (video)


#DrTraceyMarks #AvoidantPersonality #Rejection #Criticism #Anxiety

An essential feature of avoidant personality disorder is a pattern of being socially inhibited, feeling inadequate, and hypersensitive to rejection or criticism starting by early adulthood.

This pattern occurs pervasively which means it spreads across all areas of your life. So it’s not something you only noticed after being a bad relationship with someone who sucked your soul and tore you down emotionally. After a relationship like that, you will have some battle wounds that can look like feeling inadequate. Most of the personality disorders including this one really start to manifest around late adolescence and early adulthood. And with an avoidant personality disorder, you can get hints of social awkwardness and insecurity that seem excessive that the child doesn’t seem to grow out of. Here’s the criteria. You need 4 or more of the 7. 1. Avoids occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact because of fears of criticism, disapproval, or rejection. 2. Is unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked. 3. Shows restraint within intimate relationships because of the fear of being shamed or ridiculed. 4. Is preoccupied with being criticized or rejected in social situations. 5. Is inhibited in new interpersonal situations because of feelings of inadequacy. 6. Views self as socially inept, personally unappealing, or inferior to others. 7. Is unusually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because they may prove embarrassing. There is a lot of overlap between social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality disorder. However, with social anxiety, fear and anxiety is limited to social interactions. And you realize your fears are unreasonable at some level but you’re still anxious about it. And you can still have close personal relationships. With an avoidant personality, there’s a deep belief that there’s something wrong with you and because of that, you hyperfocus on subtle cues that people are rejecting or criticizing you. The threshold for seeing something as critical is very low. Meaning it doesn’t take much for you to feel insulted or hurt by someone’s remarks. Your reaction to this is to stay away and avoid dealing with people in any way you can. The treatment for this is cognitive therapy. There may be some behavioral exercises that a therapist can help set up for you, but generally, the approach is addressing your distorted beliefs about yourself.

Dr. Tracey Marks Videos mentioned Social Anxiety video https://youtu.be/QJuSm4R8N4E Cognitive distortions video https://youtu.be/QlDXDLA4qpc Challenge thoughts video https://youtu.be/hT3c4VDTLLo Disclaimer: All of the information on this channel is for educational purposes and not intended to be specific/personal medical advice from me to you. Watching the videos or getting answers to comments/question, does not establish a therapeutic relationship. If you have your own therapist, perhaps these videos can help prepare you for your discussion during your next session.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

4 Strategies for practicing Radical Self-Acceptance

Radical Self-Acceptance Painting by Jennifer Mazzucco #mindfulness #self-judgment #RadicalSelfAcceptance #negativethinkingpatterns #thoughts Radical acceptance involves acknowledging how life unfolds without resistance, even if we don't like things at any given moment. It can take effort to apply this principle. How can we begin to accept our situation and ourselves despite experiencing anxiety, uncertainty, and fear? Why self-acceptance is not the same as complacency. It is essential now, more than ever, to practice radical self-acceptance. This means training ourselves to find inner stability despite unpredictable external circumstances. Ultimately, we are responsible for acknowledging our hidden wounds, which can lead to personal and collective growth. Radical self-acceptance is the opposite of avoiding responsibility or giving up in self-defeat. It requires pushing against old ways of being to open the door to deep healing. Embracing radical self-acceptance allows us to int...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust". Bell Hooks

#AfricanAmerican #BellHooks #Love #Respect  #WhereWeStand  #ClassMatters  "Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust". Bell Hooks A writer, teacher and cultural critic, bell hooks is best known for her work examining systems of domination, especially racism and patriarchy, and how they may be overcome. She has published more than twenty books, including  Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black; Killing Rage: Ending Racism , and  Where We Stand: Class Matters . hooks says that uncovering and naming the forms of oppression in our society is an extension of her lifelong curiosity about love and her desire to see love manifested. “Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that it means we will not be challenged or changed,” she once wrote in the Buddhist magazine   Shambhala Sun . “When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch the...
Post a Comment
Read more

To Conquer Perfectionism, You Only Have to Fail

#Perfection #Perfectionism #Triple5Light.com #Triple5LightTherapy #AfricanAmericantherapist #Therapist  People who struggle with perfectionism can find it impossible to move forward if the prospect of failure looms ahead. Perhaps you’re working on a project and have a certain idea of how you’d like it to turn out. In your head, you know exactly how it should look and perform. However, as you sit down to tackle it, all you can see are the many ways it could deviate from this idealized image. This type of situation may not have serious implications other than being a bit frustrating, but what if this desire to be perfect hampers your ability to get things done in a work or other group setting? People can get fed up with you if you constantly insist on redoing everything they start. Perfectionism’s Perils According to Florida State University’s Sarah Redden and colleagues (2022), “Perfectionism is defined as refusing to accept” anything short of “being flawless,” (p. 1), a definition ...
Post a Comment
Read more

On its 40th anniversary, a look at how 'The Wiz' forever changed black culture

#TheWiz #DianaRoss #LenaHorne #MichaelJackson #QuincyJones #SidneyLumet #StephanieMills Forty years after its original release, no film has uniquely defined black culture and shaped the framework of a musical genre quite like “The Wiz.” An adaptation of the groundbreaking Broadway musical — itself a retelling of L. Frank Baum's classic 1900 children's fantasy “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” that became the beloved Judy Garland movie — the Sidney Lumet-directed film had a rapturous soundtrack produced by Quincy Jones, a cast that included Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, Nipsey Russell, Mabel King and Richard Pryor and an aesthetic firmly rooted in black culture. For a generation of black Americans, this was the first time they saw people who spoke, sung and moved the way they did in a Broadway production and, later, a big-screen musical, and it has become a kind of rite of passage for the black community. Everyone remembers their first time experiencing “The Wiz.” I...
Post a Comment
Read more