I don’t take being blatantly rejected very well. It makes me passive aggressive. I slowly try to draw out females attention before I make a move… rarely works out lol. When it does though its good.
Hey! You’re my long lost twin brother! (Okay, maybe not, but our relationships with our mums were eerily similar.)
I started “getting it” in Adult Children of Alcoholics years ago. I read Janet Woititz, Claudia Black, Pia Mellody and Alice Miller years ago… then the ACA/DF “big red book” when it came out in about '05. By then, I was plowing my way through Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Don Jackson, Murray Bowen, Virginia Satir, Theodore Lidz, Stephen Fleck, Aaron Esterson, R. D. Laing, Jules Henry et al on schizophrenogenic mothers and families.
Most of the boys on my bus are needy, love-addicted, co-dependent whore hounds here… and needless, love-avoidant, counter-dependent loners there. Big surprise. (Not.)
I’m likewise cautious with psychodynamic explanations, but Bowlby was no Freudian flag waver, and his stuff has stood the test of voluminous empirical research. I also plowed through Cassidy & Shaver’s 900-page tome on all that. Dry as dead wood, but useful. “Ambivalent” and (in the past) even “disorganized” adult attachment fit for me, anyway.
ahem avoidant personality disorder strongly supported
I’m also a big fan of personality constructs as complex defense mechanism sets. (I got waaaaaaaaaay into Theodore Millon, who wrote the entire drafts for Axis II in the DSM III and IV series, as well as several other personality theorists.)
But as mentioned in my reply to firemonkey above, I’ve seen enough supportive research for attachment theory to, well, support it. Avoidant PD has to have a set of causes, and attachment theory does seem to provide them.
Well yes, but we can’t change his childhood or psychoanalyze the guy until he reaches transference and catharsis…I think focusing on his current state of what looks a whole lot like avoidant pd is best.
interpersonal therapy for firemonkey. Thats my 2 cents.
Wasn’t trying to; was merely presenting a useful, possible explanation. Because understanding what may have happened in childhood is very often de-shaming and de-guilting. I’ve seen too many instances of that result to dismiss psychodynamic approaches altogether.
I agree about going with Harry Stack Sullivan and Lorna Smith Benjamin, though I think it would be a longer way around the barn to get rapid results than CBT with a mindfulness component. A combo of both IPRT & CBT+M might be close to ideal.
Ah. Well description, explanation, I see what you were doing. It is a very salient point to understand and reevaluate guilt and shame.
I love psychotherapy talk, that’s what I do in school- psychotherapy research. I want to study stigma and rehabilitation in grad school though.
That may be true but I would not put my avoidance/severe social phobia down to mother related attachment problems.
I was always a shy and cautious child but the avoidant/socially phobic traits kicked in as a result of bullying by my peers at public school(13-18) . There had been teasing at prep school (8-13) but it had been milder.
Was I an otherwise psychologically/socially normal teenager or were issues already present(physically and socially awkward) that were a catalyst for the negative peer reactions that lead to avoidance/social phobia and paranoia? I suspect the latter is true.
Some pshrinques call that a “concentrating factor.” Some will say it’s the “entire cause.” Some will say one’s reactions to being bullied are set up by the nature of the relationships with early life caregivers. Etc. Etc. Etiology (see Etiology - Wikipedia) is typically complex and multi-factorial.
I think you’re barking up all the right trees, especially if that barking is reducing self-blame, shame, guilt, worry, regret, remorse and/or morbid reflection. You’re obviously more on top of what’s going on with you than the average duck (sz or not), so I’m guessing the barking is useful.