I have struggled with being an Avoidant all my life. I was probably born as one. Though as I written about before, certain things in life that will remain nameless (The Air Force) greatly exacerbated the disorder. My daughter is 9 now. She does socialize, but not much. She much prefers to stay home and be alone.
This is classic Avoidanism. I have tried to keep an eye on this and encourage her to get out more. We have her in public school right now and she seems to be doing ok. Actually a lot better than the private Christian school that we had her in for a while. But that was mainly due to a very poor private school.
She does have friends, and seems to be doing pretty well. She has more adult friends than friends her own age, which is concerning though.
The school year is about to start and we are looking for things for her to do. We found an acting class that she wants to take. We are encouraging this and hope she will like it.
But today we were talking to her about this and she said something that really scarred me. She said that she hates people.
Uh Oh!! Thats Avoidism to a tee. I fear that my daughter has picked up at least some of Avoidism. I just hope and pray that she has enough of my wife in her to off set this and even combat it.
Im trying to do the best I can to force our daughter to get out there and socialize. If she does not face these fears not, she will always be a slave to them and have to fight as I have.
Its going to be a tense next few years. We can only pray and do the best we can to help her deal with this.
If anyone has any advice on how to combat this, I would love to hear it.
This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. I have set up a survey on AvPD. Click here to take it. I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.
