Help 😞 anxious about talking to psych about potentially having avoidance personality disorder
I want to start off by saying I am nineteen and I struggle with ADHD, GAD, and MDD so a lot of symptoms overlap and it gets confusing :(.
It may appear ironic, but I feel completely paralyzed when considering what to say to my psychiatrist. I dislike vulnerability and cannot accept the idea of being “open.” I worry about her perspective, perhaps seeing me as someone seeking a diagnosis or attention. In reality, I want to understand what is wrong and to heal. I simply want to feel better. Since childhood, I have lived with this hypervigilance: stay quiet, avoid embarrassment, shut down, monitor, avoid trouble, avoid rejection. I continually watch others for shifts in tone or reactions to my words or actions. I cannot bear the thought of rejection; it hurts physically. Any minor criticism makes me fight back tears, shame overwhelms me. I have never been in a relationship, yet I deeply crave being loved and loving someone else. Others have liked me and I liked them back, but I was too afraid they might see me as bad or tell me they do not like me; I could never take that risk. It hurts too much. Now I am caught in this dilemma: should I describe my symptoms, say directly that I think I am struggling with avoidant personality disorder, or remain quiet and stay safe?
Help please. 😞
@espressos
It's important you feel comfortable.
But I personally would be honest with my feelings.
That way you can get the support you need and deserve.
They won't be thinking you are attention seeking or seeking a diagnosis, they'll see someone being brave, advocating for themselves and asking for help
That's a strength.
You deserve to love and be loved and this might be the stepping stones towards you getting the coping mechanisms to enable you to do that 💛
Good luck whatever you decide 💛
hi. I'm right there with you with the whole being vulnerable not being easy but you have immense courage for talking to people and look! you opened up about it here! proud of you.
i'd say you should see what finding out for sure if you have it or not means to you. the final decision is in your hand, whether to ask your psychiatrist or not. but it could be good to first think what that label will do for you.
good luck!
@espressos
If I were in your psychiatrist's shoes and someone came to me sharing exactly what you shared, I'd be *delighted* that you were thinking through things, trying to understand them, and that you have such a deep sense of what's happening and how it affects you and you're able to articulate it so clearly. (It's kind of a curse--knowing exactly what's happening but feeling powerless to stop it.)
I don't know what kind of person your psychiatrist is, whether she has the same reaction as me of "wow I love how this person is so in-tune with who they are", or what your prior interactions with her have been like. Ideally if she's good at her job, you could share with her exactly what you shared here in its entirety (experiences + possible AvPD framing + doubts/concerns about that framing + doubts/concerns about sharing with her at all) and she'd be able to absorb *all* of it and immediately grasp a lot about the situation from how you're communicating it:
1) You're not self-diagnosing; you've just been trying to understand what's happening and AvPD feels like a good fit thematically (i.e. wanting to connect with people but feeling very scared of rejection/judgment)
2) Even the act of sharing what's happening is very risky because the more you share, the more surface area you create for people to hurt you if they say/do the wrong thing. (I'm sorry if that's happened in the past with people.) It's reasonable to not want to do something that increases your risk of being hurt. (And considering that, it's amazing/brave that you posted here 💜)
3) You're not attention-seeking or trying to collect diagnoses. You're suffering and want to not suffer as much. You're aware of what's happening and how disruptive/painful it is, and you want that to not happen anymore. (You'd probably prefer not to have to share, but things feel tough enough that you really want/need the support. It's hurting enough that you're considering taking the risk of talking about it.)
Have you shared any personal stuff like this with her before?
Thank you so much for such an incredible response. I feel like I can be very articulate with how I feel it’s just I can’t ever say it out loud. I am able to really analyze everything about myself, my feelings, how it’s making me feel really well, sometimes too well. It’s like I know exactly what is wrong but I am too scared to be vulnerable. I can see myself actively being hyper vigilant and notice that I am doing it but I can’t stop I am just so scared all the time so so scared. I have talked with my psychiatrist a little bit about what’s been bothering me barely saying anything about the avpd traits but I gave her a list of symptoms and a message saying that I am scared to be vulnerable when I first met her and she took it really well. I do feel like she is the best psychiatrist for me but I still feel so scared. I don’t know.
@espressos
I'm glad it felt helpful 💜 That's really encouraging that your psychiatrist was able to handle the past thing really well. (And I wonder if the written message helped with that too. I could think of a lot of reasons why maybe trying to speak/share something spontaneously would be a lot more difficult than planning/writing it out ahead of time.)
I wonder if maybe there are layers/levels of vulnerability and it might be possible to test by sharing something that's a little less vulnerable or more toward the surface. And then if that goes well, that kind of creates a precedent of "okay, this person can be trusted with this thing that's a little less disastrous if it goes wrong--maybe I can trust them with something a little bit more risky than that".
Something else I notice in myself and in talking with other people is that sometimes just talking about distrust or hypervigilance can naturally ease into vulnerability. And if someone tries to forcibly push through that, then it doesn't really go well... defenses exist for a reason.
I hope there are ways of doing that whole sharing where the fear can be like a 30 or 40 on a scale of 0-100 rather than a 95.
