10 Signs of a Husband with Avoidant Personality Traits

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can talk about the characteristics of a husband with avoidant personality traits so I've had many videos kind of similar to this looking at both husbands and wives with narcissistic traits or psychopathic traits this one's looking at a husband with avoidant race now this video is focused on the husband and wife relationship as I talked about these signs but many if not all of these signs could also apply to any long-term partnership whether or not the couple was married so answer this question by reviewing the ten signs of a husband with a whimp personality traits now of course there are a lot of signs that reveal avoidant personality traits I'm really focusing on behaviors that could be directly observable by the wife now avoidant personality and avoidant personality disorder are different constructs we could think of avoidant personality as being on a continuum so it could be subclinical so a level of traits that wouldn't necessarily indicate treatment like treatment may not be necessary all the way to clinical where treatment would be indicated like treatment by a mental health counselor with avoidant personality disorder we're talking about something that's categorical not so much on a continuum so somebody either has a wooden person a sorter or they dumped this particular personality disorder this mental disorder is a cluster see personally sorter in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual this is considered the anxious fearful cluster and this also contains dependent person is order and obsessive-compulsive personality so taking a quick look at a voiding person a sorter before I get to the ten signs here we see seven symptom criteria for this disorder we see avoids occupational activities involving significant interpersonal contact due to fears of criticism disapproval or rejection we see they're unwilling to get involved with people unless they're certain of acceptance so if they're going to be dealing with somebody they want to make sure that person will accept them there's a fear of rejection here they show restraint in intimate relationships due to fears of shame or ridicule they're preoccupied with fears of receiving criticism or rejection and social situations they're inhibited in new interpersonal situations due to feelings of inadequacy they consider themselves inferior to others socially inept and personally not appealing and they're usually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because those activities could prove to be embarrassing so as I go through these 10 signs we'll see a lot of these features from a wooden person is order reflected in the science now getting started with the signs when I use the term husband here I'm talking about the husband with avoidant personality traits for the sake of expediency I'm just going to use the term husband sign number one the husband over processes perfunctory conversations and serious conversations so as people navigate relationships they have various conversations some of them are pretty ordinary and some of them are considered a little bit more serious to the husband with avoidant personality traits these are really treated in the same way both again or over-processed the husband kind of obsesses about those conversations now everybody does this to some extent particularly when somebody's encountering a so-called important person right so if you work for an organization and the owner or the president of that company comes into the office and it's not expected you may want to say the right thing right you don't want to embarrass yourself you want to make the perfect amount of eye contact because there's something to lose in theory right you could make a bad impression and that could be negative in terms of your job outlook or if you made a good impression there'd be something to gain right so that type of stress again with the so called important person is what the husband feels frequently often with almost everybody he interacts with so after the husband has an interaction with somebody if he's there with his wife as they're walking away as the husband and wife are walking away he might say to the wife was that okay what I said or I hope that she understood that I was being friendly right trying to make sure that he did the right thing in that conversation and double-checking that with the wife expending a lot of energy and going over the details when most people really wouldn't worry that much about that particular conversation sign number two has to do with comorbidity now if somebody has avoidant personality disorder and some of the time if they have avoidant personality traits they're going to be more likely to have mental disorders like depression major depressive disorder and substance use disorder we also see with avoidant personality and in creased risk of having dependent personality disorder which of course is interesting because both are in the same cluster cluster see now 30 to 40 percent of individuals with avoidant personality disorder also have social anxiety disorder now social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality conceptualized in a few different ways one way to think about them is not a continuum so social anxiety disorder is kind on the low end and of wouldn't personal sores on the more severe end of symptoms another way to look at it is they're quite similar but avoidant personality has a lack of insight that we wouldn't expect to see what social anxiety disorder and still another way would be that social anxiety disorder is situationally activated so somebody's speaking in public or something like that they may have symptoms the rest of the time they may not whereas avoidant personality something more constant the symptoms are always there now I've explored this distinction and depth in other videos I just want to make two important points about this particular comorbidity so the first point is they can become morbid so somebody can have social anxiety disorder and of wouldn't personality sorter at the same time that might be kind of unusual most practitioners would not do that but technically somebody could have that another point here is that panic is actually not technically part of social anxiety disorder or of wing personality disorder but it's often present so the wife might say well my husband doesn't have one of those disorders because he doesn't have panic actually that's not required for the diagnosis now if the husband does have panic attacks then we use the panic attack specifier so it's the disorder and then the phrase with panic attacks after that every diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual can be modified with this specifier except panic disorder because panic attacks are part of panic disorder sign number three is that there may be some signs of vulnerable narcissism with this husband now there is some overlap here but there are many key differences as well for example if somebody has avoidant personality traits they have difficulty expressing anger typically people with vulnerable narcissism do not also we see with the husband with avoidant personality traits he's not typically arrogant he doesn't have a sense of entitlement he's not manipulative he doesn't believe that he's special all those components are missing and of course they would be expected with vulnerable narcissism even still vulnerable narcissism does have more overlap with avoidant personality than any other person is order including borderline personality so this is fairly surprising but this is what we see repeatedly in the research literature sign number four the husband has anxious and fearful attachment both associated of course with a negative self-image and we see related to this the husband is less likely to divorce avoidant personality disorder is actually the only person I disorder associated with a lower divorce rate when compared to people without a personal sword so all the personality disorders carry an increased risk of divorce but avoidant personality does not so on the subject of attachment one of the questions I hear quite a bit about this would be does the husband have avoidant attachment this seems to make sense you have avoidant personality traits it makes sense that you have avoidant attachment well it may seem like it but not always avoidant attachment is when someone expects relationships to be unreliable so they dismiss or reject others so in a sense they're being proactive they don't trust the relationship and they're going to reject first also this type of attachment is less focused on emotions now people with anxious attachment tend to expect relationships to be frustrating and unpredictable so they present with escalated levels of distress ticket their attachment needs met so we see here an overlap between avoidant personality characteristics and dependent personality characteristics both avoidant and anxious attachment styles are considered insecure right so that part lines up with of wooden personality characteristics but the positive self-image component of the avoidant dismissive attachment style sometimes it's also called dismissive that doesn't really seem to fit with this husband now while I'm on the topic of attachment one unusual fact I found the research literature that kind of surprised me it wasn't really necessarily looking for it but I stumbled upon it if somebody has a fearful attachment style like we would expect the husband in the scenario would have we see that sleep problems due to worrying about nightmares are usually markedly increased so not just general sleep problems but specifically having difficulty getting to sleep because concerns over having a nightmare so just something interesting that's connected with that attachment style again they didn't expect to find but I thought it was best to put it under this particular sign-sign number four so moving to sign number five we see that the husband has a fear of being laughed at this phobia is known as gelada phobia and it's present the vast majority of time with individuals who have social anxiety disorder or avoidant personality disorder so much so that many believe that it should be one of these symptom criteria for both of these disorders so what this means is that the husband sees other people laughing and immediately believes that they're laughing about him or at him so when he sees other people laughing he feels rejected and ashamed so in a way this is kind of an idea of reference too right so the husband is looking a situation and believing it's about him when there's really not a lot of evidence to support that sign number six is that the husband was the victim of parental neglect we see the people with avoidant personality sorter often had parents who were less affectionate more rejecting and less encouraging than people who do not have a wooden person a sorter so the husband is more likely to report a history of neglect and lower care moving to signed number seven here we see affective instability this is interesting because this is one of these symptom criteria for borderline personality disorder but yet we see it here with avoidant personality traits it's not as pronounced with avoidant personality disorder as it is with borderline but it's still there it's still a significant factor there is a theory about a relationship between avoidant personality and schizoid personality which is a cluster a person a sorter and one of the things I find interesting is that if avoidant personality is linked to affective instability that makes it seem much different than schizoid personality sorter because with that disorder we know there's not a lot of instability around emotions at all there's actually a high degree of stability so this is just one of the many reasons why I think there isn't really a strong relationship between avoidant and schizoid person is orders moving to sign number eight we see the husband has a strong desire for interpersonal contact so we really see like opposing forces here there's this fear of humiliation rejection and embarrassment on one side but then the other side the husband wants to be close to other people we see the husband is upset when he's in a one-on-one conversation and that conversation is interrupted because those conversations really just few and far between for the husband so he values that time he's highly distracted if the other person in that conversation looks away so if he's talking somebody one-on-one and that other person looks over the husband's shoulder clearly looking at something behind him the husband's going to take that as a sign of rejection the person's not paying attention properly and that's because the husband is bad right he immediately jumps to that theory instead of the person's just extroverted or that's just their mannerism they tend to look around they talk that's not what he's going to conclude gonna go right to again he's bad he's unworthy and this is suffers more proof that his theory is correct moving to sign number nine here we see the husband has trouble recognizing fear in facial expressions but there's no difference in his ability to recognize other emotions like anger disgust sadness surprise and happiness we also see no speed difference as well so this husband can recognize facial expressions just as quickly as other people he just has trouble with recognizing the fearful expressions now the husband with avoidant personality traits seems sensitive and for the most part he is but missing the fear component is really something that can cause problems in a marital relationship for example the husband and wife are walking down the street and they encounter a stranger who starts asking them questions the wife is frightened but because it may not be socially acceptable to scream and run away she kind of looks at the husband right an expression of fear trying to communicate to him that she wants this conversation with a stranger to end right she wants to move on to keep walking but the husband doesn't get so he keeps on engaging the stranger he doesn't recognize that fearful expression and after that discussion with the stranger is over when the husband and wife were walking away from that the wife may offer him an angry expression right to express her disapproval with him missing that sign right so again missing fearful expressions can really cause problems so moving to sign number 10 this is self blame the husband has a lot of this rejection means the husband is bad again I talked about that before he hides feelings of shame sadness and anger by suppressing emotional expression this is another reason why avoidant personality disorder is confused with schizoid personality disorder now because the husband fails to express emotions this can really come at a cost for him if the husband fails to show amusement when this is expected as a socially appropriate response he is thought of as being less agreeable and less extroverted when he fails to show sadness when would be appropriate he is judged as lacking compassion the irony here of course is that the suppression of emotions leads to the rejection in some cases so we have the suppression leading to the rejection the rejection leading to feelings of shame sadness and anger and that leading to a desire to suppress those emotions so we have kind of a vicious cycle that forms when talking about the husband with avoidant personality traits so those are the 10 signs avoidant personality and social anxiety disorder actually respond fairly well to treatment when the husband comes in to receive treatment but of course that's the problem the disorder prevents the husband from seeking treatment in the first place and this is really the dilemma that's faced very often by people who have a wooden personality sorter and the mental health counseling community obviously counselors want to treat these individuals to help them but the avoidant personality traits prevent the individuals from coming into treatment so we end up in a situation where we are only seeing the outcomes for the people of course that showed up and received treatment so we don't know what's happening with people that don't and there's a belief of course that there are many many people out there who have avoidant personality traits including the disorder who don't receive treatment and continue to suffer I know whenever I talk about topics like avoidant personality there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this discussion of avoidant personality traits to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 180,610

Keywords: husband, avoidant husband, avoidant personality disorder, cluster c, dependent, OCPD, DSM, personality disorder, vulnerable narcissism, covert narcissism, shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, introverted, defensive, avoidant, anxious, depressed, depression, socially awkward, neurotic, shy, manipulative, blame-shifting, gaslighting, self-esteem, FFM, big five personality traits, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism

Id: AP0bX3utm48

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019