Avoidant personality disorder and narcissistic relationships

hi everyone it's dr romney and welcome back to this youtube channel on narcissism narcissistic abuse and all kinds of stuff relevant to difficult relationships it's my hope that this content will help you cope heal and just understand these relationships for the month of may in honor of mental health awareness month we're featuring videos on a range of mental health conditions to provide some basic education but also to tie these mental health issues to both narcissistic abuse and narcissism to expand your understanding when there are these overlaps and today we're going to be talking about personality disorder now in general terms people with avoidant personality disorder tend to avoid social situations and become really inhibited in close relationships because they feel interpersonally unskilled they feel interpersonally inadequate and they're very preoccupied with fears that people are criticizing them are going to they're going to look foolish they're going to be rejected and that they're going to embarrass themselves a lot of you are thinking this sounds a lot like social anxiety and it's very very very closely related so people with this pattern they tend to be very socially inhibited like i said they'll often avoid for example activities at work that have a lot of contact with other people because they're afraid of being criticized disapproved of and rejected and interestingly what can happen is that that might mean they don't get to climb up the ladder because of fears of putting themselves in more sort of interpersonally intense situations at work they won't get involved with people unless a person with avoidant personality won't get involved with people unless they're certain that they will be liked people with this pattern are they hold back a lot in close relationships because they're afraid of being shamed by the other person or being made fun of they're very preoccupied with being rejected in social situations they hold back they're inhibited in interpersonal situations because they feel inadequate they view themselves as socially unskilled inferior to other people and just generally unappealing to other people and they won't take personal risks because they're afraid they will embarrass themselves or even try something new i don't know like singing karaoke or something a lot of people say this sounds exactly like social anxiety i know it does and they're awfully close some people believe that avoidant personality disorder is a more consistent pervasive and severe version of social anxiety disorder now when we look at avoidant personality disorder and we sort of link it to narcissistic abuse this personality style of avoidant personality disorder is actually really vulnerable to getting stuck in a narcissistically abusive relationship think about it when we think about what's happening for people in these relationships they feel inadequate in relationships they're afraid of being rejected they're afraid of embarrassing themselves and so the narcissist who comes along and love bombs them the person with avoidant pd will be like okay what's happening here but they're not rejecting me and they're pulling that person with avoidant personality in the person with avoidant personality is not likely to notice things like red flags because they're putting all their energy on i don't want to be rejected i don't loyal foolish i don't want to look silly and so in fact interestingly years ago we've done some research in my lab and what we found was that people in avoidant pers with avoidant personality disorder were more likely to do things that sort of put them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases because they would they'd be much less um they'd be much less careful in the people they chose to be their sexual partners and it likely it was because of the social anxiety and sort of feeling unskilled in terms of being able to make a choice about a partner if a person has avoidant personality symptoms even if they don't have the full-on disorder being in a narcissistically abusive relationship can really sort of spark up exist the existing symptoms they have because in narcissistic relationships a person is so often shamed and ridiculed and criticized so all the things they're afraid of are happening the patterns we see in an avoidant personality style things like a fear of being criticized the fear of disapproval the fear of rejection the fear of shame the fear of rid of the sense of inadequacy those feelings of social inadequacy and that sense of seeing oneself as being inferior really map on to what happens to a person as a function of narcissistic abuse and so if a person has already an avoidant personality style then what ends up happening is that being in one of these relationships can really cement these patterns and make them much much worse which makes it harder to get out of a narcissistically abusive relationship and certainly be able to heal and move forward from one now when we look at avoidant personality styles and their overlap with narcissism there's not a ton of overlap but the patterns related to shame inadequacy and just sort of inferior views of the self all overlap to the core deficits of narcissism especially the inadequacy and the shame particularly when we look at i know you're thinking it covert narcissism think about it it's such a socially anxious style and that could be playing out here and those two styles may have some overlap there it actually could easily be mistaken so if a person came into therapy and was having i feel so socially unskilled i feel like nobody's going to like me i think everyone's always going to reject me it would be really easy for a clinician to call that pattern if a person's actually a covert narcissist to call it avoidant personality style there are differences and the key differences between a covert narcissistic style and an avoidant personality is that the shame activation and narcissism will manifest as rage right so you activate the shame and a narcissist you see rage externalizing blaming other people shifting blame off themselves to anything but themselves in avoidant personality it will tend to result that kind of shame will result in that person giving in going along or socially withdrawing so it's a very different kind of a reaction in most cases the intimacy avoidance that we see in avoidant personality styles is much more from a fear of shame rather than that contempt of closeness and the exploitation in relationships we see in narcissism so although it's almost like the thing you see could be similar avoidance of intimacy or fear of intimacy but the thing driving it is different so that's why it can also be tricky because if all of you you're doing is seeing behaviors you can sometimes have to split your vote here whether it's covert narcissism or an avoidant personality style in terms of treatment avoidant personality is often associated with a parents who shamed their children a lot sort of shame oriented parenting and shameful shame shaming experiences i should say in childhood and and perhaps like i said it represents a much more severe and pervasive form of social anxiety cognitive behavioral therapy and other anxiety techniques to address sort of distorted social schemas could actually have some utility in the management of avoidant personality but it's a pretty entrenched style can be difficult to treat and if for any reason there was also an overlay with a covert narcissistic pattern this would be a really really tough pattern to push back on and if you want more information on avoidant personality please go to the video notes you can get it there thanks again you

Channel: DoctorRamani

Views: 66,921

Keywords: yt:cc=on

Id: ovsb6WTcOME

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021