Can AvPD be cured?
Look man, I know it’s real fucking basic to do the whole dictionary definition thing, but I think it’s actually pretty important here. Because this question is getting asked a lot. Can personality disorders, and in this case specifically Avoidant Personality Disorder, be cured? And to answer that, we have to answer another question first: What is a cure? When is a disorder cured?
Table Of Content
1 a : to restore to health, soundness, or normality
b : to bring about recovery from
2 a : to deal with in a way that eliminates or rectifies
b : to free from something objectionable or harmful
Well, which one do we pick? “To restore to health, soundness or normality?” or perhaps “to deal with in a way that eliminates or rectifies”? I kinda like the latter. Because I tend to agree that AvPD probably cannot be cured. I believe that no matter what I do, that little voice will always be there in the back of my head talking shit. But I can learn to rectify it, I believe. Actually, I’m already doing so.
A loud parasite
The more I look closely at my AvPD and the things it tells me, the more I’m starting to realise that it is not much more than a loud parasite. It takes all my mental energy and puts it towards creating made up scenarios and obsessing over them. It does this with incredible conviction, often making me believe that what it’s telling me is actual truth. And very rarely, it is. He’s not always wrong, but he is very often.
I don’t really need the thing to go away. You know, the thing, whatever you want to call it. A voice, a parasite, a hurt little kid. It’s all these things. It’s me. It’s my own defense mechanisms that have gone rogue and decided to rule my mind like a dictatorship. What they say goes and any kind of relativism or positivity needs to be banished.
It achieves this in several ways. First of all, it’s loud. It steps to the front before any other thought can get a word in and throws these really creatively crafted doom scenarios on the table. It’s also very well spoken. It knows very well how to convince me of something that is in essence nothing but entirely made up bullshit. It’s not necessarily agressive, it’s just very convincing and overpowering.
Democracy
As I get better with time, practice and hard work, I find that my mind is becoming less of a dictatorship and more of a democracy. The thing isn’t the sole ruler anymore. It’s still there and it still throws its massively heavy folders full of fantasy scenarios on the table at every board meeting, but he’s not always in charge anymore. There’s some feedback these days. Realism, sometimes even optimism, sit down at the table and take these folders full of nonsense, looking them over carefully and discussing their likelihood. And most of the time, these folders don’t stand a chance. They’re drivel made up by a paranoid, delusional person that is convinced the whole world is both obsessed with it ánd hates it at the same time.
There’s no good reason to listen to the delusions of a madman, yet it’s what I’ve done for many years. Only now am I learning to not take my thoughts as reality without question. And it’s changing my life. I am curing myself of the voice by rectifying it’s delusions. Not by killing it or even banishing it. Just by asking it simple questions and by looking objectively at it’s statements.
An example
We’ll take an example. I was high last tuesday, as I usually do. Tuesdays are my group therapy days which open me up nicely and prepare me for a good, therapeutic high. I smoked way too much and got psychedelic-level deep into my mind. There, I realized how utterly disordered my thinking can get. I was sitting there, absolutely quiet in my little hobby room listening to music. I was not doing anything wrong at all, yet there it was. The thing.
“You’re bothering others. Your neighbours are angry at you for playing your music too loud. Your wife is annoyed by you. Everyone is bothered by your base existence”.
It just drops these casually. They’re part thought, part feeling. A deep rooted feeling of awful dread about existing around others and being bothersome to them. It feels very real, very important. But when you look at it, it isn’t real at all. I start listening. The neighbours’ dogs are barking. I can hear them if I focus and stay quiet, but they don’t bother me at all. I don’t hate my neighbours. I honestly rarely think about them. Realistically, I am the same in their life: an NPC that lives next door. Not some horrible monster that’s ruining their lives by daring to play some music. Realistically, I was bothering nobody.
Had I not challenged these thoughts, I would’ve felt like shit the whole night. Now, I put them up for democratic voting. The thing voted for me to hate myself and stop enjoying my evening. Realism voted to maybe just put headphones on so the thing would shut up. Optimism voted to keep going and enjoy the night. I put some headphones on and enjoyed my evening very much. The thing kept coming back every now and then with more ridiculous scenarios to make me miserable, but I kept putting them up for voting and it just kept on losing. It can almost never win if you do it like this.
The real world
Now, it’s easy when I’m high as 12 kites laying on my beanbag all chilled out. In day to day life, the thing still wins most votes. But every time I look at it like this and demolish one of it’s ideas, statements or beliefs, it loses a little bit of it’s power. I was at work today, two days later, and I wanted to say something to a colleague while having tea. Normally I wouldn’t have. The risk of saying it at the wrong time or it not getting the right reaction would’ve been too high. The thing would’ve convinced me it would end in absolute disaster and total social ridicule and/or banishment.
So I did a really quick vote in my head and a minute or so later I decided to say it. It went well. We had a nice talk about the subject and everything was okay. The stupid thing is that being like this, not listening to the thing, actually makes me more normal. It tells me that not listening to it will make me fail socially, but it’s the opposite. Normal people just say shit. They don’t massively overthink everything because they don’t have the thing in their head bothering them with these stupid fucking folders.
That'll be all
I find that treating my mind like this is very effective. It doesn’t really matter what sort of analogy you use, as long as you challenge your beliefs and thoughts. It’s nothing new, of course, and that’s probably why it works.
That’ll be all for now, I gotta go. I’m meeting a friend later and I’m pretty sure he actually doesn’t hate me because we’ve been friends for literally 25 years. I’ll ask him and report back.
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