Well, Avoidants can be unbelievably introverted, going to work, coming home and heading straight to their room and never coming out. I recently spent a couple of weeks in a home where an Avoidant lived as a roommate. You almost never saw him. He was like a ghost. He never said hello or even really acknowledged my presence the whole time I was there.
One time I went to the kitchen, and he was in there. He got really freaky and acted like he couldn’t stand that I was temporarily sharing the room with him – like he wanted to get out really fast or wanted me to leave. He wore sunglasses indoors all the time with a cap pulled over his forehead. This way he could be even more of a ghost, and he could “hide.” After about five days, he shot a furtive glance at me once.
At times he was called in to fix something that had broken in the house (he was a fix-it type) and he would seem very nervous but also very nice when he was around us for a bit. He had a very nervous laugh. Supposedly he had zero self-esteem and thought he was some sort of a laughingstock. At one point, he had asked the landlord for help in “coming out of my shell,” but then she never heard another word about it. That is because he doesn’t really want to get better. He is protected when he hides out from all of the things that scare him so much, like other humans.
He came home from work around 4-5, headed straight for his room and then was in general simply never heard from again for the rest of the night except to be annoying and complain that people were making too much noise. He was awake the whole time he was holed up in his room, but I had no idea what he was doing in there. He actually did have a pretty good sense of humor. He could be very nice and kind, and the landlord was able to go into his room and speak to him at times. The other roommates were mad at him and thought he was rude because he would never say hello or even acknowledge anyone’s presence.
He wore dark glasses all the time outdoors so others “could not see him and make fun of him” since he was apparently defective. Some of the other residents of the house referred to him as an “asshole” and were starting to hate him for “being rude.” He had never had a date in his life and was a virgin at age 43.
He chalked this up to his deep Christian religion and justified it as not wanting sex before marriage. Then he dealt with the marriage problem of this equation (hookup with another human happens at some point) by saying that he never intended to marry. So in essence he was saying that he was going to remain a voluntary virgin for life and he use his Christian religion as a defense and an out. He was highly intelligent and a gifted photographer. If he was being social at all, he came across as very wimpy, nice, kind, sweet, profoundly passive and harmless and very nervous. He wasn’t unpleasant to be around, rather just sort of “funny” to be around.
I watched him the whole time and tried to figure out a diagnosis for him. Soon I boiled it down to three choices:
- Social phobia
- Schizoid personality disorder
- Avoidant personality disorder
I tossed all of these about in my head the whole time I was there, and eventually settled on Avoidant. Schizoid was ruled out because he was not cold and robotic and he cared deeply about how others saw him and reacted profoundly to perceived rejections and slights.
Social phobia was ruled out because I have met a few social phobics and in general, they are pretty well put together psychologically other than the Social Phobia. In other words, basic personality structure in SP is often quite healthy. Furthermore, they desperately hate their SP and want to change. This guy was not well put together at all and I sensed that at his very core, he was a very damaged person, which generally means only one thing: Axis 2, personality disorder, people are damaged at the very core of their essence, at their basic character or even soul.
