Not surprisingly, in couple therapy, masochistic avoidants respond negatively when a partner improves. In their headlong rush to a painful divorce, they deliberately, if unconsciously, continue to view a mate who has newly become interesting as still boring, who has learned to be nice as still insufficiently positive for their taste, and who has changed from remote to close as a newly developing threat to their valued freedom, independence, and identity.
COMORBID AVPD AND ADDICTION
Avoidants who are also addicts gamble or take drugs as a substitute for having relationships. For example, they gamble not to be involved with, but to retreat from, the world and the people in it via entering the substitutive fantasy arena of the casino, their figurative opium den. A man gambled in Las Vegas to get away from his wife. He thought of himself as a “guest of the owner” of his favorite casino, as if the owner wanted not his money, but him personally. He viewed the casino as the perfect home with the perfect people in it, in contrast to “my own shabby surroundings and impossible home life.” As anyone who has tried to make eye contact with a serious gambler in a casino can attest, he, like many gamblers, hardly noticed anyone around him. He was blocking out the possibility that someone might be interested in him personally or sexually—as if the gambling (as intended) made human relationships, at least for the moment, entirely beside the point.
COMORBID AVPD AND BISEXUALITY
Bisexual avoidants indulge in Types IIa and IIb avoidant behavior when they behave homosexually to avoid heterosexuality, and the other way around.
A Case Example
A patient was at first a heterosexually oriented child. But, as he recalled, because he threw a baseball underhanded, his peers humiliated him to the point that his self-esteem fell precipitously. So as an adult, he “became bisexual to protect myself from rejection and the consequent loss of self-esteem by surrounding myself with two different kinds of people and fleeing protectively from one to another whenever I felt criticized and humiliated.”
He also traced the origin of his bisexual shifting to problems in his early relationship with his parents. According to him, an overattachment to and identification with his mother fostered homosexual fantasies as he acted toward male companions in a way that reproduced his mother’s seductive behavior toward him. But heterosexual fantasies came to the fore as he fled from homosexual relationships because they made him feel too much like a woman and so much too much like his mother. Also, every time a woman was unpleasant to him, she “sent me to men” because she reminded him of his mother’s hostility toward him, while every time a woman was warm/seductive toward him, she “sent me to men” because she aroused oedipal/incestuous anxiety related to “my mother fixation.”
He also traced his bisexual shifting back to his relationship with his father. He believed that his complete disrespect for his father put a damper on his heterosexuality because he had no male figure to identify with. And a restitutive need for a good father accounted for his never-ending search for an imperfect man he could make over into an ideal male parent.
As he concluded, overall, “I use my bisexuality to reduce anxiety about getting close to any one individual, for my being bisexual means that I will never be stuck in one place, and with one person only.”
COMORBID AVPD AND MIXED PERSONALITY DISORDER
I diagnosed the following individual as a man with avoidant, including sexually avoidant, passive-aggressive, and narcissistic, personality features: 1
I do and what I can do to change. Your book has helped me get a better understanding of who I am and I must say I do not like myself for it.
My story goes like this: I was with my wife for seven years and for the first part everything was fine. We moved in together after six months. Three months afterward, my sister moved in with us (arriving on a student visa from Greece). She interfered all the time with my relationship with my wife, and it became too tiring to deal with her as she had issues of her own (she was 30 when she arrived, she is now 36). This took a toll on my relationship with my wife. Yet I was unwilling to tell my sister she had to go home then kick her out. She would sign up for college courses in English as a second language and just not go (she needed to be enrolled in a class to keep her visa). She would go once a week to make an appearance then spend the rest of the time sleeping during the day and staying up all night watching TV or cooking. When my wife learned I was the one paying for all my sister’s expenses and she had sucked up all my savings, she asked me why I needed to support my sister like this and said she was using me. I explained it was a cultural thing and she would not understand.
Around the same time I got money from my parents to buy a new home. My wife and I found a nice loft in Center City but I insisted we get a two-bedroom to accommodate my sister. We all moved in and things got worse. The two-bedroom was an open concept with wall partitions going up 8 feet while the ceiling height was 14 feet, so you could hear every sound.
Our sex life went from very little to even more so. We were never really that sexually compatible to begin with since my wife was more the romantic type that needed the candles flickering and soft music playing in the background, while I was more spontaneous and aggressive and liked to be adventurous. As our sex life became worse I got to the point that I was more into porn than into her. I would rather just lie beside her and relieve myself than do anything, and if she tried to touch me, I would push her away, and this even when my sister was not home. I would not let her have me unless I was drunk or high and she was not into that as she said she would feel she was taking advantage of me and making me do something I did not enjoy.
My wife got sick of the situation and started to hook up with other guys on the side. She learned that with others, she could
have the sex she wanted and enjoyed, the sex that she could never get from me.
Spring last year, we decided to move to a new place with more privacy. My wife begged me to get rid of my sister, and I kept telling her that since my parents gave me the money for the place I did not want to do that, even though our parents also wanted my sister to go back home and live her life there, and my sister owns her own place back in Greece. My wife got to a point where she felt alone because she was in a ménage à trois relationship with me and my sister. My wife also complained that she put all the money she made into our home, yet every day she would come home to find the house a complete mess as my sister would do nothing around the house but cook a meal she saw on a cooking show that day.
My wife begged me to do something but I refused as I said that it is not her house as my parents gave me the money for it. I told her that this was not her home even though everything she made went toward it. She began to feel like she was working toward nothing in her future. She even started contemplating suicide.
She had enough. She had to get away, so she flew to London for a week to clear her mind and distance herself from the relationship to evaluate what she should do. She came back with as few answers as she had when she left. When she returned she connected with a guy ( John) that she thought was very nice even though he was 11 years older. They started talking and got to know each other well; they hooked up and she said that the sex was the best she ever had.