Anyone who’s read about avoidant personality disorder to an extent knows there may be a link (however tenuous) between avoidance and narcissism. I’ve read some accounts claiming that an avoidant is a kind of “inverted” narcissist, who is enraged the world doesn’t accord him or her their due attention.

Sometimes I feel this rings true in myself. Like when I’m writing this blog to understand my feelings. Notice the focus is entirely on my own sufferings, and not what I’ve done to others. My own brother can attest to the misery I put him through when we were younger. I was often bullied in school so needed to bully someone who was weaker than me.

Just because I’m a deeply wounded avoidant doesn’t mean I don’t have my own skeletons, and that I feel no shame about the things I’ve done in real life (as opposed to feeling shame about imaginary traits that I suppose people hate me for).

Furthermore I resort to narcisstic thoughts sometimes, and have caught myself in the past needing to believe I’m smarter or more attractive than I am. I engage in this comparative thinking particularly in social situations, when I feel anxiety and am overwhelmed. For these reasons I often say I’m an avoidant “with a streak of narcissism,” but I see the narcissism in myself more as a coping mechanism.

The pull of convention

I grew up with great social pressure to not talk about my issues, but to serve and be selfless. My father in his great authoritative wisdom looked down on the 60s “me generation” and always insisted psychotherapy was an egotistical exercise. He himself had also served in the armed forces and sought to instill discipline in me from a young age. When I was four or five, he made me memorize the following lines - paraphrased from Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade:

Mine is not to reason why. Mine is but to do or die.

As a four- and five-year-old, I indeed had behaviorial problems, being diagnosed as “hyperactive” with an inability to sit still. My parents never gave me pills for this, but my father insisted on a new regimen of standing at attention when he spoke and saying “sir.” I willingly complied with all this because I saw it as a way to get greater attention from him. He also believed in shame as a tool for manipulating behavior in children, and used this often to make me believe there was something wrong with me.

The hell of all this is, I never outgrew any of it. Sure, he stopped demanding I act like a soldier later in life. But my compliance to a higher authority is now ingrained, to my own detriment. Today I cannot properly stand up for myself, and always feel overemotional in any sincere disagreement with someone.

As well, the shame that was a part of my upbringing can still be felt profoundly. By teaching me there is something wrong with me, he ensured that I’d be crossing any and all barriers later in life with a pack of bricks weighing me down. For example, while I cannot get into others’ minds, I have the distinct impression it’s many times more difficult for me to express myself in a group than for others. Imagine what that has done to my career chances.

Stepping away from the microcosm of family though, it’s apparent that Southern society as a whole embraced shame as an educational tool. I often misbehaved in school and was constantly shamed (and sometimes publicly humiliated) by my teachers. This pattern endured all through my school years. Perhaps it wasn’t that my parents were especially cruel people, but that they were simply doing what everyone was doing.

At the same time he always preached self-denial as the path to success. The path to riches lies in the denial of immediate pleasure. No argument about that, but this applied as well to my attempts to express to him any difficulty I was having. This never interested him and he insisted whatever negative things I had to express was both unimportant and a sign of weakness.

During my young adult life, these messages were reinforced by my feeling that society doesn’t want to hear about my issues or negative expressions either, for these are trivial and should be ignored (or at least, you should find a good shrink to just blab your problems away at). Don’t ask me specifically how I got this message, but it seemed to be in everything I perceived.

The downside of believing that you should always keep your mouth shut and just buck up is a simple but grave one. The costs to society of dysfunctional adults is really too high to pay, and every effort needs to be made to correct esteem issues. Many with AvPD do not marry, do not have jobs, and still live with their parents, even at my age. The ones who marry (like me) may end up causing dysfunctional relationships of their own, and damage the next generation. Contrary to the opinion of some, parents play an outsized role in the development of their children and their behavior can be devastating to a young mind. If my father had been able to get his own problems sorted out, I believe I would be a different person today.

Attracting nacissists

Regarding avoidance and narcissism, there may be other aspects to the connection. In my case, I attract narcissists like roaches to stale food. My father was a very self-absorbed man who often wasn’t around, and today I believe he had narcissistic personality disorder. In fact, I was sometimes shocked by his double life. Outside the home, he was a well-respected doctor with plenty of admirers. He gave his all for patients and peers alike, and at his funeral I met many a person (for the first time) who told me how high an opinion they had of him.

But he had no interest in mixing this world that rewarded him so handsomely with that of his private one. At home, he acted like a tyrant with explosive rage in his younger years, only to mellow with age (but keeping an aristocratic air nonetheless). He belittled anything I was interested in and his only interest in me or my day didn’t go beyond a formulaic “how was school today” question at the dinner table. Later I needed to move far away overseas to found my own life, especially to get away from his “help.”

He wanted me to move back to the US for financial reasons and when I thought this notion absurd we started to struggle. He threatened to take me out of his will and predicted I would kill myself. He threw every personal item in my bedroom away (without my asking him to) and didn’t talk to me for a year. Afterwards we talked but I always noticed a sad, blasé attitude in him, as if resigned to whatever fate would occur. He then ended his own life.

For many years this behavior mystified me until I later read how it all fits with the notion of the withdrawal of “narcissitic supply” from obsequious followers, and what happens subsequently. One may say that my father ended in a spectacular decompensation episode.

Till the end of his life he adamantly denied any role in my or my brother’s life difficulties, but demanded I fulfill his wishes. He was truly no friend but a stranger, an utter mystery that will never be unravelled. As far as I’m concerned, his memory will be treated accordingly.

I’m mentioning this to give some perspective on my current life. I would identify some of the people for whom I’ve worked as narcissists. In fact, I can even enumerate the stages of my relationships with these people from idealization to decompensation. As I am a well-experienced practioner in supplying the narcissist’s ego, they seem to love this about me and want to tighten the working relationship. Eventually I uncover their incompetencies and decide I don’t want to carry on working toward their glory for scant reward, and withdraw (i.e., quit). This is followed by a period of rage and decompensation, where they forswear all further contact with me, and even put me down verbally. Again, I’ve observed this type of relationship in two of my former bosses (a man and a woman) but I feel convinced of my interpretation of the patterns.

The narcissists I’ve worked for had a talent in sales but little else. My father was a talented physician as well as a socially adept person. Unfortunately and eventually such people either begin to demand more than I can reasonably give, or their promised vs. actual rewards are not in sync. Either way, the act of “growing up” for me meant gaining this ability to recognize such relationship patterns not only in my own behavior (whether professional or private), but in others as well.