AVOIDANT PERSONALITY DISORDER TREATMENT & CURES! ? If you’ve wanted treatment for avoidant personality disorder or avoidant personality disorder in relationships, then this is going to help you a ton! If you’ve also ever wondered “what is avoidant personality disorder?” or about avoidant personality disorder vs social anxiety then this is for you. Avoidant personality disorder relationships can be tough even with a high functioning avoidant personality disorder, especially in romantic relationships. If you’re tired of experiencing avoidant personality disorder traits or living with avoidant personality disorder then enjoy these new secrets! ?
Video Transcript
Would you like to discover five avoidant personality disorder treatments and cures? Hi, I'm Antia Boyd, founder and creator of the “Magnetize Your Man” method. Being someone with an avoidant personality disorder is not always easy. I totally get it – you sometimes feel forced to be something that you're not, and the acknowledgement that's missing here is that you simply don't feel safe to connect. You feel safer being in your own space. You feel much safer expressing yourself as this new individual, because you don't quite trust a deeper connection to another person. Sometimes, this can also show up as extreme shyness and mentally leaving your body. So, I have five cures for you that can turn that ship around for you. Let's go ahead and dive right in.
1. Slow Consistency
What happens here is when the avoidant personality disorder wants to disconnect it's rather inconsistent. There is some safety that the avoidant personality disorder feels. And so, what needs to happen is we slowly need to introduce some rhythm to consistency. What this is doesn't even matter – even if it's just consistently reading a book on Friday, or if it's consistently walking your dog at 7 a.m.
By introducing more consistency into your life, you're introducing more reliability into your life. Then, by introducing that consistency and reliability, what that does is it also increases your trust. First and foremost, it increases your trust to yourself, because as an avoidant you don't necessarily trust yourself; you don't trust all of your parts. What we want to do instead is learn to trust all of your different parts inside of yourself. So, think about how you can introduce slow consistency.
What's important here is that you're not accountable to anyone, because this brings out the inner rebel again. We’re not looking for that. That's why it's really something that works for you, but it's not something that you have to do. It’s not something that you owe anybody or anything. It's rather much more about if it's for yourself and if it's for your own self growth.
Cure number two is learning to share something vulnerable. What happens so often when you’re an avoidant is that you avoid vulnerability, because it feels extremely scary. Your nervous system starts to go haywire the more vulnerability you share, and then we have a tremendous vulnerability hangover afterwards.
What you want to do is learn to kind of take snacks, to take little bites of vulnerability to move just a little bit closer to the person. For example, maybe you can share a sad moment you had, or maybe you just share something unexpected that the other person didn't know about you. You want to really think about what that vulnerability means to you. If that means, “Okay, now I need a week’s break to recover from that,” then that's okay. What we want to do is consistently learn to bring just a tad of vulnerability into it.
So, what would you say if I were to ask you? If you really knew me, you would maybe know that I sang musicals in high school, or I was afraid of spiders, or whatever the case may be. It can be something simple like that, right? Or it could be something such as “I actually don't like candy”, or I don't like whatever it is that everybody normally likes.
Just really think about what could be something for you that you could share, where you could signal to your system that it's safe to share something vulnerable, then “recover” from it, and recalibrate to that new baseline of vulnerability. Then your system may start to feel safe and co-regulate with the other system, meaning with the other person, and then you continue to be present with the other person.
3. Be In Your Body
Cure number three, believe it or not, is to be in your body. What happens too often if you are an avoidant is you leave your body. You're like, “see yah, I’m out”. You disassociate, because what happened is that your parents did not give you the attention you really needed. You may have even gone through some extremely traumatic experiences where you were completely cut off. It could also be that you had birth trauma. Maybe something happened where you got stuck in the birth canal, the birth took longer, or something happened in the womb. But the peace of fully being in your body, of really feeling your feet on the ground, was lost.
Are you actually breathing? Are you here? Or are you already floating around somewhere in the universe in some vision that you have, and you’re actually no longer here? The other person can tell when you're not really present, when you're not really connected. It's like, “hello, knock knock. Somebody home?” They can tell, right? So, be in your body, even if it means gently reminding yourself to come back into your body. You may realise, oh, I just left my body. Okay, I'm coming back into my body. You definitely don't want to force yourself, because we don't want to ever do anything with force, even if you just come back for a little bit before you go back out. Just practice coming back into the association with your body, with your heartbeat, feeling where you sit on your chair, feeling the back of your seat, feeling your back against it.
So, practice going into all of those feelings, those markers, for you to know that you are in your body and that it's actually safe to be in your body. You can also introduce some touch, either with your own body and really feeling what that feels like, and telling yourself that you're safe when you experience touch. Or maybe when a friend hugs you; maybe you can continue to tell yourself, “I am safe. I'm safe while I'm being touched. When my friend is putting her hand on my arm,” or something like that. Maybe when you’re just receiving a hug, just feel this heart-to-heart connection, both heart speeding and rhythm, and saying that's safe. It's a lot about safety here, as well.
4. Integrate Freedom Into Your Life
Cure number four is integrating freedom into your life. I don't know how much you know about my personal story, particularly about our wedding, but we’ve realized that we both have an avoidant part inside of ourselves. My husband’s is a little stronger than mine. But what we wondered was how can we actually bring freedom into our life?
Well, easy. For one, we said “with this ring I set you free.” Yes, you heard me right. You probably feel like, “wait, what did you say? You’re having a wedding, but you're not in a cage, and you’re actually being set free. What does that actually mean?” Let me tell you. What so often happens is that we hold on to what we want in the marriage, or in a relationship, or in an engagement, right? So, we're not really looking out for all the parts in our partner and vice versa.
What you want to think about instead is that there is this freedom-loving part inside of myself, which we call The Wild Man. As a partner, I'm asking myself, “how can I help my husband to be more present of that Wild Man and help him to feel free within the marriage?” For example, let's say he starts to get a little frustrated, a little aggravated. I can just feel that something is a little off balance, and so I say that I think it's time for what we call a “recharge retreat”. And that really means that he can fill up that whole individual part inside of himself.
Another thing my husband likes to do is sit “in the tree”. He's not really sitting in a tree, but that's what he calls it, and that's his alone time. He has that alone time every day. So, ask yourself “what can I integrate into my life to make sure that I have that freedom?” I like to go with my girlfriends and have a whole evening with them. I have these trainings that I do by myself and I’m sometimes gone for four whole days. So, just really develop that healthy independence.
5. Set Containers
That leads me to cure number five, which is to set containers. What I mean with containers is that you want to really look at your calendar and say that, for example, from 5-8 p.m. on Thursdays and on Sundays that's my time. That's just “me” time, right? You really want to put that in your calendar, because of that part inside of you that wants to have her own space. This way, that part inside of you knows it’s safe to have that space for herself; she'll feel relaxed; she'll think, “oh, great. We already have that on the calendar.”
Remember that what’s scheduled gets done. And if you actually love to be with your friends, now you can tell them that from 5-8 p.m., unless that’s your alone time, that now you can spend time with them. But you might also need to train your friends that from, say, 7-10 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, that’s me time. You can really train your environment. I have containers, and maybe once a month for one week, you can totally go off the grid, no phone, no nothing.
So, really think about “what does that container look like for me to create this healthy independence in my own life?” It’s really, really important for an avoidant personality disorder to feel continuously safe, to grow in intimacy and in connection, so they can also attract the right relationship to themselves.
Conclusion
So, those are my five cures. I'd love to hear from you. The question of the day is: do you have somebody in your life who has an avoidant personality disorder, and which of those cures do you think is the most helpful for that person; or if it’s you, which one resonated with you the most?
I also have a wonderful “Magnetize Your Man” quiz, so if you want to learn a little bit more about how you can bring both parts on board, or how you can have the best of both worlds without continuously selling out on yourself in order to feel safe but also free, then I invite you to hop on over to magnetizeyourman.com and grab your quiz right there. This is it for today. Much love to you, bye bye.
