Why Can't Psychologists Help You? Avoidant Personality Type

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Many people are faced with the problem of choosing a psychologist - after visiting 5-10 therapists, they are convinced that no one can help them.

Basically, those who talk about such a problem have traits of an avoidant personality type (they shy away from any relationship, try to avoid attachment and emotional contact).

What is the reason for this? In general, there are 2 important reasons:

Lack of trust - in childhood, safety in parent-child relationships was violated (the child was faced with the fact that the mother's figure (any person who raised him), instead of protecting, protecting, supporting emotionally, caused trauma). In fact, there is a pretty deep attachment trauma here. Even a baby cannot understand why suddenly the one who was given to him by nature for protection begins to scold, criticize, condemn, beat or just emotionally coldly treat (“How is this ?! I scream, I ask for food, only you can give it to me … But you do nothing for me. Conclusion - the world is cold, evil, rejecting ")

Accordingly, a person develops a level of trust in others below "0". This is not just "I do not trust people", it is - "I consider people enemies, they are bad and will only bring me pain." In this case, any attempt to establish a relationship is accompanied by intolerable pain, because everything that a person does in a relationship is perceived by him as something painful - even the very attempt of help from a psychologist or psychotherapist (this is a direct introduction into the human psyche!).

Therapy can be metaphorically compared to a surgical operation - you need to make an incision in the psyche, open up all the old trauma, raise the throbbing pain from the depths of the soul, somehow fix it all and sew up the wound. After the psychotherapy session, the soul will be in pain for some time. The rehabilitation period is not about pain-relieving injections, we are experiencing the trauma that has been opened with all our consciousness directly in therapy. That is why a person seeks to get away from his pain to another psychologist ("This one does not know how to help me! We need to look for help elsewhere"). In fact, however, this behavior is avoidance of therapy.

Of course, there are also insufficiently good specialists in the field of psychology, there are situations when therapy, in principle, cannot help a person - a psychiatrist's consultation and medical intervention are needed.

So, if a person says that they “didn’t help him at all,” you can diagnose distrust and some kind of depreciation against the background of this distrust (it’s scary to trust someone). If the search for a psychologist continues after 5-10 people, then the client has a deep unmet need for secure attachment, and he wants to take it from other people.

Such a personality always provokes others - hurt me, break me completely, and it is quite difficult for the interlocutor to restrain himself. As a rule, in childhood, parents used moral and physical violence against their child. That is why we need a “special” person who will not react in contact like an animal, because people really have a huge number of animal instincts.

Metaphorically, the situation looks like this: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the traumatized get even more traumatized by colliding with other people. The society somehow unconsciously feels who is more traumatized and “finishes off” the person further. Accordingly, if you are traumatic, you will be faced with the fact that people will confirm your picture of the world ("Yes, we cannot be trusted, we are all moral monsters!"). A good example of this situation - at the very beginning of the film "Joker" the protagonist is provoked and then beaten in response to his actions. And what is characteristic - in childhood he was also beaten, and the person in some completely incomprehensible way broadcasts a call for violence into his life (“Beat me! I was beaten before, I’m ready!”).

Trust causes complete control due to the fact that a person does not have clear criteria by which to determine whether or not to trust someone. In principle, these signs are not clear-cut, but on a subconscious level we always understand whether it is worth believing someone (for example, outwardly a person does not behave aggressively, but intuition tells us that a catch can be expected from him). So, in early childhood, the child was simply "knocked down" by this beacon (the closest people who gave him life always hurt). There may also be basic Balint defects - distrust of the world and insecure attachment.

Strong mechanisms of resistance to changes, and they are quite logical ("I lived somehow before that? I adapted to my situation, to life in general and to myself … And what will you do with me now? You will knock out all my adaptation systems, on What then can I rely on? Only on you? But I have no criteria by which I can be sure that you can be trusted! ")

A person experiences a dizzying fear, chilling horror from the fact that the ground will be knocked out from under his feet, does not know how to proceed.

Here I want to give an example from personal therapy, when I was against my therapist (I got angry, blamed her, swore: "You are not helping me in any way! I will go to another psychotherapist!"). This is a feeling of terrible melancholy, oppressive internal existential loneliness that no one can help if my therapist is already unable to do it. The situation did not occur in the early stages of therapy, but a year or two after the start of the sessions. When I stopped blaming my therapist and acting out the situation of looking for an ideal object that would sort out all the problems of my life (“This is all because of you!”), There was a feeling of inner growth and transformation. The emotional undermining was so vivid that there was a feeling of equality with the entire Universe - now I can resist it myself! On the one hand, the support of a psychologist, and on the other hand, is a remarkable strength and formed frustration in relationships. Many people who leave psychotherapy ahead of time show instinctive resistance to therapy. Directly in my situation, some time after the appearance of the inner core, the next stage began - the formation of trust. Before that, I had the most powerful session in my life. Being late for a session and mentally drawing unsightly pictures of a meeting with a psychologist (“I was waiting for you for an hour! How could you?”), I experienced rejection, criticism, humiliation on the way, I was sure that the therapist would shut the door and stop therapy. However, this did not happen, and it was at this moment that trust appeared!

With the avoidant personality type, psychotherapy is quite lengthy - at least only 10 hours will be required to approach and 1 year to establish contact. But the result will be impressive - after going through all the torment, accusations, aggression and discontent, you will get a feeling of trust in people, and control will become much less.

Another defense mechanism is egotism. This is one of the forms of retroflection in gestalt therapy, they talk about it when a person thinks that no one can cope with the task better than himself, and closes himself inside himself. Retroflection is the direction of all your feelings and emotions into yourself (for example, if you are angry with a person, then by default you immediately take all the blame on yourself). In fact, this is a rather strong and deeply held belief that is difficult to fight, and sometimes even impossible. Often, the process of acting out is important for such people (“Mom, I left you all the same!”, “Mom, you’re still a nonentity,” “Mom, I devalued you, me!”) for taking on the feeling of guilt. No one took responsibility for my injury, everyone pretends that nothing happened, but someone has to answer for the pain? Probably, I did something wrong, so now I am suffering. In this case, the person in the session unconsciously interprets the situation from the other side - it shows that the reason for his pain is precisely in the actions of the psychologist.

However, even the one who does such a cruel acting out and leaves therapist for the therapist, pursuing this goal, suffers for a very long time, dreams of breaking the vicious circle, getting satisfaction from warm and pleasant sensations, from attachment in which you can be yourself, trust a person and relax …

Nowadays, no one wants to be "treated" by relationships, even few go to an ordinary doctor, trying to diagnose the disease on their own and cure it. From this we suffer, because not a single person can know everything about himself! Each of us lives in society, we are social beings. And we absolutely need other people for contact!

What if you are faced with the problem of finding a psychologist, and no therapist satisfies you?

Set aside a few supports for yourself so that you are not so afraid to trust someone. Understand the stages of the passage of attachment, sit down and study the work of John Bowlby (the English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who first formulated the basic provisions of attachment theory and highlighted the stages of attachment formation). Ideally, check out the opinions of various psychologists. Understand that all psychological zones need to be worked out with one person! First, trust is formed, then Ego, shame, initiative or guilt, and in parallel with these processes there is a merger

What are these zones?

- trust is practically a symbiosis;

- fusion implies physical separation (relatively speaking, we are two separate bodies), but moral unity;

- the first separation occurs at the age of 3 years;

- then again a relationship with some degree of merger;

- the last separation in adolescence.

If at any of the stages there was a failure, you need therapy with a person, you will not be able to form attachment on your own.

Why is it not worth constantly changing psychologists? Therapy runs "from the opposite" - at first you will be in separation (up to the enemies), over time the contact will become closer, then you will fall into a merger and be afraid of this state ("Now I cannot live without my psychologist"), then into counterdependence (" You are a bad psychologist, you don’t do anything for me!”), And only over time a healthy form of addiction is formed. All these stages should be passed in an amicable way with one person, but there are situations (rarely) when the psychologist is not able to accept the separation of the client.

While in separation from your therapist, it is important to tell him everything, even if it sounds unpleasant. “You don’t help me”, “You cannot”, “Why are we standing still?”, “Why is my condition not improving?”, “What's going on?”, “I don't understand anything at all!”, “Why are you do you repeat the same thing all the time? - speak, speak, speak. If you find intelligible answers for yourself, and the psychologist understands what kind of need is hidden behind such questions, this will help you stay in contact with one therapist. The most important thing is that he correctly identifies your need, and then the work will develop as expected. Of course, therapy may stall, there may be resistance from both you and the psychologist - if he has only 20-100 hours of therapy. On average, the optimal experience of psychotherapy should be between 10 and 15 years. Some psychologists go to supervision or therapy throughout their lives (this is necessary in order not to bring their figures into the client story, not to try to self-satisfaction, to get recognition through the client). Body-oriented therapy can also help in such cases.

One well-known Cambridge professor who has been researching attachment trauma for 30 years believes that people with attachment trauma in childhood had disrupted neural networks between parts of the brain - this connection simply did not form in due time. It is impossible to re-form it only by talking within the framework of therapy, so he recommends body-oriented therapy, yoga, Chinese qigong gymnastics and other oriental practices from the category of meditations. It's amazing that many of us laugh at yogis who meditate in one pose for several hours, but this approach helps them! Through the body, we bypass the defense mechanisms that protect our trauma from re-intrusion, but it is important here that therapy is also present (this is the only way to understand what happened in body-oriented therapy).

Try different oriental techniques, but do not overdo it with esoteric directions (for example, shamanism). This practice can "carry away" into unreality, it is characterized by a strong experience of merging with nature, the world, God. In fact, you will have even less opportunity to work through this merge, and you will be stuck in this zone for a while. With good and correct therapy with a well-thought-out strategy, you can align yourself in a zone of independence and strengthen your ego, learn to rely on yourself and other people. However, our ego is still formed through the personality of another person, respectively, self-confidence and self-esteem are laid in the psyche only by reflecting me to others.

So listen to other people, get information from them, build relationships. It is also important to have many supports so that you are not afraid that you will fall in love with a person and will depend on him for your whole life, and he can do anything - live at your expense, assert himself, reject you or beat you up. Be sure to figure out what exactly you are afraid of in a relationship with a therapist, and how you will resist if this suddenly happens to you.