The Essential Guide to Overcoming Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder (AvPD) is an extremely widespread, devastating disorder that generally goes unrecognized or misrepresented by what little scientific literature there is on the topic. Therapists are left mystified about how to diagnose and treat it, and patients and other sufferers are at a loss as to what is wrong and how to go about correcting it.

The Essential Guide to Overcoming Avoidant Personality Disorder is the only book available to guide both patients and those trying to help them. This thorough and much-needed volume explores the development of AvPD and presents a holistic view of its causes from the psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, and interpersonal perspectives. It offers an extensive section on diagnostic criteria that will be useful to sufferers and therapists, and it discusses the various therapies for AvPD. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the book provides a section intended as a guide for psychiatrists—and a self-help guide for sufferers—including a day-by-day, one-step-at-a-time, monthly guide on how to overcome AvPD.

Customer Reviews:

some useful (overpriced) information

By K "kimmy_nobody" - March 16, 2010

This book isn't what I expected. I will say that there are definitely some helpful insights in here, but the majority of the book is just one long case study after another (after another), and an overview of the different kinds of therapies used to treat AVPD. There really isn't much new information, just elaborations on the same old stuff that anyone who is familiar with the disorder would already know. In some instances it just feels like he's reaching for material. For example, he includes a (negative) Amazon.com customer review of his last book, and spends a page and a half discussing how the reviewer's negative response to his book showed that the reviewer was exhibiting anger-related avoidant behaviors. Maybe this review will make his next book.

The only sections of the book that I found useful were his discussion of the cognitive-behavioral aspects of the disorder (paranoid thinking, over-generalization, and worst-case scenario thinking), and AVPD's co-morbidity with... read more

Interesting and compassionate treatment of a neglected diagnosis

By O.L. "reader153" - August 11, 2010

Interesting treatment of an interesting topic which has received very little attention (in the form of works accessible to laypeople). Discusses reasons for this neglect, including the tendency of many professionals to lump AvPD together with Social Phobia (along with the author's reasons why he believes this is a bad idea.)

Uses many case studies to illustrate examples of what he's talking about, although sometimes digresses into using examples from his personal/professional life in what seemed like a slightly strange way to me (if nothing else I thought he could have simply described the incidents as belonging to an anonymous client.) This is something he's done in several of his previous works as well. (I have not read either of his works on Avoidant Personality Disorder so I cannot compare this work to them, or say whether it is simply a case of hardcover "rechauffée".)

Is generally good about not aggressively pathologizing subjects (although it does... read more

Mixed feelings

By Dan L - December 3, 2010

Some of the case examples seem a bit too personal and almost vindictive.

In one case the author sites "a personal friend, a dental school student" who "called once or twice a day to unload his serious emotional problems on me." And then the author goes on to describe how that man broke off his friendship with him.

On the very next page he cites his daughter, Carley, who "used to go to the medical school cafeteria dressed in surgical scrubs to pretend she was a doctor (weird, but no weirder than the crush she developed on her dermatologist, whom she used to follow around with a girlfriend, who was also in love with him)." Actual quote... and it goes on to trash her new husband whom he calls "a schizophrenic stalker" as well as her husband's "crazy family." Which all comes across as a bit petty.

And then there's the case example from "A negative "review" on Amazon.com" where he quotes parts of a review (not the whole review) where a woman calls... read more