In this video I go over extreme Dismissive Avoidant attachment, the impossible dilemma of the Avoidant, how it cuts them off from life and vitality, and then discuss the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol to help fix it.
Below are some astonishing quotes from various clinical papers describing extreme Avoidant Attachment tending toward the schizoid, which have major overlaps while not identical :
“Schizoid patients with Avoidant Attachment…have split off the emotional hunger for love, care, and contact, and at the heart of the personality there is a core of emptiness.
The hunger for love, first felt as a vital, fleeting need, becomes a constant state of mind as it remains unmet.
This state of mind is split off from the remaining personality, and gradually its needs are extinguished. The active emptiness of hunger becomes a frozen, static, lifeless emptiness.
Thus, schizoid patients experience a death-in-life and a pervasive, compulsive conflictual hunger for food, drugs, sex, money, admiration, or tyranny over others to fill the empty core.
They go through life as the living dead, hungering for things, as the vampire thirsts for blood to keep itself going.”
The danger of loving.
Fairbairn famously noted that these people have a fundamental belief that it is his love, rather than his hate, that destroys relationships.
Fearing that his needs will weaken and exhaust the other, the extreme Dismissive Avoidant disowns these needs and moves to satisfy the needs of the other instead.
Since he equates love with fusion, control, and persecution, he must hate what he loves—the classic ambivalent position.
Acknowledging and nurturing one’s needs is unacceptable.
Here’s an incredible description of a patient :
“He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life. He imagined himself to be outside it all, yet he cherished for a while one shred of hope. Women might still have the secret. If he could somehow be loved by a woman, then he felt he might be able to overcome his sense of worthlessness. But this possible avenue was blocked for him by his conviction that any woman who had anything to do with him could only be as empty as he was…”
In order to ensure his survival, he is willing to put off gratification and give up the needs of the mind and body in order to achieve what he needs to achieve. His self-sacrifice and willingness to go without happiness, comfort, soothing, or respite make this process possible. He is, above all, a survivalist.
…in his attempt to be nobody, the schizoid makes efforts to have no body…”
Some researchers claim schizoid is in fact polarized Dismissive Avoidant Attachment, which I think plausible. If not, the difference would be the former get to the point where they no longer even feel the need for others, which the merely Avoidant, even if it’s hidden and repressed, still longs for connection.
