#i’ll expand on a lot of these points in the posts about avpd and complex trauma that im working on

[avpdpossum]

Hi and thank you for making this blog! I have avpd and I have been wondering a lot about why. Why did I develop a personality disorder. So I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are? Is it genetics, the environment, trauma? My avpd is making it very hard for me to accept my diagnosis and not turn it into a critic of myself. “I’m born wrong/weak or I’m so weak that I went crazy and traumatized from nothing”. I’m trying to tell my negative thoughts that “I’m just a sensitive person, and the environment and people around me have affected me in a negative way so this is how my coping strategies and view of myself and the world have developed” but it’s hard to believe because I don’t know if I know enough about avpd to be sure of that. Also, not referring to the common misconception that avpd is avoidant attachment, do you think people with avpd also have some sort of unsafe attachment style? And if so, which one is most common? And are unsafe attachment styles an inherent part of avpd?

i’ll answer the easy part first — avpd is most commonly associated with a fearful-avoidant attachment style. if you read descriptions of it, you’ll definitely see the similarities to avpd. not all fearful-avoidantly attached people have avpd, but as far as i can tell it’s for sure the most common among avoidants.

and i would argue that yeah, people with personality disorders in general are pretty much guaranteed to have an insecure attachment style of some sort. of course, not being securely attached doesn’t automatically mean you have a personality disorder, but i think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with a secure style and a PD, including avpd.

now, onto the question of how someone ends up with avpd. i’m actually working on a longer post related to this right now, so definitely look out for that! but i can summarize my thoughts on the subject here:

the short answer is, avpd seems to be a combination of genetics and outside influences.

as far as the genetics go, there are a lot of factors indicating that a predisposition to develop avpd can be inherited. avpd more common in first-degree relatives of people with social anxiety and people with schizophrenia, avpd traits are associated with personality traits which are believed to be particularly heritable as far as personality traits go, and avpd traits have been found to be somewhere between 30% and 65% heritable (depending on which study you look at). so it’s very very likely that some sort of genetic vulnerability is involved in developing avpd.

that being said, the research i’ve read pretty unanimously agrees that the genetic part can’t account for all of avpd on its own, and most conceptualizations will attribute that other piece to trauma. if we do think of it as being at least partly caused by trauma, there are two main reasons you might feel like you were “traumatized by nothing”.

the first is experiencing harder-to-notice forms of childhood trauma. the research i’ve read repeatedly identifies two kinds of traumatic parenting as being related to avpd: neglect and overcontrol. both of these are hard to spot — neglect (emotional or physical) because it’s very hard to see what’s not there, and overcontrol because it tends to be normalized as “just how parents are supposed to act” (think lack of privacy/boundaries, high expectations, general lack of freedom). both of these (and combinations of them) are super hard to spot, especially when you’re the one experiencing them, so it can feel like the trauma comes from nowhere even if you’ve experienced a recognized form of childhood trauma.

the second reason has to do with that genetic component of avpd. one theory about what the specific inherited aspect of avpd is (which i personally tend to agree with and base a lot of my own theories about avpd on) is that we naturally have a lower autonomic arousal threshold. put more plainly, that means it takes a lot less for us to go into fight-or-flight mode than the average person. in situations where the average person would be a healthy amount of stressed/concerned (or not at all), someone with this hypersensitivity might already feel like it’s life or death. and at least in my opinion, that sure as hell sounds like it could turn common situations which most people come out of fine into trauma, right? i’m sure plenty of people also have that sensitivity and don’t end up developing some sort of neurodivergency as a result, but some of us do and that’s through no fault of our own. it’s already widely recognized that literally any stressful situation can become traumatic if you don’t have the resources to manage that stress, so when you’re already at a disadvantage like we are, it’s not hard to believe some of us would end up traumatized by things most people see as normal, manageable stresses of life.

so my theory on how avpd develops is that we’re born with this natural hypersensitivity, and then over the course of our childhood and adolescence, we go through some sort of trauma — maybe super obvious trauma, maybe less commonly recognized trauma, maybe trauma that most people would never even think of as trauma, maybe some combination of the above — which causes us to retreat into ourselves to manage how the trauma heightens that hypersensitivity. our brains go from being very easily activated to being pretty much always activated. we want to avoid things that could overwhelm our nervous system just like anyone else does, but because our brains have reached a point where nearly anything can overwhelm us, we just end up avoiding almost everything.

i’m sure plenty of people have other explanations and will disagree with me on this, but this is what makes the most sense to me based on my own experiences and the research i’ve done.

and i can assure you that, at least from my perspective (and i’m sure from the others too), developing avpd doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you — the fact that that’s the conclusion your brain jumps to is, i would argue, literally just an avoidant trait in itself and not a reflection of reality at all. you’re absolutely right to tell yourself that you are just sensitive, not “weak” or “wrong”, because i believe that’s a very real part of it and a lot of work on avpd seems to agree. our brains just naturally work differently and given the wrong cocktail of early life experiences, we end up avoidant. your brain’s just doing the best it can to protect you from a world that it perceived as genuinely life-or-death dangerous.