[Alt Text: reply from @exqeriment that says, “put this in the tags but. can this be also be a trait of anxiety/paranoia or autism? /genq”]
short answer, traits of anxiety, paranoia, and autism can also look like this, but they’re generally motivated by different internal experiences
there are specific thought processes that underlie these behaviors when they’re coming from avpd. one is that we tend to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, which often includes a really deep belief that we’re incapable of getting social interactions “right” and that rejection in social situations is nearly inevitable, as well as a belief that getting too close to people will reveal all our other flaws to them and cause them to turn on us as a result of that exposure. we also tend to interpret neutral reactions from other people (and even some positive reactions) as negative, so this behavior can also be a result of us being genuinely unable to see someone else’s behavior as welcoming to us unless they go out of their way to make it clear, to the point where it seems excessive to others. we also often have much stronger reactions to rejection, so avoiding it feels much more dire and our standards for who’s safe for us to interact with become much higher. and while these experiences — complete lack of faith in your social abilities, fear of some deep personal flaw being revealed to others, interpreting the actions of others as confirming your fears, intense sensitivity to rejection — aren’t necessarily exclusive to avpd, they tend to be much more concretely connected to the avoidance behaviors in people with avpd. while someone else who experiences these might still be able to work past them and interact with others, avpd often makes that impossible because our brains naturally assume that avoidance is the only way to keep ourselves safe from the threat of rejection. people with avpd are also just more likely to experience all of those factors altogether and more intensely, rather than only experiencing some or feeling them on a lower level — the nature of avpd is that all of these factors come together to create a perfect storm that makes avoidance feel like the only option for us
social anxiety often looks a lot like this, but the fear tends to be more of a sort of visceral, physical reaction, whereas with avpd, it often feels like a rational thought process in the moment. social anxiety is much like a phobia (hence why it’s often referred to as social phobia) — you have a physical anxiety response in response to certain social situations, so you’re likely to avoid those situations. you may not be able to explain why you’re so afraid of it, but nonetheless, when you’re faced with those situations you feel the anxiety. anxiety tends to feel less rational and more instinctual than avpd generally does
when paranoia causes people to wait for absolute confirmation of acceptance like this, it’s not because of a fear of being rejected — it’s because of a fear of danger. with paranoia, someone might fear that other people have malicious intentions toward them or that there’s otherwise some direct danger associated with interacting with those people. with avpd, the potential rejection itself is the threat
when it comes to autism, this could look like one of two things:
the first possibility is that an autistic person doesn’t initiate interactions in many situations because it just doesn’t come naturally to them. autistic people often act based on different social rules than NT people, and that often looks like us not initiating interactions with people in situations where a neurotypical person would. specific to this situation, an autistic person may feel that it would be rude to initiate an interaction with someone before they’ve shown interest in having that interaction. there isn’t necessarily any anxiety associated with it; it just may not make sense to that person to interact with those people if they haven’t explicitly expressed interest in an interaction
the other possibility is that it’s from autistic trauma, specifically trauma from attempting to make friends with people only to be told that you’re “doing it wrong” and rejected as a result. this and avpd avoidance can actually be connected — i personally believe autistic trauma like this is actually part of what caused me to develop avpd
i know you didn’t mention npd, but since i also have npd and know from experience that that can also look something like this, i’ll also explain the difference there. someone with npd may avoid interacting with people who haven’t proven that they’ll be accepting because we don’t believe someone who won’t fully 100% like us is worth interacting with. the thought process might go something like, “why would i spend time with people who might not give me the treatment i know i deserve?” the key here is that that thought process is often (arguably most of the time, though i can’t say for sure) covering up a deeper anxiety — that interacting with someone who isn’t certain to be accepting will threaten the mask of confidence and superiority that we wear to protect ourselves. we have to avoid the people who might not like us at all costs because if we interact with them and they respond negatively, we can no longer keep up the belief and appearance that everyone must like us because we’re the best, and the only alternative to that in our minds is a brutal spiral of self-hate
and of course, none of these are mutually exclusive — one person can experience any number of these as contributing to their avoidance behaviors. i know i’ve experienced most of these at one point or another, and many of them are pretty constant companions. figuring out which one is impacting you mostly involves a lot of introspection and paying attention to what’s fueling the avoidance in your own mind. and, of course, you also have to keep in mind which possibilities even make sense for you — if you don’t meet any of the other criteria for avpd, it’s almost certainly being caused by something else, so the fact that you relate to this shouldn’t be taken as some sort of sign that you have avpd if that’s not something that makes sense for you in general
i hope that makes sense! it can be hard to articulate the differences when i experience multiple at once because they all blur together in my own head, but hopefully this helps you make a bit more sense of how this behavior can come from very different places despite looking similar on the outside
