This book thoroughly describes Avoidant Personality Disorder, goes into its causes, and outlines the various therapeutic approaches currently in use for helping overcome it. Numerous case histories fruitfully unveil the essence of this serious and widespread problem, distinguish it from Social Phobia, and illustrate real-life examples of how individuals triumphed over their relational anxiety through therapy and self-help approaches. There is much new material including an original and excellent chapter on sexual avoidance and a day by day/monthly guide for coping that can help avoidants reduce their anxiety and start down the road to coming out of isolation. Worth every penny.

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 other disorders, but he only offers a few paragraphs of discussion on each one. Also, the case studies get to be pretty tedious. I found myself skimming them after a while.

I would only recommend this book to someone who hasn't already bought and read "Distancing." I don't think many other readers will get much from it, and I'm pretty sure most of them would regret shelling out the 40 bucks.