Well the AVPD is caused by trauma, all mental disorders are. Whatever trauma you did go through caused you to develop a survival strategy that works at the time but when you are an adult these ways of thinking doesn't work anymore and you need to unlearn old behaviour and relearn new, healthy ones.

All I ment by mentioning the word bully is because that is a big part of why I developed these ways of thinking. Trauma isn't just happenings of violence or accidents, it's the way you felt when someone looked at you weirdly. So trauma is everything. Everything you experienced as a child formed ways of thinking and coping, sometimes there's serious things that happen to people but I'm talking about small things that lead you to develop patterns that isn't useful anymore as an adult. Everything is trauma.

A child that hasn't had anything happening to them automatically trusts blindly, so for some reason you developed trust issues, that is not part of the infj personality. Everything we grow up with that shapes us is trauma on our inner child. You can't really ask a child what type they are, ofcourse what happens to us impacts it, but without the unhealthy patterns and twisted cognitive behaviours, how would you be then? It's not a solid science so no one really knows.

I have come a long way, I barely think about it. In some situations it can be relevant to how I behave but the only part of it that is often present is the anxiety.

I found it helpful to not really think about it. I have a diagnosis because how I behave and think sometimes is a common collection of patterns that they put in a box and call AVPD. But it is not me. I never mention it to anyone and I only look it up if I'm curious about it. Step away from your diagnosis and see that it is next to you and not actually you. It helped you when you where younger to survive but now it us not useful anymore.

In cases where people are very stuck in a situation and don't have the ability to think bigger, they have tunnel vision of their problems usually, it is probably more need for medications and professional help. I used to be like that many years ago but it does infact get better if you are open, don't identify with it, shift your focus, do whatever makes you feel good about being alive. Read books, learn everything you can to understand, broaden your view. Everything will slowly readjust itself and your patterns of behaviour will change because you allow yourself to. Anything that is defined does not allow real growth.

I had 10+ years of therapy and professional help, 5 years of medication but none of it helped other than I got someone to vent to. For 1 year I had a psychologist that taught mindfulness and it changed everything for me. Look into mindfulness and meditation and practice it everyday for a year and see how far you come. I promise you will stick with it the rest of your life.