The willingness of the individual to seek and stay with treatment (to work through the exercises to change behaviours and thus experiences) can have an effect on treatment success and, therefore, the prospect of realistic hope. With treatment, some people with avoidant personality disorder can learn to relate to others more appropriately.
Families are a different matter. It's best to avoid the most toxic and dysfunctional members as much as possible. One strategy can be to never live with or stay overnight with the family and limit visits to three hours or less. Another can be to meet with the more agreeable members of the family in neutral and public places.
Avoidance is about avoidance of emotional pain. It might be avoidance of directly unpleasant speech or behaviours. The cure here is to learn good (and appropriately flexible) boundaries and to recognise when and how to assert them.
Or it might be a more subtle fear of intimacy, entrapment or abandonment. Often one of these will lie hidden under the other. If this is the case, overcoming avoidance has more to do with learning the skills of intimacy in communication, learning to like, be at peace with and be fully aware of one's own feelings moment by moment, and learning to recognise an emotionally functional prospective partner.
All of us "normals" are walking-wounded to some degree, so even the best relationships are always a matter of learning to live with the other person's foibles as well as one's own.
