Well, glad I broached the possibility then lol. As you proceed with thinking about these things, keep it at the forefront of your mind that PD’s are “trait-like”, they’re fixed patterns of behavior and thought that stick with you through thick and thin and effect you in just about every aspect of your life. They involve your core motivations, your core fears and triggers, your maladaptive patterns that exist at the absolute root of your character, from which your broader personality branches off from. They’re an omnipresent background noise, and treatment aims at moving them as far into the background as possible, which will never mean removal, tho we certainly try to get as close as possible of course.

If you sometimes “feel not that AvPD today in my self-conception”, but the empty dysregulated BPD-core remains, that could be even more reason to discard AvPD. If you literally always have the self-worth of a AvPD’er, if you can establish that the pattern of feeling worthless and isolating for others benefit to be something that persists at basically all times and is practically unremovable from your self-conception without a lot of hard and intentional work even in your best moments, and the best you can usually ever do is make the thoughts quieter or shed doubt on them, then dual-diagnosis is not only more accurate but more useful (tho, yet again, technically still not “neccessary”. It’s perfectly possible to just note you have avoidant features, and just proceed BPD treatment from there with such considerations factored in).