There is Nothing

I actually usually do enjoy moderate amount of light socializing. Joking around is fun, and some deeper talks from time to time can give me interesting and different perspectives on the world.

But, overall, I think why I don't do it much, nor do I initiate meet ups pretty much ever, comes down to a couple of reasons. And it's so much more than just "people bad".

1. Because I don't get much emotions at all, it's impossible to get much emotional satisfaction / fulfillment out of social interaction.

2. At the same time, it takes a lot of effort to try and fake having "normal" reactions, face expressions and so on. So the reward-effort ratio is very skewed.

3. Avolition. Just... no motivation to do it if it's hard and doesn't grant much reward.

4. Depersonalization and derealization make it really hard to connect. How do I form an attachment if I don't even feel real?

5. Many people's experiences are extremely different from mine, so that only adds to feeling isolated and not understood.

Society is founded on community and human beings are constantly said to be social creatures. To excel in society, you need to have connections and wisdom that comes with interaction and experience.

When your emotions are so stunted, your interest in people little to none, your circle practically non-existent… you reject the very foundation of what society is built upon and hence everything else within it. You don’t even have it in you to try and curate a circle of friends, even if for manipulative selfish purposes of using them and excelling ahead, because you’re just not interested. You just don’t have that in you. Little to nothing seems to interest you.

Most people rush to escape the pull of its waves. I stand at the shore awaiting to be swept from the hectics of life. It is yet another way schizoid is not adapted for coexistence with human society, even though we are quite human.

Complicating their adaptation to a world that over stimulates and agonizes them is the experience of invalidation and toxification by significant others. Most of my schizoid patients recall being told by exasperated parents that they were “oversensitive” or “impossible” or “too picky” or that they “make mountains out of molehills.” Thus, their painful experiences are repeatedly disconfirmed by caregivers who, because their temperament differs from that of their child, cannot identify with his or her acute sensitivities and consequently treat the child with impatience, exasperation, and even scorn. Khan’s (1963) observation that schizoid children show the effects of “cumulative trauma” is one way of labeling this recurring disconfirmation. It becomes easy to see how withdrawal becomes their preferred adaptation: Not only is the outer world too much for them sensually, it invalidates their experience, demands behaviors that are excruciatingly difficult, and treats them as crazy for reacting in ways they cannot control.

Children … develop an internalized image of a tantalizing but rejecting parent … to which they are desperately attached. Such parents are often incapable of loving, or are preoccupied with their own needs. The child is rewarded when not demanding and is devalued, or ridiculed as needy for expressing dependent longings. Thus, the child’s picture of “good” behavior is distorted. The child learns never to nag or even yearn for love, because it makes the parent more distant and censorious. The child may then cover over the resulting loneliness, emptiness, and sense of ineptness with a fantasy (often unconscious) of self-sufficiency. Fairbairn argued that the tragedy of schizoid children is that …they believe it is love, rather than hatred, that is the destructive force within. Love consumes. Hence the schizoid child’s chief mental operation is to repress the normal wish to be loved. (pp. 285-286)

attachment threatens the schizoid with the loss of self.” This internal conflict, elaborated in countless ways, is the heart of the psychoanalytic understanding of schizoid personality structure.

the schizoid person lives in a world of possibility, not probability.

schizoid people tend to feel connected with their surroundings in profound and interpenetrating ways. They may assume, for example, that their thoughts affect their environment, just as their environment affects their thoughts. This is more of an organic, syntonic assumption than a wish-fulfilling defense

schizoid people are “insufficiently incarnated,” existing in a world in which their bodies are no more real to them than their surround.

This sense of relatedness to all aspects of the environment may involve animating the inanimate. Einstein seems to have approached his understanding of the physical universe by identifying with particles and thinking about the world from their perspective.

Winnicott, whose biographers (e.g. Kahr, 1996; Phillips, 1989; Rodman, 2003) depict him in ways that suggest a deeply schizoid man, has described development in language directly applicable to the treatment of the schizoid patient. His concept of the caregiver who allows the child to “go on being” and to “be alone in the presence of the mother” could not be more relevant. His appreciation of the importance of a facilitating environment characterized by nonimpinging others, who value the true and vital self over compliant efforts to accommodate to others’ defenses, might be a recipe for psychoanalytic work with schizoid patients.

Cognition and stream of consciousness

Thought interference

Loss of thought ipseity (‘Gedankenenteignung’)

Thought pressure

Thought block

blocking

fading

combination

Silent thought echo

Ruminations-obsessions

pure rumination

secondary rumination

true obsessions

pseudo-obsessions

rituals/compulsions

Perceptualisation of inner speech or thought

internalised

equivalents

internal as first-rank symptom

external

Spatialisation of experience

Ambivalence

Inability to discriminate modalities of intentionality

Disturbance of thought initiative/intentionality

Attentional disturbances

captivation by details

inability to split attention

Disorder of short-term memory

Disturbance of time experience

disturbance in subjective time

disturbance in the existential time (temporality)

Discontinuous awareness of own action

Discordance between expression and expressed

Disturbance of expressive language function

Self-awareness and presence

Diminished sense of basic self

early in life

from adolescence

Distorted first-person perspective

mineness/subjecthood

experiential distance

spatialisation of self

Psychic depersonalisation (self-alienation)

melancholiform depersonalisation

unspecified depersonalisation

Diminished presence

not being affected

distance to the world

as subtype 2 plus derealisation

Derealisation

fluid global derealisation

intrusive derealization

Hyperreflectivity; increased reflectivity

I-split (‘Ich-Spaltung’)

I-split suspected

‘as if’ experience

concrete spatialized experience

delusional elaboration

Dissociative depersonalisation

‘as if’ phenomenon

dissociative visual hallucination

Identity confusion

Sense of change in relation to chronological age

Sense of change in relation to gender

occasional fear of being homosexual

a feeling as if being of the opposite sex

Loss of common sense/perplexity/lack of natural evidence

Anxiety

panic attack with autonomous symptoms

psychic-mental anxiety

phobic

society anxiety

diffuse, free-floating pervasive anxiety

paranoid anxiety

Ontological anxiety

Diminished transparency of consciousness

Diminished initiative

Hypohedonia

Diminished vitality

state-like

trait-like

Bodily experiences

Morphological change

sensation of change

perception of change

Mirror-related phenomena

search for change

perception of change

other phenomena

Somatic depersonalisation (bodily estrangement)

Psychophysical misfit and psychophysical split

Bodily disintegration

Spatialisation (objectification) of bodily experiences

Cenesthetic experiences

Motor disturbances

pseudo-movements of the body

motor interference

motor blocking

sense of motor paresis

desautomation of movement

Mimetic experience (resonance between own movement and others’ movements)

Demarcation/transitivism

Confusion with the other

Confusion with one’s own specular image

Threatening bodily contact and feelings of fusion with another

feeling unpleasant, anxiety provoking

feeling of disappearance, annihilation

Passivity mood (‘Beeinflussungsstimmung’)

Other transitivistic phenomena

Existential reorientation

Primary self-reference phenomena

Feeling of centrality

Feeling as if the subject’s experiential field is the only extant reality

‘As if’ feelings of extraordinary creative power, extraordinary insight into hidden dimensions of reality, or extraordinary insight into own mind or the mind of others

‘As if’ feeling that the experienced world is not truly real, existing, as if it was only somehow apparent, illusory or deceptive

Magical ideas linked to the subject’s way of experiencing

Existential or intellectual change

Then an old woman using her own stick smiled and nodded at me on the way home! I felt like Barbie sitting on that damn bench!! I had been so scared of feeling “like an old lady”. tbh I had probably actually been scared of looking like a disabled person despite experiencing the physical pain and exhaustion of disability for the past year. Somehow hiding all that discomfort behind the exterior of a completely healthy person gave me hope that I could still fit in with all the normal able bodied people.

Do NOT see the new Spiderverse movie if you have any form of epileptic condition or conditions affected by bright lights and rapidly changing colors.

I will not be spoiling the plot or anything happening in it, but it is important that people know, because ohhh my god the AMOUNT of flashing lights and rapidly changing colors from beginning to end was so rampant that even I, a non-epileptic autistic person, got a severe headache and wild overstimulation. They do not give a warning in theaters at all that this movie is NOT epileptic friendly from the literal beginning with the beginning credits - which is so, so sad!

This is a beautifully made film, it's wonderful, it's amazing, but unfortunately, it's not a good time for anyone super affected by bright flashing lights in rapid succession, especially those seizure prone.

I wanted to put this out there BECAUSE there are no theater warnings. Idk if anyone else has put it out there, but it is SUPER IMPORTANT!!!

we've discussed time and time again that impulsive thoughts are not the same as intrusive thoughts i dont really think i have to reexplain that one again for the millionth time. weve all been over this you all know this so lets move on to the second layer here

Blog 9: 11/04/2022

If you’re a schizoid who feels like “the walking dead”, this might mean you dissociate. A lot. And apparently, for schizoids, that’s common.

Others might not know what dissociating is, or might think “oh I dissociated” the moment they miss one point during a meeting. (Yes, that’s dissociation, but not to the extent a schizoid experiences it.) 

Dissociation is a way to protect us from harm and strong emotions, but it also makes our lives bleaker. Dissociation is like living in a house where the temperature is always steady, but because of this, you do not know what hot or cold is. Or even worse: when it suddenly does get hot or cold, it’s suddenly a disaster because you never experienced it, and you go through some panic because of it and dissociate again as soon as you are possible.

Today’s blog post is about this common aspect of SPD and the goal is to explain what it is, where it comes from, how Schizoids vs. Neurotypicals might experience this, what can be done to dissociate less. Finally, it poses the question whether this is a blessing or a curse. I’ll also be giving a personal example of a recent time I was about to dissociate and was able to catch myself in the moment (thanks to therapy.)

tl;dr: Schizoids [ and perhaps those with other personality disorders ] have a different mechanism for "masking" than other neurodivergent conditions, and thus have a different relationship to the concept of masking.

※ I am mostly writing from the perspective of being schizoid here but I think this also applies, albeit to a lesser extent and/or in a different way to the rest of the personality disorders.

/* “Masking” is something done by people all across the spectrum of neurodivergence but I think people do not really realise just how different the experience is depending on what exactly your condition is.

I put "masking" in quotes since the term itself sort of implies "faking" a specific way of speaking/acting/etc. to appear "normal" [ read: neurotypical ]. Whereas, as I will elaborate below, I do not think every neurodivergent person sees the "mask" as faking per se.

It is usually associated with how autistic people and ADHDers mask, and while I cannot speak for their experiences, from what I have read the "mask" is disassociated with them. That is, it primarily does feel like a mask, a way of conforming, and being in an environment where they do not have to mask is often considered liberating. Of course, not everybody will feel the same way, but this is what appears to be the general consensus from the posts I see [ Do correct me if I am mistaken ].

People with SzPD often struggle with self-integration, which leads to highly permeable boundaries, a difficult to "differentiate" oneself from other people [ not cognitively but emotionally ], and a pronounced gap between the internal and external self. And while these are often described in terms that imply masking, such as the external self being a "false" self or with terms like "persona,“ "character” and even "mask" itself, the relationship that exists between the "true" self and "false" self is complex in a way that it feels less like being a person faking a different personhood, so much as it feels like being multiple people at once [ or like not being a whole person at all ].

Often, because the "split" between the two happens very early on in life, the internal (“true”) self does not develop a strong "personality" because it lives in the internal world, devoid of all the boundaries that make reality Reality. It is often weak and fragile, a perpetual child, because it never exists long enough for it to have gotten used to the conflicts of the external world.

Whereas the external (“false”) self that develops to negotiate between the internal self and the external world lacks this extreme sensitivity. When it is first created, after all, it is done as a stopgap measure: the idea is that it sits as a substitute until the internal self is ready to come out again.

Except… that does not happen.

Therapist: Is there anything you struggle to deal with?

Me: