schiz-void

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If you experience the negative symptoms of schizophrenia/schizoid personality disorder I can’t recommend “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa enough. It’s like a look into your soul. He understood that feeling and puts it into words better than anyone else can.

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I believe "depressed personality" is so ingrained in schizoid because in depression, one feels most "alone" and removed of anything else. To most people this no doubt sends them into a frenzy; they search, desperate to make sure the connections they so want are indeed still there-- but when you wish to live in a detached manner, because you experience people and their constant expectations and demands to only be tiresome, the burden of connections and the intricate webs they weave (which you hardly asked to be part of) then for you, the depressed state is the most blissful you could possibly be in. One could say the most natural. However, the unfortunate side effect is that it still requires a hefty amount of one's own energy. And life does not slow down, even if you wish to be in that place a while.

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.

It is a paradox of paradoxes. A lonely person who cannot get lonely. A depressed person who is happiest depressed.

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I finally got an official diagnosis for Szpd.

#actually szpd #szpd #she also reconfirm adhd-pi #and said ive got mild anxiety and depression #hope i can restart therapy

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“It’s a tough thing to accept you just don’t have much ambition/drive. Although I do admire ambition/drive (from a distance).”

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.

“People with schizoid personality … tend to feel more comfortable with people who are in touch with themselves, who do not fear to reveal their weaknesses and appear mortal. I refer to an atmosphere that is relaxed and informal, where it is accepted that people err, may even lose control, behave childishly or even unacceptably. In such surroundings a person who is very sensitive by nature may be more open and expend less energy on hiding his/her differences. (“Mitmodedet,” 2002, p. 190)

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EASE: Item Hyperlink List

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

Solipsistic grandiosity

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I used a walking stick for the first time today and I felt so so nervous but on my commute into work a lady told me she loved my stick and is getting one of her own soon. I told her the name of the site I got it from and we had a shouty conversation about it while I was going up the stairs and it just felt like I was talking about a cute pair of shoes or a dress! Yes it’s a mobility aid but it’s also something I but a lot of thought into picking out like I would anything else that I wear/carry!

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.

I knew I was going to look vulnerable and everyone would be able to see that I’m different and I constantly had this image of an old woman with a cane in my head and I was so afraid of looking like her. And then I saw her! And she smiled at me! And we both did a little laugh as we walked past each other because hey, look at us, so different in age and appearance and yet we have this one object in common, this thing that is allowing us to experience the world like we could before. Hers was flowery and mine was sparkly. I hope I see her again sometime.

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PSA for Across the Spiderverse:

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!!!

I wish you all a lovely day and hope they eventually have a remaster that will be much more friendly to epileptic and other people affected by bright, flashing lights.

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ocd is so weird bc its completely belittled and infantilized on the surface level (aka the stereotype- what people think ocd is like) but then the reality of it, the actual symptoms, are completely demonized once you get into them and people see you as evil just for having this mental illness in a non quirky way like they assumed its like. and then at the same time its not taken seriously at all and all the symptoms are handwaved as not that deep because how could you be so upset about something so dumb lol just dont do the compulsion its easy. why dont you hashtag let the intrusive thoughts win and shut the fuck up

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Everyday I wake up and go ‘SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME!!!’ and then I go to work

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Dissociation: a schizoid blessing or a curse?

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.)

Keep reading

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♛ The Schizoid Mask [ The "False" Self ] and why it is not actually (just) a mask

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.

Keep reading

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Me actively dysfunctional every second of my miserable little life:

Therapist: Is there anything you struggle to deal with?

Me:

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Spent so much of my life thinking that I was empathetic and felt genuine remorse. And the thing is I can sometimes feel those things. It's usually for someone I'm very close to and it's usually very fleeting. But I thought I was "normal" in the amount of empathy I have and my ability to feel guilt and remorse for actions because I was mixing things up.

I feel... bad when someone around me is upset. I feel uncomfortable, unsure of what to do, and often anxious. I feel like I have to do something about it because people being upset = unsafe. This does not mean I feel for them or am feeling their emotions with them. It doesn't even mean that I've accurately read what they're feeling. I feel contented and relieved when someone around me is happy. People being happy = safety. I can be happy that a friend is happy or that something good happened to them. But their happiness isn't really contagious.

Even when it comes to cognitive empathy, I frequently struggle with understanding how someone feels or why. I can somewhat imagine a person's emotional state based on either something similar I've gone through or by having observed people my whole life, if I really try. But a lot of the time I actually just find other people's emotions tedious and irrelevant. It sounds mean, maybe, but it's the truth. Most of the time I am not a very feeling person at all. I love my partner very deeply, but I only feel empathy for him in brief blips of moments.

When I've done something that hurts someone, I... most of the time it doesn't really hit me. It's hard for me to wrap my head around. No, that's not right because logically I do know that other people's emotions are just as real as mine. But I don't feel it, so I still have a hard time with it in practice. Their feelings don't feel real to me.

I can feel bad when I've done something wrong. Bad because I don't like fucking up. Anxious because I'm worried about the consequences. It's not generally remorseful. It's guilt in the way I can acknowledge my actions and feel regret. I can wish I didn't do something because it's now caused a problem or made someone I care for upset, and I don't set out to hurt others. But it's not an emotional experience for me unless it's... again, just fleeting. And it's extremely rare that I feel more than that even knowing I was wrong.

The thing is my lack of prosocial, emotional experiences in response to other people or situations doesn't motivate me to do harm nor mean that I don't still care about my loved ones.

It's taken me a long time to sort that out.

I used to think I was empathetic because I felt upset and scared by other people's upset, until I realized that was a hypervigilant trauma response. I used to think I felt remorse because when someone was upset with my behavior, I just wanted the problem to go away. I regretted being in the negative situation I was in. And yes, if I cared for the person especially I could be genuinely concerned about fixing the problem for their sake and not just my own. I thought, "I'm generally a compassionate person, I'm not cruel to people without cause so of course I'm empathetic. I don't want to hurt people."

That's not what empathy is.

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shoutout to low/no empathy people who don’t have a lot of sympathy or compassion either. who have a hard time caring about other people. who feel irritated when other people are emotional. who have a hard time being comforting when people are upset. I feel like so much “positivity” for people with low/no empathy is about how good we are at sympathy and compassion and how we’re always willing to listen to everyone’s problems and we’re some of the most caring people ever and it’s so tiring. not all of us feel that way and that doesn’t make us bad. it reminds me of people in the aro community talking about how “aros are some of the most loving people ever!” and alienating people who don’t feel love. people who lack empathy don’t owe anyone anything to make up for it.

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While I understand why the "low empathy" tag is full of people saying that low empathy doesn't make you a bad person (something that I do fully agree with, honestly) and that you can be compassionate and sympathetic and human without empathy (again, I agree), I cannot relate to something less.

I did grow up with violent, even homicidal, thoughts mixed with my own self-destructive thoughts of suicide and such. I play the part of a "good" person, but I don't think that I am one. Hell, I hardly even consider myself a person.

I can't be the only one that's only following these rules because I'm "supposed" to. I have set ideas of "right" and "wrong" because I was told which was which, and I abide by them because I don't have much reason not to. I'm apathetic in general, it isn't worth the risk of consequence to break these rules, etc.

But I'm not a "good" person. I play the part, and that's enough to function in this world, but it isn't my default state. But, in all honesty, I don't care about others. I try to be polite and correct because it saves the trouble of being scolded for being otherwise.

I looked through the low-empathy tag trying to find people that I could relate to and, while I came closer than I ever had anywhere else, there is still that sense of feeling alone and alien.

Sure, I won't intentionally hurt others, but not because I'm actually a "good" person. I'm simply a nonconfrontational person.

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i love sociopaths i love narcissists i love low/no empathy havers i love people so mentally scarred it makes them generally mean people who push everyone away i love chronically angry people i love people with horrible intrusive thoughts (yes even yours) i love people who want horrible things to happen to the people who hurt them i love people with pervasive feelings of hate i love people who are uncontrollably agitated and irritable i see you i care about you i want you to get better i think you deserve as many chances as it takes for you to pull through i mean it i really really mean it

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When you’re around Others and you have to pretend you have feelings.