The schizoid position is a structure that is formulated from a formative position which means the person has built their character layered with preconceptions and 'baselines' which are essentially pathological and used to accept stress and poor standards as normal.
There is often a moral bent that exacerbates the schizoid rigidity. The grandiosity also leads to a specific stubbornness that leads the individual to be very contumacious in setting their standard of operation.
Schizoids are not people that position themselves reactively - they are their own standard. And they are stuck not having the words to articulate their needs, nor do they generally have the tact to manage people and their demands and emotional rollercoasters.
Schizoids are self-contained. They have a philosophy of occupying their space non-intrusively to others, albeit they understand the need to mark their territory and defend it.
The reality schizoids have been pushed to integrate consciously is that the body has needs no one else can understand nor defend but we ourselves, and there are strict limits for idealism that the structure of the body can't overcome at the cost of structural collapse.
See, society is organized around social scripts, traditions, social commerce, life stages, and all kinds of demands and expectations. But the schizoid is in a limit state of energy conservation. This person is aiming to find solutions that can alleviate their own suffering, their own tensions and stress; and they are most often dealing with the consequences of extreme stress - namely, dissociative states, depression, anxiety, etc.
It's very complicated to communicate subjective experiences. More so when the person is underdeveloped and is dealing with what life throws at them. Yet, the schizoid, like any other human being, needs to selfguard himself for the sake of his own survival.
There is a collective narrative - like a sea of stories - that comprises the human drama. And people must insert their own survival within this drama by adding onto it and acquiring a script others can follow, as well as well as a script that can serve them - aligning body, relationships, and reality.
This is of importance to survival but also to physical and mental health. Because scripts inform our identity, and having an identity stabilizes us. If we're always switching identity because it's being constantly updated then that leads to imense distress and unpredictability.
The discrepancy between these three leads to what many schizoids describe as 'masking', which leads to dissociative states. Many schizoids withold information to secure their mental stability and not allow other people to use information against them - be it as a power maneuver or a shaming tactic.
Schizoids are highly uncomprehended and that adds another layer to masking, as it serves a parsimonious use of their mental resources which are already scarce.
What lies behind schizoid presentations is a 'schism'. As the word suggests the schizoid creates a schism between mind and body.
It may start, formatively, as a consequence of falling and catering to others, but it soo becomes a mental model that has a level of mismatch from reality.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it psychotic, as many people have similar mismatch; it's just that the schizoid was more damaged and pressed by society than the average individual.
Conversely, this pressure creates a rigid mental and behavioral structure that turns the schizoid into a very contained, lethargic, controlled, tense, and even angry individual. The pressure is too much.
This is very complicated to impart to others; not only because they don't care, but also because it's too complicated to articulate to the average person, let alone have them accomodate the schizoid individual in their difficulties.
The schizoid position all it breeds is stress. And stress dissociates the individual further. Not just in terms of losing tract with reality and falling immersed in mental movies, and fantasy defenses, but also in terms of losing memory, having writting gaps that are not noticed, not being in touch with their emotions, dissociating all kinds of pains and tensions through an hedonic treadmill.
This dissociative state has feedback and feedforward loops that not only reinforce a specific symptomatology but also escalate the causes both of physical states (i.e. tension) and of psychological states (i.e. dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, and so on).
Constant mental and physical overwhelm leads to further and further interoceptive problems. This means the schizoid individual begins to lose track of his own sexuality (not identity per se, although that too), and of his sexual health.
It's hard to say what's what, but the majority of schizoids report having next to no libido, while the the remainder portion report an even higher sexual intensity than normal.
Both hypo and hyper sexuality are a byproduct of high stress levels. And this leads the individual to either completely dissociate himself from their own eroticism, producing physical lethargy, or become too sensitive to sexual cues.
The true problem of such a high eroticism is that every relationship leads to engulfment anxiety. Be the state of tension is such that the subjective experience always leads to an erotic dimension. And as people we can't project our own sexuality across the board. Not only are some relationships innapropriate, others may not be adaptible, and even others may just be overwhelming.
What's being pointed out is that sexuality occupies mental energy and mental space. And in order to live a productive life a person needs to be stable.
This seems like such a self-evident statement to make, but family systems where schizoids surface are pathological all around.
The schizoid is the most pressured person in the family system; it's the person that has to reduce themselves the most because others are not able to.
This is probably the same that happens to borderlines, although borderlines cross the border into psychotic states, whereas the schizoid maintain reality-testing abilities.
The schizoid position is a state that isn't exclusive to individuals diagnosed with the personality disorder. It's theorized by psychoanalytic fields that narcissists can also enter schizoid positions during 'narcissistic collapse'.
How this shows us is that character of extensive stress that is put on the schizoid individual.
This lays bare that many personality disorders are likely only surface ossified personality structures due to CPTSD.
Each personality disorder would be therefore a stress induced attempt to emotionally regulate that was built often in the formative years and has ossified in a maladaptive structure.
Symptoms like confabulation, hypervigilance, catastrophizing, lying pathologically, being grandiose, among others, are indicative of maladaptive psychological structures are disproportional to the state of affairs.
Exaggerated displays of emotionality are toxic to the person and everyone around them. Not only they make the nervous system overreactive, but they also stress others which will lead to escalation.
This is extremely pernicious for obvious reasons. And it may lead to codependent-esque solutions like entrainment, enmeshment, and people pleasing, as well as the different flavors of dissociative states, with the accompanying muscle tension.
The muscle tension is an aspect of psychological study that in much neglected.
There is a tendency to split the mental landscape and the physical state and this leads to having patients run in circles in their own mental labyrinths.
This can be very damaging for patients such as schizoids because their life situation is already one of extreme stress and it can move on to a stage of complete dysregulation leading patients to either break away from reality or explode with violent reactions.
The damage the mental illness (not health apparently) fields are doing is insurmountable. It's not outcome based. And it keeps patients walking a line where for every breadcrumb they get two others are taken back.
Not only there are ideological positions being injected in patients already living a suggestible state, but this bread crumb dynamic puts patients in a codependent relationship that serves the therapists' profits to the detriment of the patient's best interest. It's an evident case of a conflict of interest and therapists being the gatekeepers of mental health.
In no other field do we see this phenomena.
Yes there are a lot markets where people bargain and negotiate, but this crosses a line of ethical boundaries because it has to do with the mental health of patients - or their mental illness.
For those that know the ins-and-outs of the mental health fields it's very noticeable the amount of students that approach education in these fields as an attempt to find solutions for themselves and fix themselves. This makes it clear how many people with diagnosable behavioral disorders you can find playing the role of therapists.
Imagine if an oncologist had a cancer cure and gave it out in subscriptions or witheld it? Imagine if food was being hidden from counters by people that knew there was still food in stock?
This all may seem a bit hyperbolic, and I'm arguing all practicioners are unethical, but I think the line blurs due to self-interest, incompetence, or machievelism more than people image or care to admit.
There's a mentality in some therapists that psychotherapy is supposed to be regular, but some studies point out that one of the hallmarks of mental illness is talking about oneself ("I, I, I"). It's all too self-focused, too mentally focused (instead of somatically), and having psychological wounds and memories too frequentely revisited and reinforced, thus re-experiencing the same emotions.
It's too much.
The schizoid state is the end of the traintrack. It is a state of maximum exigence and minimized cost. An individual cannot hold past it without psychotic states or dellusions.