Messi writes:
Schizoids are really attached to their aloofness for some reason. I don’t really get it, it just makes me feel vulnerable and trapped.
As for the neurology vs. psychology argument, I’m not sure. Some parts are unquestionably neurological – you can’t “think” your way out of flat affect. Yet at the same time, the most effective tips are usually psychological.
It seems like their 2-levels of schizoid-ness. There’s the emotional depersonalization and blunted affect, which can only be fixed through physical changes like sleep deprivation, anemia or medication, and the psychological layer beneath it with the withdrawal and vulnerability. You can’t work on the bottom layer without breaking through the top first.
It is looking like the top layer of schizoidness is the symptom cluster and it seems to be biological. In this case the numbing is core-derived in the brain. This can only be altered as Messi points out by actually changing your brain.
The commenter points out that he doubts if you can think your way out of a flat affect. I would add that I doubt if you can think your way to a true flat affect either.
What is the difference between flat, blunted and constricted affect? A therapist told me I have constricted affect but not a blunted or flat affect.
I used to be very emotional but I just deliberately and gradually numbed myself out in order to cope with a lot of ugly life stresses. At the time, I could not think of any other way to cope. Every time something awful would happen to me or around me, I would feel myself numbing out just a bit more. It seemed to be a perfectly logical thing to do. I wasn’t even thinking about it or whether or not it was a good idea, I was just doing it without questioning it as there didn’t seem to be any alternative.
I do not really mind that much but it is true that a lot of people really do not like it one bit. They think I am Spock or a robot. It’s not true as I do have emotions, but it more than they are muted in terms of showing them to the outside world. I have been trying to get my emotions back for many years now since I pretty much deliberately killed them off, but I do not seem to be able to do so. Why that is I have no idea.
I know a lot of wildly emotional people, mostly females.
Quite a few girlfriends have been like this. I remember once I was lying in bed with a girlfriend one morning and she was looking at me and suddenly she looked stunned and she said, “You don’t have any feelings. How come you don’t have any feelings?” She was a notorious emotional rollercoaster, probably a Borderline, though she was wildly, head over heels, out of her mind in love with me. I said, “I don’t want to end up like you. Look at you. That’s what happens to emotional people. Your emotions are all over the place, here, there and everywhere. I don’t want to be like that.” She seemed to think that was a pretty good answer.
Also I look around at Man World and it seems like in US Man World, a lot of men have pretty much cut off or shut down their feelings. That seems to be simply a normal way of being a mature, adult, masculine man. We use words like “businesslike, controlled and stable” to refer to these people. So I feel that by numbing out, I am just being a normal, masculine man in my society. What’s wrong with that? Men are not supposed to be all emo.
I remember when I was pretty emotional, it seemed like every time I got emo people, mostly men, would start giving me a hard time about it. They acted like I was screwing up or blowing it by showing those emotions. I guess the message really is, “You’re acting like a girl.”
The whole message I got is that in Man World they want you pretty much shut down. One thing was for sure, that’s that you can’t get sad. In and in the world of offices, you can’t get mad either. The life of many middle class men in our society seems to be, “You can’t get mad and you can’t get sad.” Of course a lot of them do anyway, so what you find is a lot of men masking rage and especially depression with drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, workaholism, and probably numbing out.
I hear that all sorts of folks numb themselves out and you should not confuse this symptom-derived numbing with core-derived personality structure numbing, which may be biological, as in the case of schizophrenia, schizoid PD and schizotypal PD.
In the former type a formerly emotionally full person simply numbs out as a defense mechanism to cope with life. Probably emotionality is recoverable somehow and anyway, in most cases, they are probably not as numbed out as you might think. A lot of them probably have emotions that they are just hiding pretty well.
In the latter case the numbing out is a core essential part of the personality structure, possibly biologically mediated. If it is biologically derived, there was never a full emotional life to numb out in the first place. They were numbed out biologically from Day One.