Acinorev wrote:ganbaru: As someone who, apparently, meets a lot of criteria for being borderline but still feels very much schizoid, of course I see a connection. My schizoidness involves me feeling empty, being borderline involves feeling empty. Both can be explained by poor bonding when one is younger, or some other trauma. Both involve emotional disregulation, since over-regulation is still very much disregulation. Both often involve dissociation, often to deal with traumatic or overloading experiences, which also affects memory and concentration. Both have crap for therapeutic options, and BPD therapy generally involves just changing one's actions, not fixing the enduring issues underneath. (I mean, that's useful for helping out impulses which end up creating more problems, but it does not actually fix the emotional disturbances in the first place.) They both scream of inability to properly interact with the world and people around them, because they cannot emotionally deal with it properly, and it very much seems to be an innate symptom.
The key difference, as mentioned already, seems to be that the emotional is under- instead of over-regulated. You might be thinking 'but wait, there's impulsiveness and all that self-harming behaviour too', but I think those are a direct result of the internal emotional state being messed up. During my mood swings, there is so much...something that I feel rather like a trapped animal. I do not often engage in impulsive self-harming behavior, but it has happened and there are always urges and thoughts of 'I don't know what to do but I need to feel better'. For me, those moments also involve isolating myself, because what is not really very destructive behavior while alone is very much destructive in public. It seen as attention-seeking behavior, because it is totally unacceptable socially to do pretty much any of those things I do, from masturbating to crying to pinching or slapping myself in public or even just pacing. (I have the past couple of years of my life developed stimming as a way to deal with moments like this, just like ASD people seem to, but it is not in response to having too many senses disturbed, but by having my emotions too disturbed.) As mentioned in the wikipedia entry about this, if you take away pain meds from people who have very painful conditions, they will act in similar, 'attention-grabbing' ways.
The other difference is a fear of abandonment. Schizoids cannot fear this because they do not have bonds to break in the first place usually. Because of the emotions that are usually lacking instead of having too many of them, schizoids have no need or desire for a bond. But for a borderline, I would imagine that bonds are incredibly strong but are apt to get lost to anger and fear due to the jumping from one negative emotion to another. I in fact, I suppose, regularly have fear of losing my partner through my own faults and being, like I will stop loving him, stop having the capacity to love him, so it will end. I do not fear he will abandon me though, so I never considered this description as fitting me properly.
Now, let's take someone with AvPD which is supposed to be quite similar to schizoid. I would think they would be more different internally because there is a strong conscious, cognitive component to it. It is based on something concrete, fear which is does not come up from nowhere, but which is mindfully, consciously grown. The root of the problem is the mind consciously hurting you. That is very unlike borderline or schizoid, where the problem seems to be rooted in an inability to interact on a proper emotional level with the world around you.
Both are emotional dysregulation. Do no say that it's because schizoids are more in control, they are not, people here continually cite the lack of emotions as out of their control and as often being unwanted. And I think I could explain everything else that crops up in schizoids as stemming upon that fact; social isolation, lack of activity, lack of focus...because emotions are necessary for these things.
They are both emotional dysregulation that is not explained by poor cognitive processes, which seems to stem from a lack of proper bonding/interaction at crucial emotional developmental periods in one's life.
Thinking more about it, both seem to also have far more problems with experiencing any sort of positive emotions. Quite unsurprising really, since even in moments when either a borderline or a schizoid could potentially feel emotions on a regular level, the problems they encounter daily are still known to them; depression seems inevitable unless they are literally so cognitively lost that they cannot remember their lives. Oh look, I can even tie this into the zoning out and dissociation both have; the knowledge that your emotions and body are beyond your control is maddening. Whatever one can do to keep from properly understanding that interaction is beneficial for sanity. And trust me, it is...the aggressive hopelessness that comes when I'm mentally alert on rare occasions leads to serious 'I can do nothing' and it feels like I am literally descending into madness, then followed by tiredness and brain fog so I fall asleep and forget it all. The brain fog is a defense.
This is some excellent thinking put into plain language. Your ideas and comparisons between schizoid-borderline and schizoid-avoidant make sense to me. This is pretty much how I'm used to think about the whole concept of personality disorders and interrelationships between them as well. I could take it even further by saying that all cluster B's (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic) are different ways of dealing with the same underlying problems, so are all cluster A's (schizoid, schizotypal, paranoid). I think the way in which one eventually turns out to deal with the underlying problem is a combination of genetics and characteristics of the environment in which one had to grow up. While comparing schizoid and borderline on one hand and avoidant on the other, you say that the root of the problem of the avoidant is the
mind consciously hurting you, whereas in the schizoid and borderline, the problem seems to be rooted in an
inability to interact on a proper emotional level with the world around you. This is an explanation in plain language of the difference I usually try to explain by stating that the cluster A's and B's, including schizoid and borderline, are usually borderline personality organizations, whereas the cluster C's, including avoidant, together with dependent and obsessive-compulsive, are neurotic personality organizations. In other words, the cluster C's are based on a conflict state (evoked by the
mind), whereas the cluster A's and B's are based on a deficit state (caused by some
inability). Now your plain language and my psychoanalytic babble come perfectly together.
Acinorev wrote:ZonedOut wrote:Both schizoids and borderlines have a borderline personality organization, as defined by Kernberg.
I didn't know what this was. I've just read a few paragraphs, but the therapy for such things is very similar to the therapy ideas that I have found that I think can help me. Of course, the theory behind gerlach's work is that literally everyone has multiple personalities that will differently be in charge of someone at varying points in time, even mentally health people. The difference is that people who are mentally healthy pick and choose properly which personalities to help them but will still maintain their True Self personality (which we all innately have) in charge, so as to not have a different subself take control and run amok.
Yeah, the actual thing is that 'healthy people' are flexible and can adapt to ongoing changes in their environment, while were are inflexible, rigid, unable to adapt to the same kind of ongoing changes, causing us trouble.
ganbaru wrote:in other words, both are personality disorders. which is no coincidence or discovery, but an effect of the definition itself. there's no special connection between one and the other beyond that
In fact there
is, and even a considerable one. All defined personality disorders are merely atheoretical descrptions of various sets of behavior, or behavioral patterns, to deal with an apparent underlying problem. These defined and named behavioral categories say nothing about underlying causes, so even the strictly categorical DSM leaves room for the possibility that some of the defined behavioral patterns can be caused by the same underlying problem, and this is exactly what is the case. Different behavioral patterns arise because one can deal with the same underlying problem in various ways.
Acinorev wrote:One more thing, I do not think acting impulsively on emotions is necessarily a lack of conscious control. It certainly could be, someone making a poor choice, but my experiences with actual bursts of anger for instance, there is no time between anger and letting it go. To consciously think 'no don't do that' is not a result of my mind discarding that option, it is a result of there actually being an impulse in the first place. When someone like a schizoid has no impulses, one cannot accurately then say they have better impulse control.
Perceiving there is no time between anger arising and letting it go is an illusion, and is exactly the result of poor impulse control. In aggression training, for example*, aggression is often seen as a circular process with different phases, including a tension building phase, reaching a point of no return, the acing out itself followed by a 'hangover' phase, after which tension will eventually build up again, which repeats the cycle. I quickly looked for some references, but I can't find some in English at the moment, which surprises me. I'm likely not using the terms commonly used in English when describing the aggression cycle. Googling for pictures of 'aggression cycle' doesn't yield satisfying results either. There are many variants on it, of which most Google results seem to be variants of the cycle applied to domestic violence or child abuse, which is of course not what I'm looking for in this context. Anyway, the key of learning how to manage aggressive impulsives in most cases is learning to become aware of the tension building phase. When people become aware of this phase, they will now perceive time between the anger and letting it go, which provides room for attemting to prevent oneself from letting go the anger. The most important message of the aggression cycle is that for preventing anger outbursts one has to be aware of the anger before the point of no return has passed. Awareness of one's (growing) impulses is part of control, and in most if not all circumstances a necessity for eventual impulse control.
*Please note I took aggression as a mere example here. One can conceptualize the processes for other impulse control problems such as in OCD or addictive behavior in roughly the same ways.