Family vs Everyone else

Hey guys,
After browsing the internet for a few years I have discovered I have AvPD (apart from the symptom of not wanting intimacy) and a watered down version of SPD and StPD. I feel like I lack the intensity of emotion "normal" people have in social situations. I am 20 in uni, so when I go out and everyone says it was a good time, I question if it really was. I don't feel much of a connection with people outside family especially when people have bonded with me and call us friends. I feel like I don't meaningfully understand the difference between an acquaintance, a friend and a good friend as the strength of my bond with a certain person is never clearly understood. However I don't have alot of the other symptoms of SPD and StPD like magic thinking, no desire for sex, no desire for bonds, no response or praise or criticism .

Nevertheless the point I am trying to make is that I have the symptoms I have with everyone..except my family members. I have no anxiety or cautiousness around them (AvPD stuff) but I also have none of the SPD and StPD stuff them either. I enjoy convos with them, I understand where I stand with them emotionally, I care for them. This is how I know I am weird in the first place cus I can refer to how normal I am at home with family. Despite this no one here ever makes this distinction between family and everyone else, it seems like people have the symptoms they have with everybody which leaves me very confused.

I mean when I fill in tests for personality disorders in online and they ask questions that describe my personality I am always confused since I have a very normal personality t home and I am "weird" everywhere else so I am confused to which one they are referring too, but I do understand it's the "weird" one. I just don't understand because on criteria for StPD especially it states that people are close with immediate family or very long time known close friends, but it doesn't seem to be the case here which actually left me questioning for a long time if I have a personality disorder even though I have the symptoms and it effects the quality of my life.

I used to be more AvPD, so I think I kinda get where you're coming from. My family actually was the cause of not all, but easily over 75% of my issues (I still have anxiety and cautiousness about them.) I've forgiven both of my parents for the stuff they've done after working out why they did it, but I still haven't talked to them in person in over 4 years. I tend to be better with others than my own family honestly. If a non-family member calls me, I might call them back after I'm ready to talk, but if my mom calls I absolutely dread everything about it and am a ball of anxiety for the rest of the day. Probably your family was nicer than mine, and you feel more relaxed around them is all. I feel no emotions around people unless I'm drinking. Personally I think AvPD is often a precursor to schizoid, but who knows?

I think it's best to figure out why it is that you started acting the way you do rather than trying to match up perfectly with any one label (such as did people outside of your family bully/take advantage of/betray you a lot in life?). Most of us have co-morbid pd's and due to that our actions will vary person to person.

I mean I thought most PDs occurred due to the genetics of said person's brain, I didn't know a lot could be triggered by events growing up. I guess a few dodgy things did happen in my childhood like sexual child abuse from my slightly older bro and as my mother got sick while my father walked out of our family our home started to deteriorate in cleanliness. So when I would compare our house to other kids I would feel dirty and inferior slightly. I mean I am 100% aware these events may have made what I am going through worse but I know for a fact they didn't cause it. I was already experiencing symptoms of the PD's before tragic events happened like being very quiet at school and not really speaking at all at age 2.

I don't know I just thought most people would be aware of the clear split between family, which is who they grew up with from the beginning and everyone else. However literally no one thinks that way, or mentions that.

Not all are genetics, or I suppose you could say only genetics. My family does have a history of mental health issues, but do keep in mind that very little is known about schizoid pd in comparison to others. It seems schizoids don't like talking to people, and tend to cause little trouble so it's one of the last that's funded.

For me it basically happened because a series of life events caused me to go from being a very emotional person to realizing I had to buckle them down if I was going to get through things. I essentially shut down my ability to display emotion in front of others because I knew that would prolong an already long process that I'd have to go through in my life. I'm technically not sure if I was ever really AvPD or acted like it because I am bipolar (which I get from my dad) either way I'm no longer emotional as I once was, though I'll still on occasion have manic moments. I figure other schizoids may say suffer from severe depression, paranoia or other things which they may have inherited genetically. Far as I know there's no one in my family who acts schizoid. My dad gets unsocial when depressed, but very social when he hits the other side of his mood swings.

I think really it boils down to how you handle crisis. Most people will either shut down, and ignore life, or they'll go out and do the thing they need to do to get things done. Both types tend to be fairly emotionless as it's happening mainly due to shell shock, though eventually one might get depressed over it and cry. I once read about cortisol being made by the brain when one goes through stress. Cortisol is a stress hormone that over time eventually can make a person apathetic to much in life. You can even it out with things like exercise and magnesium, however if you've been this way for years you'll probably still be a bit robotic to be honest. Personally I've gotten better than I used to be (once had years worth of being mute because of trauma), but old habits do die hard.

Leroythelost wrote:I feel like I don't meaningfully understand the difference between an acquaintance, a friend and a good friend as the strength of my bond with a certain person is never clearly understood.

Sometimes I wonder if schizoids are literally wired differently in their brain so that they are incapable of understanding (much less comfortably participate in) the rules of social interaction.

Nevertheless the point I am trying to make is that I have the symptoms I have with everyone..except my family members. I have no anxiety or cautiousness around them (AvPD stuff) but I also have none of the SPD and StPD stuff them either. I enjoy convos with them, I understand where I stand with them emotionally, I care for them. This is how I know I am weird in the first place cus I can refer to how normal I am at home with family. Despite this no one here ever makes this distinction between family and everyone else, it seems like people have the symptoms they have with everybody which leaves me very confused.

No, I'm the same with everybody. In some ways, family was worse. Maybe because I knew I couldn't escape them. Especially when I lived at home.

One exception is certain jobs I've had. In many, I've found it easy to be talkative and outgoing. Maybe this is because most of those jobs were in restaurants, where you have to be extremely social. Even so, that aspect of it never seemed to bother me.

Then there were the jobs where I could never connect. I have trouble with names and faces to begin with, which made it even harder. I once worked part-time in a video store for close to six months and I don't think I ever learned a single person's name.

I once read about cortisol being made by the brain when one goes through stress. Cortisol is a stress hormone that over time eventually can make a person apathetic to much in life. You can even it out with things like exercise and magnesium, however if you've been this way for years you'll probably still be a bit robotic to be honest. Personally I've gotten better than I used to be (once had years worth of being mute because of trauma), but old habits do die hard.

I don't think I've ever heard of this. I eat a lot of foods that are high in magnesium. Would higher doses help, as in supplements?

My family is... familiar. I know them, I know what to expect. I know how to account for their flaws and manage their expectations (even if in the case of one family member it means refusing to interact altogether, which everybody in the family has learned to accept as "just the way things are"). So they're safe. They wouldn't leave me to die, and I wouldn't leave them to die either. Also my father has many of the same intellectual interests as I do, which is nice. It's mostly just me talking about interesting things I've learned recently, but that's already more than what I need.

I don't know if I'll miss my parents after they die, but I don't miss them when I don't see them. I just notice that my routine as it is works better when I'm contact with them (which is no coincidence, because it developed around this contact to begin with). I think I'll be okay without them, maybe even better off. As for the rest of the family, they're just background noise to me. I don't want to be involved in their lives or vice-versa.

As for friends or other people I see regularly, well, there's none.

Wow zeno I guess you are fully schizoid when it comes to caring for people. This is interesting to understand to what extent you lack emotion for people. I would definitely care if my family died, as I believe I am nearly 100% "normal" emotionally with them so that would destroy me. Whereas people who say there are my friends, I would definitely care if they died a lot actually but my brain is unsure to what extent I would care.

I don't know if you're getting the idea that this is how it always was, but it definitely isn't. It was a long way for me to get where I am. I used to hate my parents with a passion. With time, they got a lot better at being reasonable human beings, I got a lot better at letting go of old resentments, and we all got a lot better at accepting our differences.

It didn't organically progress to this. For me it was like a very long term project, and my original idea was to leave them behind and never talk to them again. (Which was overkill. It's warranted for some people, but it wasn't for me.)

naps wrote:

I once read about cortisol being made by the brain when one goes through stress. Cortisol is a stress hormone that over time eventually can make a person apathetic to much in life. You can even it out with things like exercise and magnesium, however if you've been this way for years you'll probably still be a bit robotic to be honest. Personally I've gotten better than I used to be (once had years worth of being mute because of trauma), but old habits do die hard.

I don't think I've ever heard of this. I eat a lot of foods that are high in magnesium. Would higher doses help, as in supplements?

I found out about it due to researching a condition I had that caused me to twitch a lot, and kept me from getting REM sleep. Turned out that not only does magnesium deficiency cause this among many other issues, but it's close to impossible to properly test for the deficiency...so most don't know they have that as a problem.

I take supplements, as well as exercise for 20 minutes a day. If I take too much it can actually make me rather emotional around people sometimes. Before I started taking it, I had actually had a serious talk with my boyfriend over how I was constantly bored and nothing interested me as it once did. I knew it was more than simply becoming an adult too. Funny thing was I was certain a normal person would even find that concept depressing, but I didn't even care to be that way about it. I was completely hollow feeling to everything and everyone. Nowadays I hold much more intrest in people and things and am a ton more motivated, though I still have to work on a lot of face to face interaction.

When I read your first sentence I cringed.
Cus I guess you're some kewl internet kid, I'll just summarize there's much fail in your workup.

If it effects the quality of your life maybe the person to question would be a professional.

I'll take just one – you're welcome.

I just don't understand because on criteria for StPD especially it states that people are close with immediate family or very long time known close friends

Where does it say that?

schizotypal
ICD-10, 3. Poor rapport with others and a tendency to withdraw socially
DSM5, A.2.b. Intimacy: Marked impairments in developing close relationships, associated with mistrust and anxiety

schizoid
DSM5, 1. neither wants nor likes close relationships, COUNTING being part of a family
ICD-10, 8. very few, if any, close friends or personal relationship, and lack of desire for such

There's no talk of interpersonal relationships in any other of the criteria.

Also and I can't stress this enough these diagnostic manuals are not a questionnaire for the populace. Especially if you suspect yourself of having a disorder that includes impaired self-perception – which should sound obvious.

You can even it out with things like exercise and magnesium

Great example and a good hint!
When I went to professionals, first thing they did was checking my blood values. All the symptomatic can be caused by deficiencies of trace elements.

I think by groping about in the internet, pseudo-diagnosing around like a derp, you're doing more harm than good.