CLUSTER A PERSONALITY DISORDERS

10 Signs You Might Have Schizoid Personality Disorder

For those who ever wondered whether they are schizoids

1. You have a dismissive features

People with this attachment style fear abandonment and have a deep-seated fear of rejection, which means they worry that they will be hurt if they allow themselves to become too close to others. They are uncomfortable getting close to others, as they find it difficult to trust and depend on people. Despite their fear of abandonment, they may push people away because they feel ill at ease with emotional closeness.

People with SPD often live alone for long periods, leading others to conclude that they do not want intimate relationships. However, this is rarely the case. Schizoids often have little idea how to initiate relationships. They often need the other person to initiate, and as a result, they highly value even a dysfunctional connection that gets started. In addition, they are usually unable to end relationships — suffering from the relationship is often not enough.

Schizoids often require the partner to be dominant within a relationship, but they mitigate submissiveness with withdrawal. They relate to others by being of use to them, and fulfilling the expectations of others becomes a purpose for living.

2. You neither desire nor enjoy relationships

The main characteristic of this disorder is detachment from human relationships. This often extends to their family relationships because not only do they not find such relationships rewarding, they may even see them as aversive and overstimulating.

Schizoids often have an immense longing but deep anxiety and avoidance of relationships simultaneously. This results in their negativism, stubbornness and reluctance to love. Someone with this disorder will have a history of feelings of alienation and lack of safety. As a child, they experienced little gratification unless they were serving their parents’ needs somehow. In other words, their parents did not relate to them as separate people with their own needs. If they weren’t being used, they were ignored by the parent, and as a result, they could not find a way to connect with their disinterested family.

3. You are a loner

Schizoids almost always chooses solitary activities. As a result, they can find it difficult to be friendly to others, smile, make small talk, or follow the niceties of casual social encounters.

The need for closeness is often confusing to them. Rather than having a gregarious lifestyle, they will often prefer to watch television alone. They appear to be much more comfortable in the world of inanimate objects.

In other words, they are not hostile but simply indifferent. When others smile or try to develop a conversation, they can tell that people want a response, but they either do not know what to say or do not feel like saying anything.

4. You have little if any interest in having sexual experiences with another person

Schizoids prefer to not engage in sex, although they do not suffer from anorgasmia (when a person cannot achieve orgasm despite adequate stimulation). Their preference to remain alone may cause their need for sex to appear less than average.

Sex often causes schizoids to feel that their personal space is being violated. As a result, they prefer masturbation or sexual abstinence. There are, however, exceptions to this, as some schizoids engage in occasional or even frequent sexual activities.

Schizoids have an increased rate of unconventional sexual tendencies, although these are rarely acted upon. Instead, they are often labelled asexual or as having a lack of sexual identity.

5. You take pleasure in few if any activities

Schizoids are not connected to the world. If asked, they usually don’t mention any friends, coworkers, or significant relationships. Instead, they prefer to spend their free time alone. They often cannot name a show or series they like and may not understand the idea of a favourite. They typically lack fascination, immersion and even joy.

Most people are usually expressive, emotional, and social and they are perceived as such. Schizoids who lack these characteristics may be perceived as robotic and somewhat mechanical.

6. You lack close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives

Schizoids are distant and introverted — they keep to themselves and feel no need for relationships, whether platonic or sexual. By choosing to be alone, they manage to go through life with as little interpersonal stress as possible. They often need a lot of alone time and are never as involved as their partners desire (if they are in a relationship). At work, they function well but are not team players.

7. You show emotional coldness, detachment or flattened affectivity

People with SPD tend to appear emotionless, showing flat or constricted affect in interpersonal situations. Flat affect is considered a negative symptom of schizophrenia. It means diminished emotional expressions — in other words, your emotional expressions don’t show outwardly. For example, your voice may be dull and flat, and your face may not change a lot as you speak. You may also have trouble understanding the emotions of others.

Flat affect is different from shallow affect seen in Antisocial Personality Disorder (psychopathy), where the individual experiences lowered, superficial and short-lived emotions.

People with this disorder appear unemotional about most of their personal issues and seem cold and disinterested. Beneath this appearance, they are sensitive and have a longing to belong. They have suffered pain in their lives and therefore are frightened to move too close because they may get hurt again.

They also do not respond to praise or criticism and seem incapable of experiencing emotional extremes of pleasure. They rarely become excited about anything or heated or irate. Their emotional expression may be so flattened that they seem detached from the world and themselves.

8. You have a rich fantasy life

Schizoid have a degree of emotional capacity and enjoy a well-developed fantasy life. They prefer a solitary lifestyle and they make up for the lack of social contact with their fantasy lives. They are often absorbed in their own thinking and daydreaming — excessive daydreaming is often present with this disorder and in cases with severe defects in the capacity to form social relationships, dating and marriage may not be possible.

Daydreaming is different from hallucinations and delusions in the sense that schizoids are aware that their fantasy lives are not real and they are not completely detached from reality like in the case with schizophrenia.

9. You are perceived as indifferent and passive

People tend to perceive schizoids as passive. They are the person you might recognise as the classmate you remained emotionally detached and indifferent regardless of any attempts to bully them. They may appear almost numb to outside influences. People often describe them as flavourless and boring.

The same applies to being praised for their performance — academic or work-related. Schizoids seem apathetic when they receive compliments, just like when they receive criticism. They can appear to be calm, placid, untroubled, and easygoing but also possibly socially awkward and indifferent to the feelings of others. They will tend to work silently and rarely get noticed by others at work. If they are left to their own doing, they would indefinitely blend into the background.

10. You are passive-aggressive

People with personality disorders struggle to be direct as they have difficulty expressing themselves and their emotions. Because of this, they find other ways to communicate their anger and resentments. For example, silent treatment, backhanded compliments, keeping score in relationships, high levels of sarcasm, denying the existence of problems, and refusing to talk about them are all signs of passive aggression.

People with SPD struggle to be assertive, and as a result, if something has bothered them, they are unlikely to express their anger directly. For instance, if their partners came home very late and this upset them, talking about it directly would be difficult. So instead, they are likely to resort to passive-aggressive behaviours such as being cold towards their partner all evening or giving them silent treatment.

References:

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

Millon, T., Grossman, S., Millon, C., Meagher, S., & Ramnath, R. (2004). Personality disorders in modern life (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons Inc.

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