How I Became a Vulcan and Back Again
(extremely long)
A multitude of factors went into me developing schizoid personality disorder: I became chronically (and debilitatingly) ill when I was 17, and became more and more socially isolated as I got worse health-wise, especially once I graduated from high school. Ever since then (I’m 25 now), I have spent the majority of my time at home, interacting with only my family and various doctors in person, and with people online in a limited way (more of a lurker - me interacting as much as I have been on this board is a relatively new development.)
I had had social problems before, though. Social anxiety and the inability to open myself up and become close to new people, mainly. This probably had a lot to do with my parents’ social problems, some of which might be genetic. Basically, my mother has no friends and doesn’t care to have them. She interacts with us and people at work and doctors and other professionals when she has to, and no one else, which she is fine and happy with. She is also very very well controlled. I remember two instances when I was a kid when she lost control of her emotions and cried, and both were supremely scary for me. If she has any vices, it doesn’t show, and she also doesn’t seem to need.
My father is the least self-aware person I have ever known, and except for anger, he does not express emotions and needs, though he is clearly quite needy and insecure and not very well self-controlled emotionally, which makes sense, given how little self-awareness he has. He is also something of a drama queen, blowing things out of proportion and very negative. He expects the worst of everything and everyone.
I also have a propensity for drama, and I have always felt that I am too emotional and needy, which I think is the result of my mother’s example. I feel like I have to be like her and fail totally and that I have to avoid at all costs being like my father. Intellectually, I don’t think I’m actually any more emotional or needy in reality than other people are, and in fact am very controlled in my emotions and behavior and very self-reliant, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.
So basically, all of these factors - my personality and upbringing - led to me being very controlled of my needs and emotions and feeling as though it was shameful to have either, really, beyond moderate happiness and frustration, and my illness-induced isolation led me to feel very unhappy and lonely, and my solution given my poor social and coping skills was to shut off my negative emotions. The result is that I unknowingly also shut off any feelings I had towards other people, and to do that, I had to convince myself that other people, outside my immediate family, had nothing I wanted or needed. I felt I was smarter than most people (not true) and odd to the point that I couldn’t relate to other people and simply was not cut out for relationships, so why bother? And I was fine with that.
I also have had all of my life the somewhat desperate need to be smart and correct, always. Logic was king, and emotions clearly made people stupid and illogical, not to mention out of control, and I prided myself on cultivating intelligence and logic over emotion. I also needed to see myself and the world with as true and honest and objective a perspective as possible, because only then could my thoughts and decisions be really truly correct.
This was all in my very early twenties. There was a question at one point about whether my fatigue and resulting lack of ambition was entirely physical or possibly had a mental component (physical, it turns out), so I was already seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist, which is extremely lucky for me. About a year into it, he pointed out to me that I met the requirements for schizoid personality disorder, including the lack of desire or need for forming relationships, including sexual relationships, outside my immediate family, and the tendency to deal with life by retreating to a made up world in my head, which I also did. If I started feeling bad in real life for some reason, which became more frequent as the years went by and I was unable to accomplish anything, really, I would just daydream about being in this separate world where everything went great and forget about the real world. I also used books and television to a lesser extent to achieve this, but my “world” was better, since it was entirely under my control. It got to the point where I was very very good at it, at not feeling any negative emotions and not feeling anything for other people. They mainly baffled me and I felt superior to them.
So when my shrink pointed out to me exactly how I’d become, I was horrified at the realization. For all my emphasis on seeing the complete truth and being honest to myself, I’d managed to dupe myself and overlook this huge pattern of dysfunctional behavior on my part. I suddenly realized how I was limiting and damaging myself, and that I couldn’t be trusted to be acting in my best interest rather than subconsciously sabotaging myself. That resulted in the immediate formation of kind of a board in my head overseeing not only my behavior (which I also was very controlling of) but also my thoughts and feelings, which I had previously just smooshed and shoved out of view and basically ignored as needed.
So now I was aware of and had to acknowledge all of my dysfunction, and I very much feared (and still do) that I’d done permanent damage and I wouldn’t be able to form close relationships with people. For a while, I had a hard time dealing with all of the pain and fear resulting from these revelations and I spent a lot of time in my dream world while also aware how dumb and self-defeating that behavior was (can’t make the real world better if you’re spend your time daydreaming).
My desperate need to fix all of this and become a whole person sparked a lot of slow change in learning to deal with my emotions without hiding from them and learning to like people again and be interested in them and understand and feel for them. The wanting people in my life again part is completely recovered at this point. I did a pretty quick 180 on that one. I’ve also been avidly stockpiling reasons that emotions are beneficial, not to mention unavoidable, and have entirely changed my viewpoint on that.
The part I’m still stuck in is the controlling my emotions part. I still have a hard time letting myself feel sadness and fear. I hate crying, and I do my damnedest to keep my face and body from betraying the negative emotions I feel. I also hate to admit negative emotions outloud.
I also still daydream, but I’ve recently been able to get to the point where I am moving forward in my life (after many years of trying and repeatedly failing to manage to change in this way and hating myself for it) and I don’t need to retreat to it hardly at all. Another interesting twist is that my dream world stopped being so sunshine and roses. For the past couple of years, I’ve often put myself in scenarios that cause me to feel very strong, often negative emotions that I can’t quite let myself feel in real life yet. I suppose it’s because it provides me with a safe, controlled place to experiment with emotion and learn to manage it.
The internet (and specifically, this message board) provides me with another safe playground. I can learn how to appropriately interact with people in a context that allows me to compose myself before interacting and not have to expose my raw, immediate emotional reactions. I also don’t have to deal with other people’s emotions close up, both of which scare me a great deal. I still don’t know how to become close to people, though. That is, intellectually I know how, I just don’t have any experience. I’ve had to relearn all these social cues and appropriate responses, and I don’t trust myself to be able to pick them up in real life and react appropriately in the moment.
The next step is to start interacting with people face to face in real life and attempt to establish emotional (and physical) intimacy with new people, and I’m very scared. I’ve put it off for a long time, and my illness has provided a fantastic (and often legitimate) excuse not to. I’m really scared I’ll find out I’m not able to be close to people anymore, and as long as I don’t try, there’s still hope that I can, you know? I expect these fears are unfounded, but the only way to find out is to try.
I am also highly reluctant to ask for help and admit that I need other people. I often feel like such a bother when I do, and, of course, everyone has difficulty exposing vulnerabilities, including me. I’m getting better at it, though.
So that’s where things are for now. My shrink has been invaluable in pointing things out to me that I’d rather not see or hadn’t thought of or learned, and he makes me stay focused on the end goal and going in the right direction. I think I’m extremely lucky that I was in therapy as these dysfunctional behaviors developed into a big problem, and that they had only just begun to be cemented in place. I think it would have been much much harder to change them if I’d had many years to become entrenched in them.
As it is, I am still inclined to escape the real world and push people and emotions away. I have the feeling that will always be the case. It’s my easy guaranteed way out. I’ll need to be vigilant, although I expect I’ll be pulled in that direction less intensely as my new coping skills and thought/behavior patterns become second nature. I’ll also have to keep conquering various social situations, but it’s the becoming comfortable with my emotions part that’s the real hindrance.
And there you have it.