Managing the Schizoid Process - Critique of current analysis and its implications

[GOD]

A very useful article to begin with is the following www.psychologytribe.com/schizoid.pdf by Gary Yontef

As it’s a 17 page article I will slowly work my way through it over the next week or two examining paragraphs and adding / critiquing where I feel necessary.

All commentary extracted from the article will be in italics, with comments in normal font.

I really do feel that many seriously clinically depressed people may being misdiagnosed with this condition and so many of the features seem to be manifestations of this.

"The Schizoid process is important enough to warrant more attention" ... "to some degree, everyone experiences some facets of it"

Effectively there is a broad spectrum from the mild to the severe. It is inter temporal in the context that it is not a fixed condition and can fluctuate. Normally upon identification and a willingness to redress the causes and subsequent effects it can be positively managed.

"Usually presents as a loner, profoundly emotionally isolated, few close friends, not very close even in intimate relationships, drifts through life, and for whom life seems boring and meaningless" "usually show extreme approach-avoidance difficulties" ""frequently describe themselves as depressed" "tend to identify with the spaces between people than with inter human connections" "In therapy, as in many of their relationships, they tend to be present but with vitality"

An underlying theme with the types of manifestations stated above is that a seriously depressed individual could easily gravitate to all these. 1) Extremely depressed -> 2) Loner -> 3) Few Friends which they become conditionally used to and thus they start with 4) identify with the spaces between people 5) life being boring and meaningless -> 6) approach-avoidance difficulties -> 7) not close in intimate relationships etc

The issue is about the conditioning often in people’s youth that then follows them through into adulthood when they find they have sufficiently diverged from the norms that it impacts on their lives. The conditioning is important because the routine of isolation and the consequential lack of social integration exacerbates the continuance of divergence from social interaction. Often I have stated it takes around 10 years to truly migrate from a train of conscious conditioning to sufficiently embed in the subconscious fundamentally different routines to such a degree that you cannot relapse into previous conditioned non normal divergent state.

"try to live life as if in a castle on an island where they are really safe. The main feature of this isolation is a denial of attachment and the need for other people. Of course living that way brings on another terror - the terror of not being humanly connected"

As an analogy the construction of the defensive castle, it takes a considerable time to build; it is a construct of the mind that has been arrived at. Initially in their early youth the island itself would have been sufficient protection but because of 1) Extended time to think and plan and 2) familiarity conditioning and 3) insufficient alternative options (distractions from defensive structures) or allowance of initial avoidance to be further aggregated.. We end up building and enhancing further structures which become a fortress of protection... but equally a prison.

The justifications for self imprisonment (defence structures mainly through isolation) are

1) To reduce emotional interdependencies (The drain of others needs) - Avoidance can be used to be unavailable to help others and/or suffer their problems when they themselves have more than enough to contend with.
2) To engage in physical avoidance (If nobody knows I exist then it wouldn't be an issue if I decided not to exist)
3) As a containment of emotional issues, to be kept under guard. Also to act as a barrier to even more issues being added.
4) Allows enhanced and extended periods of introspection
5) Allows the gatekeeper to moderate inbound connections to a level that can be managed. (Hypersensitivity can mean that every connection and interaction has significance and importance, rather than applying a filter type approach with others need dependencies and so forth

"Schizoid individuals have to struggle to maintain their human existence as individual persons. The human sense of self and good ego functioning cannot develop and be sustained without interpersonal engagement, but schizoid isolating defenses attenuate the interpersonal bond to the point of endangering ego development and maintenance"

If we take the position that the person in question has been deviated from their natural dispositional state of interaction then this can be accepted. However, some people simply do not require anything like the level of human interaction that would appear "normal".

Getting back to the Castle analogy another aspect is about an "all or nothing" approach in "attack and defence" which is opposite to more transient nature of say the "Town market" where the people have greater confidence in those around them and the varying levels of interactions they have with different people.

Another point that is very important is one of the inflexibility of the "Castle Wall mentality".

... To be continued...04/02/10

[Zeliar791]

This pretty describes the issues I have been suffering, the fact is that I was unable to get the assistance I required growing up, and I did not have a self identity, I was forced to create a wall in order to avoid being manipulated by others. This wall is a result of severe trauma that I have endured due to a highly unstable environment. The mobility in America is incredible, I just cannot fathom it in the slightest. It seems as though the process was a bit too hasty. The idea was to make everything as simple as possible in order to promote rapid activity, but in doing such people are now in a severe state of confusion. I notice these signs pretty much everywhere. It always has been like this growing up for me, I get myself in these situation were I am expected to understand everything, and as a result I get lose track of what I am supposed to be doing. I have always been puzzled at the way things are done in America. People are not taken accounted for, no matter what you try to do in this country, there is no signposts. It is too easy to get lost. It seems to me that people are going faster every year. Look at how we expand in the west, we do not even bother settling the territory first. Another problem was the technological boom. The schizoid process is basically a process in which things are going too fast to be properly computed. There is simply too much waste in this country then what can be properly managed, and I am being effected by it everyday. To put it mildly, there wasn't any management in the environment I grew up in. This is the cause for all my psychological difficulties. Everything just went too damn fast for me, and I was unable to make sense out of anything, as a result I have endured severe confusion. My isolation was a means to cope with all this, as I was unable to process information. In order to prevent a neurological breakdown, I pretty much shutted down my entire brain. I have just managed to work out of it. It seems like people were trying to destroy my mind.

[Zeliar791]

Basically my solution to this problem is to create friction between the conscious and subconscious in order to spark a connection of some kind. The process is extremely painful, but I have reasoned out that unless I make a deliberate attempt to sacrifice myself, I will not be in any harm of terminating the process. As I work myself into the subconscious my sense of time slows, but time actually progresses faster as a result. I have chatted on some sites, it appears that most ignore me, and few give insignificant replies. I really do not understand why words such as "faggot" and "gay" are in such wide circulations in these dialogues.

[GOD]

Basically my solution to this problem is to create friction between the conscious and subconscious in order to spark a connection of some kind. The process is extremely painful, but I have reasoned out that unless I make a deliberate attempt to sacrifice myself, I will not be in any harm of terminating the process. As I work myself into the subconscious my sense of time slows, but time actually progresses faster as a result. I have chatted on some sites, it appears that most ignore me, and few give insignificant replies. I really do not understand why words such as "faggot" and "gay" are in such wide circulations in these dialogues.

lol, you're hard to understand Zeliar, you talk about of a lot of things that seem tangential although interconnected to your thoughts and views. Think you need to clearly attach what you talk about directly to the paragraphs or statements that prompt them! But, your statement about using friction between sub conscious and the conscious prompted me to think of something which will be my next blog posting.

[Zeliar791]

So all I have to do is work all activity into the subconscious and I can fix this process? There really is only two ways to fix a schizoid process, overcoming coming through some form of creative thinking, or slowing the process while working out various impulses. I didn't choose the latter because I do not like having what I need not in front of me. If I had known it was going to be like this I might as well of reached out to those level ten girls from the collective subconscious, unfortunately there was not very many of them, and I did not have frequent proximity either... All processes were seemingly trying to crush me amongst level 1-3 types. I seriously do not like being stuck with them. I noticed that my grades in school were not a factor either... My entire life I have been bullied by a bunch of ugly goblins, and before I knew it I was left naked in some damn wilderness. Anyone can imagine why I am in isolation at this moment.