What is Schizoid Personality Disorder?
Schizoid personality disorder (SPD) is a collection of deeply ingrained, persistent, and maladaptive traits and behaviours centered around interpersonal safety. These personality issues stem back to an adverse early childhood environment where the child’s needs, emotions, and safety were intruded upon, ignored, or compromised.
Someone with this disorder struggles to regulate a comfortable level of intimacy and closeness with others, which are too often experienced as overbearing and intrusive. To handle interpersonal stress, people with schizoid personality disorder are prone to relying on certain psychological defenses which distance and detach themselves from their fears and anxieties.
The different approaches to SPD
When searching for information about schizoid personality disorder, the most commonly referred to resource is the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which characterises the schizoid person as having no interest in relationships (emotional or sexual), lacking emotional affect, displaying indifference to the opinions of others, and living a highly solitary life. The DSM also suggests schizoid personality disorder has belonging on the schizophrenia spectrum, as well as having some relation to Autism Spectrum Disorder. The details and description are arguably sparse, shallow, and confusing. The DSM version of SPD has a lack of identity and understanding into the disorder, likely a result of it being conflated with several unrelated conditions.
Ralph Klein’s and James F. Masterson’s psychodynamic approach to disorders of the self (borderline, narcissistic and schizoid disorders) distances schizoid personality disorder from the typical description found in the DSM. Their work (based on the earlier work of Fairbairn and Guntrip) describes almost the opposite — of a person weighed down heavily with unbearable emotion and a longing for human connection, but with an equally unbearable fear of the interpersonal vulnerability involved. The result is a seesaw effect where the schizoid person splits between feeling engulfed by others (but connected), to detached and isolated (but free). This is the framework this article is based off of.
The ‘schizoid conundrum’ is finding a balance between these two polarising states of being, where enough connection can be achieved without feeling consumed by it.
What defenses do people with SPD use, and why use them?
Schizoid defenses revolve around protecting a sensitive inner self from the pain, stress, and hostility of the outside world. As a young child, the schizoid person did not feel safe and secure — they were rejected, neglected, abused, intruded upon, and were unattuned to by caregivers. Children raised in these situations feel their survival is fundamentally threatened, and adapt in creative ways.
Dissociation is a basic coping mechanism used by everyone to some degree in life, but is taken to a more precise, involuntary extreme for those with schizoid issues. People with SPD learned to use dissociation to disconnect from the physical and/or mental pain they endured in childhood, and by adulthood it has become the default go to when stressors are encountered. This can manifest as anything from detaching from the body (depersonalisation), the world (derealisation), or splitting off thinking from feelings and navigating life from a purely intellectual perspective.
Distancing is used, to many creative degrees, as a way to maneuver the interpersonal difficulties faced by the person with schizoid issues. Distancing can be physical or emotional, and is not always as clear cut as full-blown isolation. Some people may only have professional relationships as it establishes an unspoken boundary, preventing further intimacy. Some may have deeply passionate relationships, but only with people who they rarely see, and can control how often they meet.
Extreme independence allows the person with schizoid issues to rely on no one but themselves (to the degree that this is possible). Due to their upbringing, which lacked proper development of trust and emotional nurturing, people with schizoid issues have a weak sense of self, and are especially sensitive to feeling enveloped by other people’s emotions, opinions, and decisions. An over reliance on the self is a way to bypass this and feel more in control of life.
Internalising emotional needs keeps these very vulnerable (and easily exploited) parts of the self safe. Many people with schizoid issues keep their thoughts and feelings private, and instead express them as internal fantasies (daydreams, internal worlds). They may even fall in love with a real person, but due to interpersonal fear will only indulge in a fantasy daydream relationship with this person.
Splitting (lacking whole object relations and object constancy) is more commonly associated with borderline personality disorder, but there is a schizoid equivalent as well — between feeling either safe or unsafe. When someone with SPD feels unsafe, they struggle to hold onto positive feelings for the person they’ve split on, and may see them as suddenly and completely dangerous. This can then trigger other defenses such as dissociating and distancing.
Other characteristics of SPD
Everyone with schizoid personality issues presents a little differently, and to varying degrees of severity. But there are quite a few commonly reported experiences that appear consistent with a schizoid personality.
- Existentialism and existential depression
People with SPD sometimes isolate from others so much that it brings about an existential meaninglessness to life. Without connection, they are lost in abyssal nothingness, unable to connect again. - Poor negotiating skills
From having their boundaries and feelings disregarded so much in childhood, people with SPD may not feel comfortable, or may not even realise that they can haggle, ask for help, or try to accommodate themselves. - Lack of basic trust
Trust was not properly fostered by caregivers in childhood, either handed out inconsistently or not at all. This underdeveloped ability to trust follows into adulthood. - Other mental health issues
Depression, anxiety, C-PTSD, dissociative disorders, substance abuse, and many other mental health issues can exist alongside SPD.
The takeaway
When schizoid personality disorder is understood from an object relations context — in that it’s an adaptation to a certain childhood environment — a clear cause and effect can be seen. There is a depth and complexity to the personality disorder which goes beyond simple affectlessness and indifference. Instead of impoverished emotionality, we see intense and sensitive, but undernourished feeling. There is a rejected child inside, which is doing their best to stand without the help of others.
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