Emotional life

schizoids.info

Emotional life

Emotional life of the schizoid

1-Hugs and Praise

When your mother hugs you, you feel uncomfortable and do not respond.

If your wife or your sister becomes emotional, you cannot empathize, and will try to end their displays of emotion.

Your mother may be disappointed by your lack of response. And your wife or partner

will certainly feel your lack of passion

and affection. If your partner is one of those women/men who "needs" to feel loved and desired, you will have a problem.

Praise produces two different reactions in you. On the one hand it sounds good and pleases you.

On the other hand, you may reject it or play it down because you feel uncomfortable, and dislike being

the centre of the attention. You prefer to go unnoticed, so you show indifference even though

you may feel some inner satisfaction.

Sometimes, though, you don’t even feel that inner satisfaction. Instead, you are totally indifferent.

2- Receiving and Giving Affection

When people receive affection, they feel cared about, and their tendency is to return affection

to the one who gave it, When schizoids receive affection, they feel little emotion

and return little, or no affection. The schizoid has limited

capacity to receive or to give affection. This is one of the reasons for their isolation in the social environment.

3-Neither Pleasure, nor Pain

A characteristic of the schizoid is his/her limited capacity to feel pleasure. The correct term for this is anhedonia.

Although this is true, it also has a positive side. While ordinary people enjoy many things we cannot enjoy,

many things also cause them pain - friends, family, professional success or failure –

which the schizoid tolerates quite well.

So, though we experience less pleasure than the average person, we also experience less pain.

4- Grief at the Death of the Mother

My father and mother have died and, in both cases, I was aware of the sense of desolation felt by those around me.

For me, however, it was a day just like any other. While my sisters were devastated,

and my brothers deeply affected,

I realized that I felt nothing, I was completely unmoved. This made me wonder, in what way did I love my mother?

And in what way did she love me?

5-Friends
One of the most important things for creating a sense of well-being, is a person’ts circle of friends

or social support network.

This becomes even more important from adolescence onwards. Someone who does not have

any friends may be branded as weird,

or even perverse. As schizoids, we are condemned to live our lives without friends, from youth to old age.

We can never rely upon this excellent backup in any situation.. We might go for a walk or for a cup of coffee,

but we have to do so alone. We also have to extricate ourselves from any crisis alone.

This is a harsh destiny. If you are not schizoid try, for a moment, to imagine it.

6- Who is Going to Be a Friend?

The story is always the same: you are introduced to someone, you talk to them, you like them, and they like you too.

But, one way or another you you become accustomed to the fact that you will be unable to talk to them again,

and that you will avoid meeting them in the future. It just happens, without conscious thought you simply avoid them .

If you do bump into them, you exchange greetings, and then just slip away. If you see them on your left,

you immediately go to the right, all the time wondering what you're doing and why.

The same response is repeated again and again.

You go to work. In the distance you see a colleague. You should say hello and talk to him.

Instead, you move away to avoid him.

When approaching the front door, you notice another colleague. You slow your pace, so you don’t have to meet him.

You go out for a walk. If you do so in your own neighbourhood, you will meet neighbours and acquaintances,

and this makes you feel uncomfortable. So you take your walks elsewhere, where nobody knows you.

This is how we treat people who might have become friends .

7-Reply Intellectually

There are certain instances where the normal response to a social interaction would be an emotional one.

In these circumstances, we will change the subject and respond coldly, intellectually, rationally,

and/or aseptically. This is our escape.

8 - The Absent Relative

The schizoid is the absent relative. He/she is the missing sibling at family meals. He/she is the nephew/niece

who does not attend funerals. He/She is the cousin who doesn’t attend the village festivals,

and ‘escapes’ from Christmas.

He/She is the uncle/aunt who is absent at your birthday. While most family members are generally present,

the schizoid is missing. He doesn’t act as cousin, uncle, nephew, brother nor son.

He/she is the absent relative.

Of course, the rest of the family eventually respond in a similar way. But this is no hardship.

Sure, you may be annoyed at being ignored by your relatives, but you won’t become emotional about it.

9- Cold and Lonely

The schizoid's loneliness is the result of at least two factors. The first is their discomfort in social relations.

But there is another one, and that is their emotional coldness. When you approach someone

with some emotional warmth

and he/she responds in the same way, the relationship has a future. However, if you perceive coldness in his/her response,

this will douse your own emotions, and the relationship has little chance of success.

When one of your personal traits is to respond to others with little emotion, you will have few friends.

10-Misfit

Emotion is contagious. Panic is contagious. Fear too. You can create fear, just as you can create ideas.

Joy is contagious too.

Emotions appear to spread outwards. People who shine with joy, and who are easy-going,

are solicited as friends.

These emotions make people feel comfortable. People who are fearful, and who appear to have problems are avoided.

These emotions make you feel uncomfortable. If you behave like this while still trying to be sociable,

you will find that people avoid you. And, if you persist, you will be rejected.

Eventually you gain the impression that you are an outlaw.

11-Nobody loves me

I had a serious relationship. She fell in love with me, and fostered the relationship with her love and her faith in it.

The relationship grew strong, thanks above all, to her. One day I confessed: “until today,

you are the first person who has loved me”.

That was exactly how I felt - that nobody had ever loved me. Not even my parents. In one of many consultations with my specialist,

I said the same thing. He did not believe it was possible. And he was correct - it was not true that my parents did not love me.

But it was true that my relationships was the first time I ever felt that someone loved me.

< My parents, who were emotionally cold, never succeeded in making me feel loved. >

When we were children, my father once told us: “if you get into trouble and end up in prison,

don;t think I will bail you out”.

I replied: “not even if we are innocent, and arrested by mistake?”. Since then, I never asked my parents for help, and

I have never asked anyone else for help either. Recently, a schizoid told me: “nobody cares about me,

except my girlfriend”. I must confess that I have also felt that way sometimes.

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