In this video, I'm going to, just, run off some random thoughts about being schizoid, and how it
influences us in terms of our relationship with society. How it makes us different from society,
and the ways in which our motivations differ from the majority of other people due to this.
I remember people suggesting to me that there's something wrong with me because
I don't trust people and because I don't open up to people. I don't feel comfortable
sharing personal information about myself, and this is meant to be a disorder. But I
don't really see how those aspects of being schizoid actually constitute a disorder.
When you look around at the world and you see the state of a lot of people's relationships and a lot
of the difficulties that they're going through as a consequence of trusting people, and as a
consequence of sharing personal information about themselves and wanting to fit into the group,
it seems that not doing all those things isn't such a bad idea.
By having these, defenses in place, that creates a barrier between us and other people,
it's cutting out a lot of issues. It's a lot of things that we just don't have to deal with, and
that's got to be like, the positive side of being scared. I think being different from other people,
in the sense of how we think and how we function, gives a good reason not to trust people. This is
linked to the fact that a lot of people really are primarily users, which means that they're
really just like weighing people up to see, like what they can get from people or how they can
take advantage of other people or capitalize or exploit what other people have going on.
So in that sense, because schizoid individuals don't have these sorts of agendas,
it automatically puts us at a disadvantage in relationships. In the sense that
if we had the same intentions, we could like work out some kind of a deal with other people,
but because we don't have those intentions, it's a very imbalanced situation, motivationally.
I think the reason why we don't have those intentions is because we do tend to be
self-sufficient. We derive a lot of interest from involving ourselves, and so we're not really
going to need other people in the same way as the majority of people do. People need people
for comfort, they need people for praise, they need people for company. There are a lot of
needs that we don't have. So in that sense, it is quite unbalanced when if we were to consider
having a relationship with another person. Okay, so individuals tend to be unaware of their
needs. We're unaware of our needs because, from early on in our life, we are engaged in a habit of
disconnecting from our needs. This was primarily because we didn't really see other people as
being able to fulfill our needs. And then over time, by engaging in this pattern, it's easy to
become unaware of your needs or to feel that you don't have any. The needs that we are aware of,
we tend to want to fulfill by ourselves. This can take different forms. In the main,
we tend to be very self-sufficient, so that we don't have to rely on other people for anything.
But also, we can use our imagination or fantasy and other psychological mechanisms
to fulfill a need such as emotional needs. What I've noticed about schizoid individuals
is that we vary a lot in terms of our emotional relationship within ourselves. So by this, I mean
that there are some schizoids who seem to be very aware of their emotions, and others who are not.
I would say that the reason for this is going to depend upon upbringing and childhood experiences.
There are some people who were left alone to, freely experience their emotions in whichever
way that they wanted to. And then there were other people who felt that they needed to suppress and
disconnect from emotions in order to survive the environment that they were in. In particular,
this will be people who were in environments that were triggering a lot of negative emotions within.
And so, I think that this accounts for the variance in the different spectrum
of emotional connectivity within schizoid individuals.
I think that whether or not we are in touch with our emotions,
what is the same for all schizoids is that we don't depend on other people to meet
our emotional needs, and we tend to be quite sufficient at dealing with this realm. When
it comes to physical needs, we tend to be lower on that spectrum. And this is because
a lot of us are detached from our physical bodies, which means that our physical needs,
apart from obvious needs like for food and shelter etc., don't really factor very high on our agenda.
Therefore, we can be quite content with simple situations and circumstances,
and we don't really tend to want things outside of, like basic needs.
In society, this is quite unusual. With the aspects of fantasy and imagination, we can be very
contented within ourselves and by ourselves. This could take away a lot of motivation because, in
our minds, we can generate experiences that don't depend on us going out into the physical world
and actually having those real-life experiences. And this saves us a lot of energy expenditure.
So whereas people might feel the need that they need to, go to a lot of places or have a lot of
real-life experiences, we can generate experiences within our mind. So in that sense, our need to
engage in the external world and socially is going to be less than the average person.
I think that people tend to notice that we're different,
and often this is judged in a negative way because other people are judging by their own standards.
And they probably see a lot of times, I think, that we are lacking in things that they have.
But the things that we're lacking in tend not to be things that are
important to us. So whereas they might think that, oh, we're not competitive
and we're not ambitious, and we're not trying to get attention, other people can see this as
a deficit or lack, that means that we're less than they are. But in reality, it doesn't.