What Does a Healthy Schizoid Look Like?
To begin even remotely defining what a healthy schizoid looks like, one needs to first understand what health really means.
What is Health?
There are many versions of health – physical health, emotional health, mental health, spiritual health. These might appear as separate forms of health, but they all overlap. When you're in poor physical health, having a cold or some serious illness, your emotional health will be impacted – you might become depressed or irritable. When your mental health is poor, such as through overthinking or biased perception – your emotional health will suffer through stress or dysregulation. And we all know what emotional stress does to physical health – poor immune response, high blood pressure, and such.
Health is a state of capacity to handle life. That would be my broad definition. Whether it's a capacity to handle physical challenges, such as illness, or emotional challenges when someone does something against you, or mental challenges when you're faced with a problem to be solved.
To be able to handle such aspects of life is health. But not just challenges – one needs to also be able to handle good things. Be able to handle being loved, respected. Be able to handle abundance, peace, ability to pursue one's goals and wishes.
It's a common thing to associate poor mental health with inability to handle "bad" things. But health is more than this. Health is also about being able to handle what's good, without sabotaging it, blocking it, avoiding it or destroying it.
Can "Schizoid" and "Healthy" Coexist?
Some could say that the concept of a Healthy Schizoid is a contradiction within itself – how can health and schizoid go together, if schizoid by itself is something that is not healthy, not normal, not good?
But if we take a more neutral perspective, "schizoid" is nothing more than something associated with a split, fragmentation, complexity, one-expressed-through-many. It doesn't need to carry any negative value judgment, apart from the one that we assign to it. Yes, there are negative experiences and types of situations associated with being "schizoid", but those don't need to make the "schizoid" as something negative in itself.
What Schizoids Struggle to Handle
What does a schizoid normally find difficult to handle? I will make some generalisations, but these all depend on a person.
Relationships: Positive and negative experiences associated with them. One might struggle with facing attachment, dependence, being seen and being unseen; being rejected, abandoned, but also being pursued and reached out to. Any of those cause discomfort, overwhelm, confusion or stress.
Self-actualisation: Pursuit of ambition, expression of the highest self. One could also say a pursuit of meaning in a grounded way, such as career, belongingness somewhere, pursuit of ideals or contribution. One struggles with both sticking to meaning, and facing any lack of it. That's a crucial point too – how one handles lack of that higher meaning or ultimate nihilism, when forced to consider that perspective.
Emotions and feelings: Positive and negative, whether emanating from self or others. Only a moment of it is tolerable, and it only needs to happen when one is by themselves. Same is applicable to the opposite state – struggling to tolerate numbness, lack of feeling, a void. Whatever the emotional state, or a lack of it, is also often quite poorly handled by a schizoid.
I will leave it at that – can you think of any other aspects of life that a schizoid struggles to handle?
Would one remain schizoid if being able to handle those aspects of human experience?
The Health Ideal Worth Pursuing
I doubt there is a person who can handle it all. If you think about it, life is pretty crazy – we're thrown into it without answers, explanations. Life in itself is a horror, the more you face it: it's based on animals killing each other to survive, it's based on death, losing loved ones. It's also based on sickness, vulnerability, loneliness. Sure, there are positive experiences too, but at the end of the day, death and sickness will come for all of us sooner or later.
Sorry for getting so grim here, but my point is that we are all vulnerable to all these horrific aspects of human existence. Who can handle it all constantly, without stress, without anxiety, without fear or sadness? Without wanting to escape into games, alcohol or other altered states of consciousness?
So perhaps health, realistically, is about doing the best we can. To handle what we can, however much and however often we can.
Defining Healthy Schizoid
If we consider that the baseline of a schizoid personality is hypersensitivity which colours our unique way of perceiving and experiencing life, as well as how we deal with people and challenges, then we have an interesting situation. Because hypersensitivity, by itself, could be seen as in conflict with an idea of facing and handling life.
When I'm sensitive, my tolerance for what I'm sensitive to is lower than average. I will want to avoid the experience more than someone whose tolerance for it is higher.
We can of course start talking about "growing a pair", becoming "thick skinned" and such, which can work to some extent and enable one to develop greater tolerance to experiences one finds too intense. And that will work, in some cases. But at the end of the day, we need to consider the cost. Let me explain.
If I have a phobia of spiders, surely I can try exposure therapy and eventually I might be able to pet one. To reach that state I must tolerate my fear. How? Through stopping my reaction towards it. How? Through ignoring it, dissociation, pure acceptance. For some reason an image of a poor deer came to mind, completely giving up and letting go right before being eaten by a tiger.
Obviously, the situation with schizoid sensitivity is way more complex, and obviously the last thing we want is to dissociate or zone out so hard that we become invisible to ourselves and others. And yet, these are the techniques that most schizoids use in order to be able to handle life. Quite a predicament then.
But, it's possible that there wouldn't exist a predicament if not for the underlying social expectation that one should be able to handle more. To do more, to feel more, to pursue more goals. More, more, more – that's the pressure that many schizoids can't stand. How often do you burn out from all that performance by the way?
However, it's important to consider the possibility that in some situations, it would be more beneficial to be able to handle more, rather than retreat to one's shell.
Again, we go back to an idea of doing our best. Are you doing your best in terms of handling various aspects of life that are good for you? But also, can you be content with what you are already being able to handle?
What does healthy handling really looks like?
For some, handling might mean staying present through discomfort instead of zoning out. For others, it might mean expressing a need even when it feels unsafe.
It’s about acknowledging the feeling, the stress, the numbness. It’s about paying attention, rather than turning our gaze away.
No matter what the situation, the common denominator of it all is the willingness to face the experience without running away. Easier say than done, probably, because it’s not like we are always consciously choosing to run away, shut down or avoid!
Allowing, Not Just Facing
There's also another perspective to all of this, perhaps less pressured, less about doing, and more about allowing. More yin, if you will.
Perhaps health is not just about actively facing life, but also allowing life to express itself through us. The extent to which we allow it to happen, without shutting down, blocking, escaping, is the extent we could call ourselves healthy.
And it's easy to stay in a shutdown, resistance or escape – sometimes quite unwillingly, or maybe more often than I'm willing to admit. Like a Mimosa plant that shuts down as a reaction to the smallest touch.
Can Mimosa help itself? No, it shuts down automatically. That's what makes it a Mimosa.
But we are more than plants, thankfully. We can push ourselves, a little. We can modify our behaviour. We have some ability to choose for ourselves. So perhaps, it’s about finding some balance.
Perhaps true health isn’t just about how much we can handle, but how deeply we can allow life to move through us - without collapsing or fleeing. And it will manifest differently for each person.
Conclusion
And as I'm approaching the closure of this article, I realised that I didn't really provide a definition of a healthy schizoid. Only a few signposts towards something that each of us needs to define for themselves.
Maybe it’s about learning to live with our sensitivity, accepting it, and letting it flow through us as yet another expression of life.