u/Guilty_Scarcity7731

I apologize that it turned into a novel. I'm very confused. I also apologize if I only succeed in making you confused as well.

I'm preparing to return to therapy after five years of no therapy at all. My intake appointment is in two months so I have plenty of time. So just know that I'm going through proper channels and I'm not in danger. I'm just looking for ideas about a specific observation about myself I will get to later.

Background information:

I have many diagnosed and undiagnosed comorbidities. I'm open to talking about them, but the non-PD diagnosis I'll mention in this post is ASD. But as far as personality disorders go, I was previously diagnosed with DPD by a former psychiatrist. However, I got another evaluation which came up with SzPD and no other comorbid personality disorders.

Three other relevant things:

1. The former psychiatrist that diagnosed me with DPD did not doubt that I might be Schizoid. He just didn't diagnose me with it for the duration I was seeing him.

2. The therapist I was seeing at the time I was seeing the aforementioned psychiatrist specifically did not believe I was Schizoid but understood that I was struggling with asociality and that my personality could be characterized as disordered in some way.

3. The psychologist that explained the results of the evaluation I mentioned explicitly stated to me that the results they had were based on me not having lied to them. Thus she understood it was possible that I was lying or mistaken about myself which could have led to an inaccurate diagnosis. With that said, I underwent the evaluation with an attitude of at least perceived total honesty because I just wanted to know the truth. That's why I got the evaluation in the first place.

The self observations I'm struggling with:

I am specifically seeking to accurately characterize for my next therapist why I have historically struggled with asociality and currently struggle maintaining the few relationships I do have. I do not fully understand why I tend to stay away from people to this pathological degree. It seems to not neatly fit into any boxes I'm aware of.

On one hand, I am largely asocial seemingly due to diagnosed ASD because masking and interpreting social information is far more effortful for me than others, thus I prefer to not do too much of it for fear of burnout.

On the other hand, I am largely asocial seemingly due to diagnosed (questionable?) SzPD because people are altogether not very interesting to me and what I do alone satisfies my interest in a way that social interaction cannot.

On yet another hand, I am largely asocial seemingly due to possible AvPD because at an earlier stage of my life my insecurities prohibited me from valuing myself and the scars of those experiences have never disappeared no matter how competent I become or how faint my consideration for others becomes as I grow older.

So…

When I ask myself why I tend to stay away from people, I am uncertain as to the origin. Are they uninterpretable, disinteresting, or do they cause fear in me? … Yes?

I feel intuitively that other people cannot be important to me because I will not allow them to be important and cannot prioritize them emotionally in a more fundamental way that is outside of my control. But at the same time I choose to engage with a select few without being forced to. Why? I don't exactly know the answer to that either.

Do I secretly want closeness? (The closeness I gain is mostly feigned imo.)

Am I just not accepting my own limitations? (Stubborn/burnt out/mistaken Avoidant in denial?)

Am I growing as a person? (Not a joke but makes me laugh because people are just... ick.)

I am not asking you to help diagnose me. I'm just asking you to read what I wrote and offer me your thoughts.

Thank you.

I'm diagnosed with ASD level 1 and SzPD but am relatively high functioning and not necessarily unhappy. Sometimes I don't know which subreddit to use to explore these two problems because the way I conceptualize them blends together in me. But I wanted to try here to explain one aspect of my life that I struggle with. The analogies I have used most frequently to explain to others my relationship to humanity are the following:

1. People are like walking paperwork. I fill them out and move on.

2. My life is like walking through a forest where the people are the trees. I don't give much honest thought towards the trees.

Although I do engage with my family and I have one close friend and several acquaintances (relationships which are atypical in their arrangement and founded on an understanding and acceptance of my ASD and SzPD) I have come to accept that I cannot deeply value other people. This has been such a key revelation in my life:

I do not think of myself as superior or inferior to anyone. I do not want to harm or control others. I enjoy life. But connection is so deeply effortful, precarious, and frankly painful that I've been forced to accept many years ago that I must for the most part remain alone.

Human beings are fascinating to me. Every day I'm held in rapture by their beauty and complexity. But I cannot bridge the gap that exists between me and them (save for a few connections) or I risk destroying myself with the stress and substance abuse that comes with chronic masking. Every day I feel trapped by this and have to counsel myself to continue on even though it's so difficult to constantly feel as though I'm so fundamentally separate from others. And yet, if this were my dying moment, the only thought I'd have is how the few people in my life would process the loss of me. I feel as though I can help people understand this aspect of me but that there is no real way to improve it except superficially. I've tried.

So my questions are: Do you understand what I'm trying to explain? Can you connect with others? Do you want to? What could it feel like to have normal concern for others?

32 yo male SzPD + ASD level 1, etc.

I had a realization lately: I've fallen into a pattern of job hopping for one reason above all others: Even after all the progress I've made, I still cannot reliably foster an environment at work in which people want to engage with me no matter how genuinely I want to engage with and be supportive of them. I feel as though my and their humanity is effectively off limits. I want to work and I want to be a human being to the people at work. But it feels like I'm not allowed to.

For this reason, I can no longer stand out in the entry-level job market. So I've decided to return to school and pursue a trade with the hopes that having greater qualification will at least grant me more value as a potential employee. I'm a good worker. I'm sober, I show up early, stay on task, and try to stay positive despite all the toxicity I've faced over the years. At this point I view independence as increasingly unlikely.

Additionally, after having talked to the few people in my life, I've determined that returning to therapy (after five years of no mental health professionals) might be a good option for me because I can no longer organize myself in the face of the frankly dysfunctional groups of people I've been forced to work with. However, I'm deeply afraid that I'll encounter the same problems I had with therapy before, namely that my therapists gave me the impression that they didn't recognize the gravity of my problems and couldn't offer me solutions I haven't either already incorporated or discarded as irrelevant.

Can you relate? Did you find any strategies that proved useful?

Thank you.