Same anon as the one with the schizoaffective readings comment (not the original question). Would you mind telling me more about how your DID experience and how your SzPD influences your DID? I've been diagnosed with DID, C-PTSD and autism and throughout the years I continue to surprised how much my autism affects my DID presentation. - š šŖ¼š«§ (to find my question more easily, I hope this combination isn't taken)
In my experience, SzPD and DID tend to play into each other quite a bit. The anhedonia and alexithymia from my SzPD often worsens the derealization and depersonalization from, and vice versa. The identity confusion from my DID is made worse by my lack of a core self from my SzPD. It's near impossible to ground myself when I don't care about anything in my external reality and I don't emotionally react to things that other people find "calming". So on and so forth.
I've felt for a while that for me, the SzPD and DID kind of come from the same place. They're both based in disconnecting from the world around me and my own internal experiences. They both seem to fill this role of "psychologically playing dead" in response to overwhelmingly stressful experiences.
When I was a child, it wasn't safe to consciously process what was happening around me, so I just didn't, and that lead to me forming alters. It also wasn't safe for me to develop a personality, because every little thing I said, did, thought or felt resulted in me being traumatized. So again, I just didn't, and that lead to me becoming schizoid.
They're both based in the same thing: it wasn't safe to exist, it wasn't safe to be a person. So my brain just tried to become "nothing". Both through heavily dissociating away from and compartmentalizing my experiences, and by never developing the ability to properly process emotions or form attachments to people.
Or something like that, I guess.
SzPD also complicates my DID because of the fact that a core trait of being schizoid is "lacking a personality", so to speak. It can be difficult for me to identify alters when all of us are so lacking in personhood. For me, identifying different alters tends to be a matter of observing differences in memory and behaviour as opposed to "personality".
We still have traits that make us distinct, like identifying with different ages, genders and internal senses of appearance. But it can be very difficult to determine differences in personality traits when we're all so emotionally flat and disconnected from everything.
It was also hard for me to even realize for a long time that I was switching between alters, because I was always lacking the feeling of having a core self at all. I noticed that I had episodes of thinking, feeling and behaving "differently", but it never felt like having multiple personalities, because I've never felt like I had a personality at all. All of us just feel like hollow shells at our core, it's the traits that decorate the outside of those shells that differ.
I've also noticed that while we are all schizoid, individually we seem to represent different subtypes of SzPD. Not entirely sure if that's literally what's happening, but there is variability of SzPD presentation across parts. Some parts seem to have traits of other PDs as well, especially those that formed earlier in life when our schizoid traits were less concrete.
There's probably more I'm forgetting, but hopefully that gives you a better idea of what comorbid DID and SzPD can be like.
