Internal experiences of ASD and SPD?

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I know this topic has been done to death, but I didn't get a good understanding from the other threads, so I will ad nauseate it again.

Here are the DSM criteria for schizoid personality disorder:

On the outside, these criteria look a lot like the social aspects of AS, except for "takes pleasure in few, if any, activities" and "appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others" and the age requirement for diagnosis. But what is going on inside the schizoid mind? The Wikipedia article keeps harping on emotional distancing and withdrawal in relationships and interactions, but I'm not sure how this translates into the internal experience of the schizoid person. Are the emotions too intense, thereby causing a person to avoid them? Is there emotional hypersensitivity in SPD like sensory hypersensitivity in ASD? Why do people withdraw so much into the internal world in SPD vs. ASD?

I tried to figure out what was going on inside the mind on a schizoid forum, but I still didn't get it. One person said that if you think you have both AS and SPD, then you only have AS, because only a true schizoid knows what it's like be schizoid, but this person didn't describe what it was like at all.

Has anyone been diagnosed with SPD? Or know what it's like? Is there a lot of overlap between the internal experiences of AS and SPD?

Edit: I just read that "autism" and "schizoid" were both terms coined by Eugen Bleuler, who also coined "schizophrenia". He did a lot of coining that stuck.

AS and schizoid personality disorder can indeed appear similar superficially but people with schizoid personality disorder have a limited range of emotions while people with AS do not. People with schizoid personality disorder might have some degree of paranoia while this is not characteristic of someone with AS.

People with schizoid personality disorder usually want to really be alone to engage in fantasies in which they are normal people living normal lives, while people with AS might be alone, and might need to be alone but usually don't really want to be alone and don't usually fantasize excessively about being a normal person with normal emotions and normal lives.

I imagine inside the mind of someone with schizoid personality disorder you will find a person who is fairly emotionally numb though not entirely. Who cannot connect with other people and harbors a socially inhibiting degree of mis-trust, and who really just wants to be alone to engage in their fantasies about being normal.

Wow, I had no idea about this fantasizing about being normal before. The Wikipedia article only mentioned fantasizing about "internal objects" without mentioning what those objects were. I thought it sounded like me and the ideas that I think about all the time.

About the superficial similarities, one thing that started the diagnostic process for me was that I took the MMPI, and the results came back with SPD, which led my therapist to focus on AS. She said that people with AS usually score high for SPD on the MMPI, but don't actually have SPD even if they qualify as adults.

It reminds me of a post I read on a schizophrenia forum once. A person was explaining why they didn't go outside to take out the trash and why they didn't look people in the eye.

It went something like this:

"I can't take out the trash, because I believe that the air outside is unbreathable, and I will die if I go outside."

"I can't look people in the eye, because I am afraid of them in a paranoid manner."

Then, I thought about my own reasons for exhibiting these exact same behaviors:

"I can't take out the trash, because I'm focusing on my special interest, and I can't stand to be interrupted from this, because it'll totally ruin my wonderful hyperfocusing pursuit of happiness."

"I can't look people in the eye, because I can't hear and/or understand what they're saying to me when I'm looking at their eyes or more likely, fixating on the color and/or iris speck pattern of their eyes."

This is funny, since autism, schizoid, schizotypal, and schizophrenia all share a superficially similar set of "negative symptoms", but what is going on inside is so completely different.

Edit: I just read this about eye contact on Wikipedia.

SPD at its core is simply the absence of emotion. It isn't that they withdraw because it's too emotionally painful. In fact withdrawing is a bad word to use because it implies an action. Solitude is the default position. They don't seek out other people just because they don't have an emotion to motivate them. Most real life schizoids only approach this.

Back when I used to think I was schizoid I had a good discussion with someone who really was schizoid about just what it was to be schizoid. The schizoid in Bleuler's day was different than the schizoid today. Millon was the one responsible for the modern day schizoid. In 1969 the Avoidant Personality Disorder was removed from schizoid and you have the "actively detached" personality in Avoidant and you have the "passively detached" in schizoid.

This is a pretty good thread explaining it.

Hope I can link to other "fora"... (Never knew that was the plural form till I came here...

I'm interested in this "solitude being the default position" idea, because I know that's how I was as a child. I was a very aloof child. I almost never spoke voluntarily in preschool and grade school, and I didn't respond consistently when spoken to, although this improved from "almost never responded" in preschool to "sometimes responded" in grade school. I did speak to and respond to my parents, but far less than other children. There was no concept of "seeking out other people" or "communicating my experience to them" in my mind. I didn't even tell the preschool teachers that I had to go to the bathroom. I read the childhood portions of John Elder Robison's "Look Me in the Eye" book, and I didn't identify with his childhood experiences of wanting to play with other children or feeling left out because other children had rejected him. I didn't realize that other children could be played with or even that they were like me at all. It wasn't even like I was on the outside looking in. It was like these others didn't exist at all. Naturally, I also can't recall any negative feelings of rejection or isolation from childhood, because I was perfectly content being alone, and there was very little to motivate me to approach other people. These autistic childhood behaviors really seem similar to the internal schizoid mechanisms of default inaction, not even active enough to count as withdrawal. Eventually, by age 11 or 12, I figured out that I wanted to interact with people, like I suddenly gained this new desire that wasn't there before. Was anyone else quite as aloof and/or clueless as a child?

There's another thread here that made me think about this. Unfortunately, I can't find it...

Basically the gist presented in the thread was that the same emotions that NTs get by socializing people with ASD get by pursuing their interests. If this is the case then the reason people with ASD don't socialize is actually very similiar to SPD. The difference is that people with SPD are content to just vegetate.

I have almost no memories as a kid so I can't help you compare.