Psychopath or Trauma Victim? Autistic or Schizoid? Borderline Anyone?
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-07-14

Even skilled diagnosticians find it difficult to distinguish between psychopathy (and Borderline), autism, schizoid personality, and C/PTSD.

All four conditions involve extreme reduced affect display: no show of emotions, flat presentation of personal experiences, and reticent self-disclosure.

All four types of patients use language in a highly idiosyncratic way: vulgar, putrid, ambiguous, non-committal, clinical, and impersonal. They corrupt language and render it circumspect and cynical.

They are inaccessible, sealed off from the world, emotionally numb, incapable of true intimacy.

They are …

Self-loathing, self-trashing, self-hating, self-destructive in multiple ways.

Their attitudes to sexual or intimate partners, to sex, and to their bodies are shocking, unsettling, horrifying, and gross. They are likely to engage in extreme and reckless sex from an early age, develop eating disorders, and suffer from body dysmorphia.

They are deceitful and unfaithful (psychopaths are parasites, gold diggers, and goal-oriented).

They are devaluing and humiliating, hypervigilant and sometimes paranoid.

But the etiologies of this identical presentation couldn't be more different.

The psychopath has no empathy or positive emotions, so truly has nothing to report. He is a goal-oriented, binary ("feel good/bad") mimicked human.

The autistic person is oblivious to social and sexual cues and this renders his reactions weird, even antisocial. He is reluctant or unable to verbalize his inner world, partly because it overwhelms him and partly owing to anticipated rejection.

The schizoid just wants to be left alone. Incapable of strong emotions or intense experiences, he flatlines into solitude, his sole comfort zone.

The survivor of trauma represses (numbs) her emotions because she finds them, and the memories they are attached to, threatening. She is reluctant to revisit her harrowing experiences and is triggered by any attempt to be intimate with her in any way.

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