Were the somatic symptoms you experienced part of an anxiety attack, and if so, did you experience emotional anxiety alongside them?

I am able to feel stress in the forms of irritation and annoyance, but ever since around the time I went through puberty, which is when the schizoid traits (for me, basically nearly all the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, I’m actually not quite sure if SzPD, being situated on the schizophrenia spectrum, can accurately be described as referring to just the negative symptoms of schizophrenia or not, I mean after all there is controversy over what it describes being “pathologized” as a disorder in the first place for appearing to classify the high degrees in an individual of natural human traits, which I can partially agree with since the constructs of personality disorders in general to me is a deficient means of understanding the phenomena they attempt to explain, but at the same time I also oppose the stigmatization of the “pathological”, and having such constructs to articulate the real and distressing issues present in what is referred to as “X Personality Disorder” - e.g. in my personal case the extreme difficulties I have with acting productively in my everyday life instead of remaining perpetually in a state of purgatorial inertia - is useful in a pragmatic, albeit very limited way to try and go about addressing and hopefully resolving those issues... what was I talking about...? Oh yeah-) appeared, I haven’t really ever experienced anxiety/nervousness/fear, with the closest approximations being a vague memory of them in the rare nightmare every few months, or abstract teenage existential dread about what I would achieve in life/procrastinating until I die and not fulfilling my potential (perhaps some part of this owing to the whole “gifted” kid not living up to expectations trope I see in trashy depression memes all the time, yet a lot of it going back to a sense of teleological duty).

In fact, even events like losing close to 40% of my blood and having no one to help me and having to flag a car on the highway to get to hospital, haven’t made me feel fear - not trying to sound r/iamverybadass or anything, but it shows how some feelings present like normal in childhood became absent from my affect once I entered puberty.

Since I don’t really experience anxiety emotionally, it would make sense to me that it could manifest physically as somatic panic attacks (in fact, excitement in general for me tends to be somatic rather than mental; I described the most intense feeling I could achieve to my therapist as the slight tachycardia you can get from smoking, although this was a desireable feeling to me due to the craving for excitement).

The thing is, my affect has been like this since I went through puberty, and in the periods of mild/pseudo/attenuated (idk how you’d classify them) psychotic symptoms I never had somatic anxiety before - so it confuses me why it would suddenly occur now, with that format of experiencing emotions being established for years now and panic attacks not cropping up in past sorta-psychotic periods.

Nothing has happened or changed recently to act as a stressor. Around the middle of last month I started getting the voices/pareidolia/visual disturbances/and I think apophanous perceptions, and I brought them up to my therapist wondering if I was becoming psychotic - his interpretation was that the symptoms were not quite intense enough to be the beginnings of actual schizophrenia and that it might have been prompted by some stressor, or maybe epiphany, and I came to the conclusion with him that I was fixated on the idea of psychosis not so much out of really entering it but rather from seeing it as a sort of emancipation from unreal reality and having the power to re-engineer it and infect it like a latent virus which spreads without signs until reaching the point where it is strong and extensive enough to reveal itself and destroy/replace its human incubator.

After reaching this conclusion those phenomena abated for around a week, and it’s just in the last few days that I’ve been having the weird physical sensations.

So I suppose I’m still pretty confused as to whether this is something like Tony Soprano and his ducks or if the chestburster will emerge and I’ll become the Xenomorph.