>>229353the way i think about it is like this: as a child, autism or neurodivergence makes it difficult to socialize and predict social situations, therefore you have natural anxiety, if you fail to learn how to properly cope, you end up avoiding which leads to poor social skills, low self-esteem, which leads to more social avoidance. spd comes in at the end when you give up on the social world, whether consciously and unconsciously, and your mind begins to slowly decouple itself from the social world, which as a side-effect lowers anxiety to some degree, but also lowers positive emotions, praise and criticism no longer motivate you, fitting in becomes less and less of a priority, social hierarchies become meaningless and tyrannical, social connections become a burden and there's a general breakdown of social attunement, everything feels fake, exaggerated, dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. you gradually turn inward as the world stops being interesting and you become enamored by your own fantasies and thoughts. that's why you can spend a lot of time alone without much of a problem.
social friction due to being different -> social anxiety -> coping with avoidance -> complete detachment from the social world
i think of them as stages of the "disease", or more like a developmental path of a certain personality type. the initial cause might be different (autism, under-socialization, high sensitivity), but from adolescence to late 20s, people that usually end up here tend to follow this path. spd is basically the endgame. after that, you can still possibly unlock schizophrenia, the more you are focused on your inner world, the less grounded in reality you become, so you might start getting some weird woo-woo magical ideas. i used to be an atheist, but now i believe some shit that old me would probably laugh at.