Dissociative Quotes

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood....”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off.

Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity.
When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes?
That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing.

(describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager?
I didn’t.
Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing is, it wasn’t me in my bed, it was Shirley who lay the wondering if that man was going to come to her room, pull back the cover and push his penis into her waiting mouth it was Shirley. I remembered watching her, a skinny little thing with no breasts and a dark resentful expression. She was angry. She didn’t want this man in her room doing the things he did, but she didn’t know how to stop it. He didn’t beat her, he didn’t threaten her. He just looked at her with black hypnotic eyes and she lay back with her legs apart thinking about nothing at all.
And where was I? I stood to one side, or hovered overhead just below the ceiling, or rode on a magic carpet. I held my breath and watched my father pushing up and down inside Shirley’s skinny body.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has at least a rudimentary sense of" I "(Van der Hart et al., 2004). In my view, all of the environmentally based" psychopathology "or problems in living can be seen through this lens.”
― Elizabeth F. Howell, The Dissociative Mind

“Dissociative symptoms—primarily depersonalization and derealization—are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures. In this latter disorder, there are often florid symptoms of depersonalization and realization, but most amnesia symptoms derive from difficulties with focused attention rather than forgetting previously learned information.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.”
― Felicity De Zulueta, From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness

“Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of" sexual abuse "to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too." We don't have a category for that. Computer says no. "͏”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Because of dissociation, many victims are able to remember the abuse only when a certain object, smell, color, scene, or experience triggers a sudden, severe reaction. During a flashback one seems to see, feel, hear, smell, or taste something from the past as if it were actually happening in the present. In a visual flashback, you actually see the scene of your abuse, or you may see an object or image that reminds you or is symbolic of your abuse.”
― Beverly Engel

“When experiences or emotions become too overwhlming, the mind clevely encapsulates the material and stores it for safe-keeping. Many people respond this way in the face of trauma, but the additional step that occurs in this process, in the case of DID, is the formation of distinct ego states that carry the experience.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock, The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook

“You’re in shock.

You can’t afford to be in shock.

Two parts of himself were having a conversation.

You were probably meant to think of yourself as ‘I’ when talking to yourself.”
― Jack Grimwood, Moskva

“Once the individual has learned to dissociate in the context of trauma, he or she may subsequently transfer this response to other situations and it may be repeated thereafter arbitrarily in a wide variety of circumstances. The dissociation therefore “destabilizes adaptation and becomes pathological.” [6] It is important for the psychiatrist to accurately diagnose DDs and also to place the symptoms in perspective with regard to trauma history.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“I was not descending in a plane, coming Home.
I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.
There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“Trauma-related structural dissociation should be distinguished from more ubiquitous phenomena that are often termed dissociation, but likely have a different underlying process. Over the past several decades the original meaning of dissociation has been quite extended by the addition of other phenomena not typically considered to be dissociative. These include alterations in consciousness such as absorption, daydreaming, imaginative involvement, altered time sense, trance-like behavior, and “highway hypnosis” (e.g., Bernstein & Putnam, 1986).”
― Onno van der Hart

“Had I not been dissociative, I never would have survived.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“Dissociation can be interpreted as an “emergency defense,” or a “shut off mechanism.” [6] According to Allen and Smith,[6] it is understood as an attempt by the individual to “prevent overwhelming flooding of consciousness at the time of trauma.” It is argued that the individual subconsciously cannot tolerate being present emotionally during the trauma but cannot control the situation, and therefore protects him- or herself from experiencing it in the moment via dissociation.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon.... The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].”
― Dori Laub, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience

“Now that she had the diagnosis to explain her sense of reality, she sorted some of the chaotic jumble of thoughts and memories.

"I'd feel funny having 'daydreamed' my way through whole seasons," Jo said, "but then I'd hear someone say, 'Time flies,' or 'How did it get to be three o'clock already?' and I'd think that everyone was like me.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“000-x02 Dissociative reaction
This reaction represents a type of gross personality disorganization, the basis of which is a neurotic disturbance, although the diffuse dissociation seen in some casts may occasionally appear psychotic. The personality disorganization may result in aimless running or "freezing." The repressed impulse giving rise to the anxiety may be discharged by, or deflected into, various symptomatic expressions, such as depersonalization, dissociated personality, stupor, fugue, amnesia, dream state, somnambulism, etc. The diagnosis will specify symptomatic manifestations.
These reactions must be differentiated from schizoid personality, from schizophrenic reaction, and from analogous symptoms in some other types of neurotic reactions. Formerly, this reaction has been classified as a type of "conversion hysteria.”
― American Psychiatric Association, DSM I: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Mental Disorders

“When a client enters therapy with a prior diagnosis, it might be difficult for the therapist to think outside of the box presented. One reason a dissociative individual might have several different diagnoses, however, is that as different parts present, they may also be presenting with diagnostic issues that are different from the host. Such differences especially make sense given the nature of DID.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock, The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook

“I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It's the inevitable, excruiating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave openhearted life – and I'll pay it. There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them. [...] It's the pain of a woman who has slowly abandoned herself.”
― Glennon Doyle

“It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. “You must be Dr. van der Kolk,” she said. “My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?” I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting “Jane” and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“clinical literature is virtually unanimous that full MPD [Multiple Personality Disorder] cannot be created iatrogenically. There is no evidence that such a case has been demonstrated; clinicians of widely different orientations have studied the available information and arrived at similar conclusions (e.g., Braun, 1984; Gruenewald, 1984; Kernberg, in press; Kluft, 1982; Putnam, 1989). Nonetheless, most of these observers have noted that many of the phenomena of MPD can be created quite readily, and that phenomena with striking superficial resemblance to MPD can be generated with relatively little effort. In fact, I noted in passing (Kluft, 1986a) that I had replicated the interventions of Harriman (1942,1943), Leavitt (1947), and Kampman (1976), and found the resultant phenomena clearly distinguishable from clinical MPD.
(from Kluft, R. P. (1989). Dissociation: Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 083-091: Iatrongenic creation of new alter personalities)”
― Richard P. Kluft

“Basic misunderstandings about DID encountered in the therapeutic community include the following:

° The expectation that all clients with DID will present in a Sybil-like manner, with obvious switching and extreme changes in personality.
° That therapists create DID in their clients.
° That DID clients have very little control over their internal systems and can be expected to stay in the mental health system indefinitely.
° That alter personalities, especially child alters, are simply regressive states associated with anxiety or that switching represents a psychotic episode.

Anyone who experiences dissociation on a regular basis knows better, however. DID is not only disruptive to everyday life but is also confusing and, at times, frightening.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock

“dissociating put me at higher risk for attacks in my neighborhood and at school, making me more easily identified by sexual predators”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“300.14* Hysterical neurosis, dissociative type*

In the dissociative type, alterations may occur in the patient's state of consciousness or in his identity, to produce such symptoms as amnesia, somnambulism, fugue, and multiple personality.”
― American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-II

“300.1 Hysterical neurosis
This neurosis is characterized by an involuntary psychogenic loss or disorder of function. Symptoms characteristically begin and end suddenly in emotionally charged situations and are symbolic of the underlying conflicts. Often they can be modified by suggestion alone. This is a new diagnosis that encompasses the former diagnoses "Conversion reaction" and "Dissociative reaction" in DSM-I. This distinction between conversion and dissociative reactions should be preserved by using one of the following diagnoses whenever possible.

300.14* Hysterical neurosis, dissociative type*
In the dissociative type, alterations may occur in the patient's state of consciousness or in his identity, to produce such symptoms as amnesia, somnambulism, fugue, and multiple personality.

DSM-II (1968)”
― American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-II

“[...] I began allowing my feelings to disturb me. This was scary, because I had always assumed my feelings were so big and powerful that they would stay forever and eventually kill me. But my hard feelings did not stay forever, and they did not kill me. Instead they came andwent, and afterward I was left with something I didn't have before. That something was self-knowledge.”
― Glennon Doyle

“I get a prompt about using my Dissociative Cognition System. It takes considerable effort to make even that decision, but I manage to give my systems the OK and immediately I can step back from the crushing burden of misery, cut off from certain aspects of my own biochemistry so that I can function and make rational decisions. It was an essential mod, for someone who was going to be on their own for long periods of time without any social contact. My emotions are still out there, and I can get fascinating readouts about what that locked-away part of me is actually feeling, good, indifferent, bad, worse, but it doesn't touch me unless I choose to open the door again. It's a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race