Dissociative Symptoms Quotes

“Dissociation is numbness and nothingness; it is a feeling of being lost; it is floating on a cloud that threatens to suffocate; it is automatic speech and action without awareness or control; it is looking at the world and blinking to try to remove the blurry fog; it is hearing and seeing the immediate world and simultaneously feeling very far away; it is raw fear; it is unfamiliarity in familiar places; it is possession; it is being haunted everyday by unknown monsters that can be felt but not seen (at least not by others); it is looking in the mirror and not knowing who is looking back; it is fantasy and imagination; and, above all else, it is survival. Dissociation is all of these things and none of them at once.”
― Noel Hunter

“Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.

This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.”
― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“In the mirror, my eyes looked red and puffy from crying. That was as expected. But I was surprised to notice that I looked older than I should be. I didn't expect to be dressed up for work. I looked down at my shoes and feet, and they didn't look like mine. Alarmed, I splashed my face with cold water and looked again. The reflection didn't show who I thought I was.
As I washed my hands, they didn't look like mine either. They looked too big. I was wearing rings. It was all very startling and confusing. I felt a little panicky and didn't want to think about it too hard. Disoriented, I banged into the doorway on my way out of the restroom and thought, Why is this door so small? Why am I taking up so much space in this hall? Whose hands are those? Whose eyes and face was I seeing? My thoughts began to race and I started having trouble catching my breath. Then I felt the fuzziness in my head, followed by calmness, and finally numbness.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Extreme versions of DID occasionally develop in response to particularly horrific ongoing trauma (e.g., children exploited through involvement in years of forced prostitution), with so-called poly-frgamentation, encompassing dozens or even hundreds of personality states. In general, the complexity of dissociative symptoms appears to be consistent with the severity of early traumatiation. That is, less severe abuse will result in fewer dissociative symptoms, and more severe abuse will result in more complex dissociative disorders.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“DID patients often feel very isolated/lonely, in the sense that they believe they are the only one in the universe who is “different” from others and that they do not understand themselves... DePrince et al found that alienation was the only cognitive appraisal variable to differentiate DID from PTSD. While the groups had similar appraisals of shame, betrayal, self-blame, anger, and fear, the DID participants had higher appraisal of themselves as experiencing alienation. This construct is associated with feeling alone, disconnected, and different.”
― Vedat Sar

“Interviewer: Have you ever felt as if there was a struggle going on inside of you as to who you really are?

Patient: Yes, for years, and I still can't find out who the fuck am I, man. Excuse my language, doctor. I don't know who the fuck l am.

Interviewer: What do you mean by that?

Patient: Who is [A.B.]? Who the fuck am I? I don't know. I don't know who I am. I really don't know who I am. I look at the rest of my family and I say, "I ain't part of this family, man, this can't be. They're all different than me. They also look alike, but they look different to me." (SCID-D interview, unpublished transcript)

As the preceding example indicates, the theme of puzzlement is characteristic of patients at all levels of educational achievement and verbal ability. The clinician should be alert to the presence of this theme in the self-descriptions of all patients endorsing dissociative symptoms, not just in those of patients who completed a college degree or who are accustomed to introspection and self-analysis.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“Most often, the "host" has some recognition of other parts of the personality, although a degree of amnesia may be involved. However, occasionally, the "host" does not know about the existence of other dissociative parts of the personality, and loses time when others dominate executive control (Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, Barban, & Post, 1986).

As C. R. Stern (1984) pointed out, it is more often the case that the "host" actively denies (active nonrealization) evidence of the existence of other dissociated parts of the personality rather than dissociative parts "hiding" themselves from the host. This nonrealization may be so severe that when presented with evidence of other dissociative parts, the host may "flee" from treatment.”
― Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“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

“In some instances the patient will have a visual image of a contrasexual alter. For example, one female patient endorsed the presence of two male alters with the same name, one a boy of about age 10 wearing a baseball cap and the other a slightly older but still aggressive adolescent. Because a patient's use of visual images provides rich evidence for the degree of identity alteration, each of the SCID-D's follow-up sections incorporates questions about visual images to allow the patient to elaborate on this symptom.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“Identity alteration is a more general term for the objective behaviors that are manifestations of the assumption of different identities (Steinberg, 1993). It includes not only behaving like a different person but also disremembered behaviors, finding possessions for which one cannot account, hearing voices and carrying on internal or written dialogues between dissociated ego states, spontaneous age regressions to traumatic events, and referring to oneself as "we." Overtly behaving as if one were a different person does not appear to be typical of the clinical presentation of DID...”
― David H. Gleaves

“To achieve a diagnostic assessment, it is important to remember that diagnosis does not hinge on the subjects answer to any single question on the SCID-D. A positive response regarding one dissociative symptom often has several possible ramifications, which must be explored through persistence with related questions. Isolated dissociative symptoms may occur in a number of different psychiatric syndromes, both dissociative and nondissociative. An isolated dissociative symptom, such as use of an alternate name or an amnestic episode, is insufficient grounds for diagnosis. To provide evidence sufficient for an accurate diagnosis, the symptom must exist in combination with other symptoms that, as a group, conform to the characteristic pattern of one of the five disorders oudined in the Diagnostic Work Sheets in Appendix 2.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV Dissociative Disorders