186 Quotes About Dissociation

I am as if paralysed: over there in the chamber the gas people and we are supposed to sing!

The first time I experienced dissociation I had no idea what was happening to me. I sat on the couch with my boyfriend. He said something to me and when I looked at him, I didn't recognize his face. I still knew it was him, but his features looked mangled and foreign. This face that I had looked at thousands of times now seemed strange. Needless to say, I was terrified.

There are some DID clients whose pathological dissociation was triggered by accidents or natural disasters. For example, I treated one client whose first alter was created after the young host accidentally fell off a raft and was pulled under by a strong wave. In sheer terror, she utilized her innate capacity to dissociate before she was rescued.

Snow girl was glad she had left her own feelings behind.

Denial is our very real, personal response to our own trauma. But denial is the normative response to trauma—by everyone. Society may deny that anything bad ever happened to us. It may deny that DID exists. But that doesn't mean to say it's right. All it says is that like global warming, our histories and our stories are an "inconvenient truth".͏

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.

Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.

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].

Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit and explicit memory.