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Dissociative Identity Disorder Quotes

Browse 391 quotes about Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Dissociative Identity Disorder Quotes

“It is clear that the various personalities I am seeing are quite different from one another. The physical changes are startling. I have come to know Missy, Jo, Renee, and Joan Frances well and am no longer surprised by the move from one personality to another. In fact, I experience each of them as different from the others in the same way as my other patients are different from one another. Although they share the same body, they are not the same and do not wear the body in the same way. It may be more accurate to say that the various personalities share the same physical space in a serial manner. Their descriptions of their parents have virtually nothing in common. Renee even denies that they are her parents. She doesn't claim different parents. She doesn't claim any at all, saying that she is "a creation of this entity alone.”

“Robin and Reagan are unique in that they date their creation not to a single traumatic event but to the need of the group to maintain a nonconficted, nonabreactive memory trace. The other past-keepers are both reactive and information-providing personalities-they appear in my office to give me information the system seems to think I need, or in response to my touching a critical nerve in the Jo, Missy, Joan Frances, or Renee personalities.”

“The Karen personality was created when Jo was nine and her mother said once too often, "Why can't you be like your cousin Karen?" Jo's internal Karen was the perfect mimic of her cousin, and fulfilled Nancy's demand that the child be neat and organized.”

“Over and over, I thought, I needed to separate into parts in my head. I needed to separate into parts in my head, but I couldn't make sense of this. They were just words that didn't come together into something meaningful. A thought came up, I chased it and was able to hold on to it long enough to ponder it: I could not know this or something bad would have happened.”

“So you really have the same conversations with two or or three people who look exactly like me?' She nodded. 'Don't you feel embarrassed repeating yourself like that?' 'Not at all,' Dr Laine said. 'Remember, I'm not saying the same thing three times to you. I'm saying it once to three different people.' That would take a while to sink in. At least it explained my history of people looking exasperated at work or school or even in shops when I sometimes asked questions. They'd obviously just gone through it with someone else who looked exactly like me!”

“The body may play host to multiple personalities, but Dr Laine explained, if that body was to function normally in the wider world then there had to be one personality in control, what she called the 'dominant personality'. 'So I'm the dominant personality?' I assumed, completely unprepared for the answer. 'I'm afraid not,' she said, adding it was her role to encourage me to reach my potential. As if discovering you share your body with 100+ other personalities isn't embarrassing enough for your ego, it's nothing compared to the blow when you realise you're not even the main one!”

“Jo and I were becoming friends, and I realized that I loved the rest of my Flock as well. Missy was a fun-loving, artistic kid. Rusty had a droll sense of humor. Everyone seemed to be getting healthier, happier, and more productive. When I wasn't putting stress on the Flock by fighting with Lynn, I now felt that I was sharing this body, this physical space, with a whole group of very interesting and worthwhile people.”

“Another patient with DID described the visual images she had of the personalities inside her in the following way; Interviewer: What does she [the personality] look like? Patient: She wears jeans, she never wears a dress ... Interviewer: Does she look like Josie? Patient: Yes, they look identical except that their manners and their clothing and their hair.. .. Josie's hair is curly with ribbons and Julie has braids and could care less what she looks like. She's tomboy looking. Interviewer: Do they look like you? Patient: I think they look like me. Wthout the glasses. They don't wear glasses... Interviewer: Do you have an image of Diane? Patient: Blonde hair, she looks older. (SCID-D interview, unpublished transcript)”

“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.”

“It seems like someone new is here?" I nodded. "Is it okay to talk to you?" I nodded again. "Are you the one who doesn't like the grocery store? "Yes," came the same soft voice. "What is it about the grocery store?" "It's not the store; it's the people. We get scared that some big person is going to hurt us. So we don't let her go places where there are lots of people." I felt dizziness in my head and then a different voice—a little stronger but still young—came out: "And then there's all that noise. We won't let her go in places with too much noise." "Is there someone new here?" "Yes." Is it okay if we talk together?" "Yes." "What's the problem with the noise?" "It was always noisy. A lot of yelling and crying. There was too much going on." "Is that the same kind of problem, the other part has?" "Yes. It's too hard for her to watch everyone to figure out who is going to hurt us next." "Don't you think Olga can take care of you?" "We want to think that, but we aren't sure." "Why is that?" "Because she couldn't take care of us before." "Do you all know what year it is?" "1968?" "Oh, I see. No, it's 1996, and Olga is big now. You all live inside her, and she has learned about you. She is also learning how to stop people from hurting you. She is strong and powerful. Were you there when she stopped the woman in the office from yelling at you?" It's 1996? She's big?" I paused to let the information sink in to all the parts that were listening. "She stopped people from yelling at us?" "Yes." Dr. Summer watched and waited. Home had been so chaotic. I had to watch Popi, Mike, Alex, and my mom very carefully. But I don't live there anymore. I'm grown up now.”

“Can the splitting of representations explain multiplicity? Not at all, for two reasons.20 First, a split is into two, not many. The splitting of self and object representations manifest polarity: self-object, good-bad, male-female, friend-foe, and so on, whereas alters generally don't (though they may). Second, hosts and alters are intentional subjects or agents, entities capable of uttering "I." Indeed, one may profitably regard alter as short for alter ego, literally "other I." A given "I" has intentional objects that are its respective self and object representations. In other words, a split representation, even of the self, is an object of thought, not a thinker, not a subject or agent or "I.”

“Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.”

“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)”

“Most organised abuser groups call each particular training a “programme”, as if you were a computer. Many specific trained behaviours have “on” and “off” triggers or switches. Some personality systems are set up with an inner world full of wires or strings that connect switches to their effects. These can facilitate a series of actions by a series of insiders. For example, one part watches the person function in the outside world, and presses a button if he or she sees the person disobeying instructions. The button is connected to an internal wire, which rings a bell in the ear of another part. This part then engages in his or her trained behaviour, opening a door to release the pain of a rape, or cutting the person's arm in a certain pattern, or pushing out a child part. So the watcher has no idea of who the other part is or what she or he does. These events can be quite complicated.”

“More than one personality was created in the hope of being the daughter Nancy could consistently love. More than one new personality was created in response to Mother's unexpected fury.”

“Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.”

“In my series, five percent presented self-diagnosed. In most cases, this was not believed by the initial clinician. I had the following unnerving experience. Prior to my first multiple personality disorder case, I did not think the condition existed. I saw a young woman who claimed to have multiple personality disorder, and dismissed her claim. She never mentioned it again. Seven years later, while doing research in multiple personality disorder, I asked her to be a control subject for a new multiple personality disorder screening protocol, since I believed she was a medication-controlled paranoid schizophrenic. A protector personality rapidly took over, cursed at me for disbelieving the patient in the first place, introduced me to other personalities, resumed control, and chastized me vehemently at great length. Thereafter, she left, never to return.”

“I did well at the Department of Justice. Some of my parts were hard workers. My well-developed memory helped me remember people: their names and positions and what they said during meetings. Rather than making me seem checked out, my dissociation made me seem calm and collected. In fact, the general dissociative state I was always in helped me function very well. I collected information, interacted on a personal and professional level, and was quite adept at managing most tasks in my life from this superficially numb and calm place. Most people, including me, didn't notice. This way of being and interacting was really all I knew. From that mild dissociation, I quickly went into a deeper dissociative state if there was conflict around me, if someone expressed strong emotions, or if something unpredictable happened. Although these difficult situations triggered me, they brought out behavior that helped me do well when the going got tough.”

“My mind instinctively developed new parts to specialize in skills I needed to make it through law school. They learned to focus on the important information: the outlines, the nutshells, and what each case meant.”

“The SCID-D-R's standard for "distinct identities or personality states" (DSM-IV, p. 487) is: "Persistent manifestations of the presence of different personalities, as indicated by at least four of the following: a) ongoing dialogues between different people; b) acting or feeling that the different people inside of him/her take control of his/her behavior or speech; c) characteristic visual image that is associated with the other person, distinct from the subject; d) characteristic age associated with the different people inside of him/her; e) feeling that the different people inside of him/her have different memories, behaviors, and feelings; f) feeling that the different people inside of him/her are separate from his/her personality and have lives of their own" (Steinberg, 1994, p. 106). [The author believes that it is of considerable importance that none of the SCID-D-R's six criteria for "distinct personalities or personality states" are observable signs; each of the six is a subjective symptom or experience that must be reported to the test administrator. This striking fact supports the contention that assessment of dissociation should be based on subjective symptoms rather than signs (Dell, 2006b. 2009b).]”

“Anna O. had a third state as well, which today would be called a hidden observer, internal self helper, or center. This was an entity described as follows: "A clear-sighted and calm observer up sat, as she put it, in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business" [p. 101].”

“There were two main reasons that the name of this condition was changed from multiple was changed from multiple personality disorder to DID in the DSM-IV. The first was that the older term emphasized the concept of various personalities (as though different people inhabited the same body), whereas the current view is that DID patients experience a failure in the integration of aspects of their personality into a complex and multifaceted integrated identity. The International Society for the Study of Dissociation (1997) states it this way: "The DID patient is a single person who experiences himself/herself as having separate parts of the mind that function with some autonomy. The patient is not a collection of separate people sharing the same body." ͏”

“Another reason for the name change is that the term personality refers to characteristic pattern of thoughts, feelings, moods, and behaviors of the whole individual. The fact that patients with DID consistently switch between different identities, behavior styles, and so on is a feature of the individual's overall personality. Our phrasing changes in diagnostic criteria clarified that although alters may be personalized by the individual, they are not to be considered as having an objective, independent existence.”

“KIuft (1985a, b) describes eight year old Tom, who could "space out," but remain aware of partially dissociated alter personalities. One, Marvin, was based on the character Captain Kirk of the TV series "Star Trek," and on the TV series character "Hulk." Marvin also represented Tom's father. Another alter personality was derived from Mr. Spock, who was also identified with his mother. Two female alter personalities had names taken from 'The Flintstones." The use of fantasy is clearly apparent despite the fantasized characters being identifications with real characters in the child's life. Tom gives us a glimpse of the transition of his fantasies becoming dissociated mental structures.”

“Whatever the theory, it is important to note that clinicians such as Kluft draw attention to the clinical error of insisting that all alters talk as one or that only the alter with the legal name should be validated. 'Such stances are commonly associated with therapeutic failure'.”

“While professionals and patients can be blamed for 'believing' in an illness or having one, patients also report problems when they are believed. Some professionals, they commented, have worryingly simplistic ideas of 'integration'. Ignoring the separately named alters in effect offers a psychic death sentence rather than aiding integration. If anything it can create a compliant false-self 'main person' who answers to [his or] her name and keeps all other 'states' in silent terror internally.”

“Peg's very young alters formed around her father's abuse. But when she was 8 another alter group formed, as Peg reported, from ritualized sexual torture by a neighbor who forced Peg to ritually injure two other children. By age 13 Peg had fallen victim to her older brother's sexual violence as well and this led to more splitting. In her teens and twenties Peg added more alters in response even to nontraumatic life disappointments, since the splitting mechanism worked so well to insulate her from suffering.”

“In summary, the conclusion that having DID is generally rewarding is unfounded because the vast majority of the attention such patients receive is skeptical, critical, exploitative, or hostile; they are often ignored if they do present symptoms of DID. It is certainly possible that some individuals have attempted to feign the disorder. However, the hostile treatment that one would most likely receive would make feigning another disorder more rewarding.”

“In the world of alters, anything is possible. This is because alters are partly based upon make-believe, and the underiying reasoning is not derived from normal linear logic but consists of 'trance logic', the toleration of completely unrealistic and contradictory ideals which might be found in a state of hypnosis.”

“Due to previous lack of systematic assessment of dissociative symptoms, many subjects experience the SCID-D as their first opportunity to describe their symptoms in their own words to a receptive listener.”

“In order to get to know who is in your System, each individual alter needs to complete a piece of paper in the form of a circle (or triangle) which contains the following information: their name, their age (it might be an age range, like age 4-7), and their traits. strengths and skills. (All parts must have a name. If they do not have a name, they need to choose one. lf their name was given to them by a perpetrator and is too upsetting or if it has a negative association, they may wish to change their name—that is perfectly ok. Any name that is not negative or triggering is fine—it does not have to be a standard ‘proper name’ as they are commonly thought of.) On the back of the circle or triangle they need to write down what caused them to split off.”

“Prior to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder had been referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. The renaming of this diagnosis has caused quite a bit of confusion among professionals and those who live with DID. Because dissociation describes the process by which DID begins to develop, rather than the actual outcome of this process (the formation of various personalities), this new term may be a bit unclear. We know that the diagnosis is DID and that DID is what people say we have. We’d just like to point out that words sometimes do not describe what we live with. For people like us, DID is just a step on the way to where we live—a place with many of us inside! We just want people who have little ones and bigger ones living inside to know that the title Dissociative Identity Disorder sounds like something other than how we see ourselves—we think it is about us having different personalities. Regardless of the term, it is clear that, in general, the different personalities develop as a reaction to severe trauma. When the person dissociates, they leave their body to get away from the pain or trauma. When this defense is not strong enough to protect the person, different personalities emerge to handle the experience. These personalities allow the child to survive: when the child is being harmed or experiencing traumatic episodes, the other personalities take the pain and/ or watch the bad things. This allows these children to return to their body after the bad things have happened without any awareness of what has occurred. They do this to create different ways to make sense of the harm inflicted upon them; it is their survival mechanism.”

“Delusions Dissociative disorders, even those created by mind controllers, are not psychosis, but this program will create the most common symptom used to diagnose schizophrenia. The child is hurt while on a turntable, with people and television sets and cartoons and photographs all around the turntable. New alters created by the torture are instructed that they must obey their instructions and become the people around them, people on television, or other alters when they are told to. When this program is triggered, the survivor will hear “voices” of the people whom the "copy alters” are imitating, or will have many confused alters popping out who think they are actually other people or movie stars. The identities of the copy alters change when the survivor's surrounding change.”

“...when different identity states convey contradictory information and then have amnesia for what the other identity states said, the patient may be thought to be lying. This can appear to be characterological mendacity when it is not.”

“When treating their first few DID cases, therapists typically focus too much attention on the alters. This focus tends to distract from what is fundamental–the patients’ pervasive dissociative/posttraumatic distress and maladaptation. Has something similar occurred in psychiatry’s view of DID? Have the compelling phenomena of alters distracted us from the matrix of dissociative and posttraumatic symptoms in which alters are embedded? - Dell, P. F. (2001). Why the Diagnostic Criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder Should Be Changed, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 2 (1).”

“Several recent studies (Bliss, 1980; Boon & Draijer, 1993a; Coons & Milstein, 1986; Coons, Bowman, & Milstein, 1988; Putnam et al., 1986; Ross et al., 1989b) are largely consistent in terms of the general trends that they demonstrate. At the time of diagnosis (prior to exploration) approximately two to four personalities are in evidence. In the course of treatment an average of 13 to 15 are encountered, but this figure is deceptive. The mode in virtually all series is three, and median number of alters is eight to ten. Complex cases, with 26 or more alters (described in Kluft, 1988), constitute 15-25% of such series and unduly inflate the mean. Series currently being studied in tertiary referral centers appear to be more complex still (Kluft, Fink, Brenner, & Fine, unpublished data). This is subject to a number of interpretations. It is likely that the complexity of the more difficult and demanding cases treated in such settings may be one aspect of what makes them require such specialized care. It is also possible that the staff of such centers is differentially sensitive to the need to probe for previously undiscovered complexity in their efforts to treat patients who have failed to improve elsewhere. However, it is also possible that patients unduly interested in their disorders and who generate factitious complexity enter such series differently, or that some factor in these units or in those who refer to them encourages such complexity or at least the subjective report thereof.”

“The classic host personality, which usually (over 50% of the time) presents for treatment, nearly always bears the legal name and is depressed, anxious, somewhat neurasthenic, compulsively good, masochistic, conscience-stricken, constricted hedonically, and suffers both psychophysioiogical symptoms and time loss and/or time distortion. While no personality types are invariably present, many are encountered quite frequently: childlike personalities (fearful. recalling traumata, or love-seeking), protectors, helpers-advisors, inner self-helpers (serene, rational, and objective helpers and advisors first described by Allison in 1974), personalities with distinct affective states, guardians of memories and secrets (and of family boundaries), memory traces (holding continuity of memory), inner persecutors (often based on identification with the aggressor), anesthetic personalities (created to block out pain), expressers of forbidden impulses (pleasurable and otherwise, such as defiant, aggressive, or antisocial), avengers (which express anger over abuses endured and may wish to redress their grievances), defenders or apologists for the abusers, those based on lost love objects and other introjections and identifications, specialized encapsulators of traumatic experiences and powerful affects, very specialized personalities, and those (often youthful) that preserve the idealized potential for happiness, growth, and the healthy expression of feelings (distorted by traumata) in others (Kluft, 1984b).”

“I suggested that the system put all the potential offending [sexually abusive] alters in an internal prison. Jennifer said that would take too long. An alter popped out and said, "Just a minute," and then, after a brief silence, announced that they had "killed" all the offender alters; they were lying in the inside world dead, covered in blood! I was not very happy with such drastic measures, but accepted it for the interim, knowing I could rely on Jennifer to tell me if the risk recurred. I made a list of the "dead" alters. The next morning Jennifer called; she had dreamed about sexually abusing a child. I asked her to look for more related memories before we met in the evening. She had to "reincarnate" all the dead alters to find the memories. (We already had a method for doing this, as some alters had previously experienced internal "death" in "disasters" in the inner world; when they were made new internal bodies, they became alive again.)”

“Types of Alters Most people who have DID have at least several different personalities. Each personality is typically referred to as an alter or alternate personality. Alters may vary in terms of age, gender, and sexual orientation, much in the same way that members of a family differ. Each of these personalities will be distinct from one another and may have differing interests, talents, abilities, and functions. And as different as these personalities are from one another, there are some common types of alters found within individuals with DID.”

“The reported numbers of MPD alter personality states are given great play by critics. As usual, these critics rarely consult the research. Although cases with dozens or scores of alters have been reported, the mode is 3 and the median typically 8-10 (see, e.g., Putnam et al., 1986; Coons et al., 1988; Ross, Norton, and Wozney, 1989f; Kluft, 1991).”

“The mass media stereotype of an MPD patient is a woman harboring an internal collection of delightfully different people ranging from wide-eyed little kids to kung fu masters and nuclear physicists. Skeptics tend to focus concretely on the impossibility of there being 10 or 20 or 100 separate people inside that woman's body (e.g., Sarbin, 1995). By and large, this stereotype will not go away. Alter personalities are real. They do exist—not as separate, individuals, but as discrete dissociative states of consciousness. When considered from this perspective, they are not nearly so amazing to behold or so difficult to accept. A fair reading of the MPD literature shows that authorities have long subscribed to this thesis: “Only when taken together can all of the personality states be considered a whole personality” (Coons, 1984, p. 53). Paradoxically, it is the critics who implicitly accept the view that the alter personalities are separate people.”

“The differences in alter personality states' self-concepts can be striking, but authorities routinely stress that these are more apparent than real (e.g., Putnam, 1989a; Kluft, 1991). Various typologies have been offered, but few systematic data exist. Types of MPD alters, such as child-like personality states, angry alters, protectors, and persecutors, are found often enough to warrant further investigation.”