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Sybil Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about Sybil.

Sybil Quotes

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days. Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”

Truth Mental Illness Denial Therapy Dependence Dissociative Identity Disorder Psychotherapy Multiple Personality Disorder Truth And Lies Pretence Multiple Personalities Denial Of Reality Sybil Ruse Not Pretending Faking Normal Not Fake

Book:Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Source: Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. "Coming to," she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows: It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.”

Source: Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves, And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms, And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves. Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms, Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist, And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist. With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes, And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep, With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs, She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep; While the earth dreamed, and only I was ware Of that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair. The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams; There was no sound amid the sacred boughs. Nor any mournful music in her streams: Only I saw the shadow on her brows, Only I knew her for the yearly slain, And wept, and weep until she come again.”

War Earth Path Samhain Sphinx Sybil Cassandra Brigid

Author:Frederic Manning

“She'd never spoken so boldly in her life. Elspeth felt liquid warmth between her thighs as she watched Julian. It made her want to squirm. To press against herself. He was like a statue, a grave, beautiful Apollo, a god of music and poetry, who also held his sybil at Delphi jealously to his heart. Or so the myths said. But what if it was the other way around? What if the sybil, a mere mortal, drew the helpless god's powers to her and made him writhe in ecstasy as she proclaimed the future? Would that Apollo look like this just before he submitted to his oracle? Poised. Still. But almost quivering with strain?”

Sybil Elspeth De Moray Dominatrix Julian Greycourt

Book:No Ordinary Duchess

Source: No Ordinary Duchess

“Debbie Nathan’s thesis is that Shirley Mason was a vulnerable hysteric and was manipulated by her therapist into iatrogenic DID and false memories of child abuse. Nathan says that this is generally true of DID, except for perhaps a small number of genuine cases. One problem with this thesis is that it is based on a stereotypically male chauvinist view of women as impressionable hysterics who do not know, and are not in control of, their own minds or histories; this demeaning view of women is presented as a feminist thesis.”

Mental Illness Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Multiple Personalities Sybil Sybil Exposed Hysterical Women Self Contradictory Hysteric

Author:Colin A. Ross

“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.”

Therapy Dissociative Identity Disorder Mental Health Stigma Dissociative Regression Misdiagnosis Mental Health System Sybil Dissociative Symptoms Hidden Disorder Hidden Selves Multipler Personality Disorder Stereptype

Author:Deborah Bray Haddock

“I was shocked and terrified to hear Dr. Summer say I had what was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Is that like Sybil? Am I like the woman in The Three Faces of Eve? My head began to spin. What do I have inside of me? Is there a crazy person in there? What am I? I felt like a freak. I was afraid to have anyone know. I have a mental illness. People make fun of people like me. Upon hearing my diagnosis, I stopped thinking of myself as smart, creative, or clever. Even though Dr. Summer had worked hard to help me understand that I had developed an amazingly adaptive survival technique, I no longer thought of it that way at all. I was overwhelmed by fear and shame. The words multiple personality disorder echoed in my mind. I thought of all the ways people with multiple personalities were ridiculed and marginalized: They're locked away in mental institutions. They are really sick. I'm not going to be the subject of people's jokes. I am a lawyer. I work at the U.S. Department of Justice. The more I thought about it, the deeper my despair grew.”

Crazy Mental Illness Ridicule Dissociative Identity Disorder Stereotypes Multiple Personality Disorder Mental Illness Stigma Mental Hospital Sybil Self Stigma

Book:The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

Source: The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Debbie Nathan blames the early symptoms on pernicious anemia yet explains their supposed remission by Shirley’s being out of contact with Dr. Wilbur for those 9 years. But Dr. Wilbur never diagnosed a dissociative disorder in 1945. Nathan does not seem to recognize the implausibility of Dr. Wilbur creating via suggestion a complex dissociative disorder in five sessions, particularly when the doctor herself did not diagnose it. Nathan attributes Shirley’s postintegration improvement in functioning to being out of contact with Dr. Wilbur rather than to the therapy. But the pernicious anemia continued to be undiagnosed and untreated during that time period, so any symptoms due to it should have continued rather than showing an improvement that coincided with psychotherapy with Dr. Wilbur. Debbie Nathan’s thesis is self-contradictory.”

Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Pseudoscience Sybil False Memory Myth Sybil Exposed Implausible

Author:Colin A. Ross

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to.”

Denial Powerless Dissociative Identity Disorder Powerlessness Multiple Personality Disorder Multiple Personalities Lack Of Control Denial Of Reality Sybil Powerless Quotes Need For Control Controllability Out Of Hand

Book:Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Source: Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Debbie Nathan also puts a great deal of weight on a letter from Shirley Mason to Dr. Wilbur stating that her MPD was made up. Dr. Wilbur’s explanation was that the letter was based on resistance. Debbie Nathan takes the letter as a statement of the real truth. But if Shirley Mason was such an unreliable historian of her own trauma and mental health history, why should we take this single letter as the truth? If a person with a long history of treatment for alcoholism wrote a letter to her psychiatrist, in the middle of treatment, saying that she did not have a drinking problem, what would we conclude?”

Denial Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Didmpd Sybil Psychological Defense Sybil Exposed Shirley Mason

Author:Colin A. Ross

“The story of Sybil is true, not fictional or fraudulent. One early commentator actually suggested that Sybil and Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, her treating psychiatrist, were a case of folie à deux, or shared psychosis (Victor, 1975). Having met Dr. Wilbur, listened to her presentations on multiple personality (now known as dissociative identity disorder), and read the many critiques and reviews of Sybil, I have concluded that Sybil was not iatrogenically created by Dr. Wilbur.”

Denial Fake Fraud Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Denial Of Child Abuse Sybil Iatrogenic Sybil Exposed Iatrogenic Harm

Author:Philip M. Coons

“A problem is that Nathan documents Shirley Mason as suffering from a variety of symptoms of a complex dissociative disorder prior to her first contact with Dr. Wilbur, although Nathan denies the dissociative nature of these symptoms. The symptoms described as real by Debbie Nathan include fugue states; blank spells; spending hours playing with imaginary companions with names far beyond the age when this occurs in nontraumatized children; pretending to be “Vicky,” one of her “imaginary companions” at times; her mother calling her by the same names of alter personalities later identified in adult therapy; talking in a high, childish voice when she was no longer a child; numerous symptoms consistent with somatoform dissociation throughout her childhood and adulthood; going downtown to bars to drink with men and not remembering afterward; suddenly becoming comatose in public; and suddenly acting dramatically out of character. All of these symptoms were described to Debbie Nathan in interviews with people who knew Shirley Mason well. Thus, Debbie Nathan’s book actually inadvertently provides documentation of a range of psychological and physical symptoms that would be expected beginning in childhood for someone with a burgeoning dissociative disorder.”

Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Multiple Personalities Dissociative Disorder Didmpd Sybil Sybil Exposed

Author:Colin A. Ross

“As a single case from half a century ago, Sybil Exposed cannot tell us anything about the reliability, validity, etiology, epidemiology, or typical treatment outcome of a mental disorder. Nathan’s alternative theory of pernicious anemia is implausible and supported by no corroborating evidence; Debbie Nathan advocates a hypothetical explanation of Shirley’s pre-1945 symptoms that is less evidence based than the trauma dissociation theory she rejects.”

Denial Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Dissociative Disorders Sybil Sybil Exposed

Author:Colin A. Ross

“In 1973 Flora Schreiber wrote SYBIL, a case history of a person with DID. After Schreiber’s death in 1988 there have been several unsuccessful attempts to prove this case was a fraud. Some of these people, enflamed by the success of the book, have falsified and distorted documents in Flora Schreiber’s archives to prove their theories. Furthermore, some did not engage in logical thinking. If the three women in "SYBIL" were clever enough to dupe the whole world, would they would not be clever enough to destroy so-called incriminating documents which Flora Schreiber bequeathed to John Jay College? Some people, who never engaged in any research about DID, claim that there is no connection between child abuse and DID. Then they unwittingly contradict themselves by stating DID doesn’t even exist.”

Dissociative Identity Disorder Multiple Personality Disorder Dissociative Disorder Mental Illness Stigma Sybil Sybil Exposed

Author:Patrick Suraci

“They will be the architects of my fate, I think to myself, despite what Sybil said about my being the author of my own destiny.”

Cora Sybil

Book:The White Oak

Source: The White Oak

“FLATOW: So you would - how would you treat a patient like Sybil if she showed up in your office BRAND: Well, first I would start with a very thorough assessment, using the current standardized measures that we have available to us that assess for the range of dissociative disorders but the whole range of other psychological disorders, too. I would need to know what I'm working with, and I'd be very careful and make my decisions slowly, based on data about what she has. And furthermore, with therapists who are well-trained in dissociative disorders, we do keep an eye open for suggestibility. But that research, too, is not anywhere near as strong as what the other two people in the interview are suggesting.It shows - for example, there's eight studies that have a total of 11 samples. In the three clinical samples that have looked at the correlation between dissociation and suggestibility, all three clinical samples found non-significant correlations. So it's just not as strong as what people think. That's a myth that's not backed up by science." Exploring Multiple Personalities In 'Sybil Exposed' October 21, 2011 by Ira Flatow”

Reality Fake Fraud Exposed Dissociative Identity Disorder Dissociation Multiple Personality Disorder Multiple Personalities Dissociative Disorders Mental Illness Stigma Sybil Suggestibility Controversory Suggestible

Author:Bethany L. Brand