Dissociative Identities Quotes

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. ~ Tracy Alderman

Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more "real" or more important than any other.

Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision ~ James A. Chu

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. ~ Olga Trujillo

Also, look for "floating alters." These are not deliberately created parts of the system, but alters that were accidentally split off at the same time as others. ~ Alison Miller

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. ~ Marlene Steinberg

The DID patient is a single person who experiences himself or herself as having separate alternate identities that have relative psychological autonomy from one another. At various times, these subjective identities may take executive control of the person's body and behavior and/or influence his or her experience and behavior from "within." Taken together, all of the alternate identities make up the identity or personality of the human being with DID.

- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p7 ~ James A. Chu

Many alters can be "stuck in the past" and still think it is 1968 or 1987 or some other year when they were still physically a child and the abusers were in charge of them. ~ Alison Miller

It is my hope that this book helps those who know and love people with DID: family members, lovers, coworkers, and friends. It is also my hope that those charged with intervening in families in which there is violence will take away a more nuanced approach to their important work, informed by a deeper understanding of trauma.
Most of all, I hope that those of you who have DID know that the disorder itself is an incredible survival technique. You should feel proud to have survived. Trauma has had a major impact on my life, as it has on yours, but I've learned that my life extends beyond the pain and darkness. Survivors of trauma are full of life, creativity, courage, and love. We are more than the sum of our parts. ~ Olga Trujillo

I don't want to mix the identities. Noah Drake isn't Rick Springfield. ~ Rick Springfield

I'm not club-able, you see. I don't like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I'd hate to join anything, however loosely. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Multiple personality [Dissociative Identity Disorder] should also not be confused with alternations of mood from happy to sad, characteristic of the cyclic temperament. These are merely emotional swings; personality splits are far more comprehensive. ~ Ralph Slovenko

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world. ~ Alain De Botton

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about. ~ Wendy Hoffman

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows:
Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and Impulses
Changes in Relationship with others
Somatic Symptoms
Changes in Meaning
Changes in the perception of Self
Changes in Attention and Consciousness ~ Suzette Boon

I also know that one must do what one can do. No matter how little it is, it is nonetheless a human testimony and human testimonies, as long as they are not based on greed or personal ambition for power, can have unexpected positive effects.
...I believe in local action and in small dimensions. It is only in such environments that human creativity and meaningful identities can truly surface and flourish. ~ Manfred Max-Neef

I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes--and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would like to be more successful or more beautiful or wealthier, and most people endure episodes of low self-esteem or even self-hatred. We despair a hundred times a day. But we retain the startling evolutionary imperative for the fact of ourselves, and with that splinter of grandiosity we redeem our flaws. These parents have, by and large, chosen to love their children, and many of them have chosen to value their own lives, even though they carry what much of the world considers an intolerable burden. Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy-even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined.

A follower of the Dalai Lama who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for decades was asked if he had ever been afraid in jail, and he said his fear was that he would lose compassion for his captors. Parents often think that they've captured something small and vulnerable, but th ~ Andrew Solomon

The voice that navigated was definitely that of a machine, and yet you could tell that the machine was a woman, which hurt my mind a little. How can machines have genders? The machine also had an American accent. How can machines have nationalities? This can't be a good idea, making machines talk like real people, can it? Giving machines humanoid identities? ~ Matthew Quick

I'd given up on the animal identities, so I didn't try to think of one; but I decided I'd sit down, not next to him but a couple of seats away, to drink my can of Coke. I would try to look casually inviting, and maybe we could strike up a conversation. I sat down, giving a sigh that might have been a sort of noncommittal half-hello. He looked up from the game he was playing on his GameBoy and stared at me, narrow-eyed. His expression said very clearly, I've got your number, Unpopular Girl. Stay away from me. ~ Ann Halam

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him. ~ Mel Brooks

The drug ketamine, used as a 'dissociative' anesthetic, can produce subjective reports of conscious awareness outside the body, as can various other psychoactive drugs. ~ Stuart Hameroff

The underlying problem is that we aren't arguing policies; we're arguing about identities, and therefore compromise is never considered a principled realization that they might have some legitimate concerns. It is, at best, a Machiavellian strategy forced on us by the bad group. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

black identities are diverse and complex… ~ Bell Hooks

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Switching is the term in dissociation theory used to refer to the change of state, or moving from one part or alter to another. Some writers use the word splitting when referring to switching, creating a further confusion. ~ Donald A. Price

He paused, then, I behind him, arms locked around the powerful ribs, fingers caressing him. To lie with him, to lie with him, burning forgetful in the delicious animal fire. Locked first upright, thighs ground together, shuddering, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, legs enmeshed, then lying full length, with the good heavy weight of body upon body, arching, undulating, blind, growing together, force fighting force: to kill? To drive into burning dark of oblivion? To lose identity? Not love, this, quite. But something else rather. A refined hedonism. Hedonism: because of the blind sucking mouthing fingering quest for physical gratification. Refined: because of the desire to stimulate another in return, not being quite only concerned for self alone, but mostly so. An easy end to arguments on the mouth: a warm meeting of mouths, tongues quivering, licking, tasting. An easy substitute for bad slashing with angry hating teeth and nails and voice: the curious musical tempo of hands lifting under breasts, caressing throat, shoulders, knees, thighs. And giving up to the corrosive black whirlpool of mutual necessary destruction. - Once there is the first kiss, then the cycle becomes inevitable. Training, conditioning, make a hunger burn in breasts and secrete fluid in vagina, driving blindly for destruction. What is it but destruction? Some mystic desire to beat to sensual annihilation - to snuff out one's identity on the identity of the other - a mingling and mangling of identities? ~ Sylvia Plath

I have both been given and taken so many identities, but at last I am beginning to grow into my one true name.
This was the gift my mother gave to me: Hope. ~ Teri Terry

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

Social media is reducing social barriers. It connects people on the strength of human values, not identities. ~ Narendra Modi

Theological discourses function in various ways as sites of contestation and resistance, of forming new religious and personal identities, and of building solidarities. Theological discourses that theologians produce, disseminate, and teach in academia are not simply objective interpretations and neutral reflections on the world and the church in it. Instead theological discourses are productions of and for the world and the church that we live in ~ Namsoon Kang

A writer leads a hyphenated-life with words ~ Munia Khan

I've always been really interested in how people's identities are shaped by where they come from and how they want to get away from where they come from. ~ Jill Soloway

I think actors are attracted to the idea of other identities and concealing themselves behind some other identity. ~ Hugh Laurie

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. ~ A.T.W.

The gods of the realms are many and varied
or they are the many and varied names and identities tagged onto the same being. I know not
and care not
which. ~ R.A. Salvatore

We lose peace of mind when we indulge in the materialistic things. We see our reflections in these possessions and properties and attach ourselves to the point of becoming saddened by them. These possessions gradually become our identity and these identities start disturbing us with time. ~ Ryan Foret

I'm gonna make music, and I'm gonna capture every aspect of being a human being. That's really all I'm trying to do. I think that artists and pop culture identities are used to simplify what it means to be a human and pigeon-hole people into looking up to one role model. ~ Mac Miller

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities
a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. ~ Hannah Arendt

What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine.
By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you. ~ Andre Gorz

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect. ~ Kate Zambreno

Specific parts of you personality may be angry and are usually easily evoked. because these parts are dissociated, anger remains an emotion that is not integrated for you as a whole person. Even though individuals with dissociative disorder are responsible for their behavior, just like everyone else, regardless of which part may be acting, they may feel little control of these raging parts of themselves.
Some dissociative parts may avoid or even be phobic of anger. They may influence you as a whole person to avoid conflict with others at any cost or to avoid setting healthy boundaries out of fear of someone else's anger; or they may urge you to withdraw from others almost completely. ~ Suzette Boon

I put on the most serious face I could muster. "We're about to embark on a journey." I used the Twilight Zone voice. "Full of involuntary sleepless nights, throw-up, and out-of-control behavior. Our freedom will no longer exist; our identities will vanish before our very eyes. We. Will. Be. PARENTS!" I mimicked loud, thundering music.

"Glad you're excited," Mia said. ~ Renee Carlino

I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families
our ancestors
are our identities. Biology is destiny.
I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either. ~ Aimee Friedman