Dissociative Symptoms Quotes

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also has dissociative symptoms as an essential feature. PTSD has been classically seen as a biphasic disorder, with persons alternately experiencing phases of intrusion and numbing... [T]he intrusive phase is associated with recurrent and distressing recollections in thoughts or dreams and reliving the events in flashbacks. The avoidant/numbing phase is associated with efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings associated with the trauma, emotional constriction, and social withdrawal. This biphasic pattern is the result of dissociation; traumatic events are distanced and dissociated from usual conscious awareness in the numbing phase, only to return in the intrusive phase. ~ James A. Chu

Feeling disconnected from their peers, they were also internally disconnected from their own humanity. It seems clear that violent video games can promote derealization in a susceptible person. For disaffected adolescents who may have undetected and untreated dissociative symptoms, spending hours and hours playing these games in isolation can be dangerous. ~ Marlene Steinberg

Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

We propose that BPD involves secondary structural dissociation. Consistent with this, Golynkina and Ryle (1999) found that patients with BPD encompassed a dissociative part of the personality that seems to represent an ANP (a coping ANP) and more than one EP (abuser rage, victim rage, passive victim, and zombie). Some patients with BPD have severe dissociative symptoms, and may actually border on DDNOS or DID. Our clinical observations suggest that dissociative parts in BPD patients have less emancipation and elaboration, and less distinct sense of self than in DDNOS or DID. ~ Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis

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

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

Early identification of patients who suffer from dissociative symptoms and disorders is essential for successful treatment, because these disorders do not resolve spontaneously. ~ Marlene Steinberg

Dissociative symptoms - primarily depersonalization and derealization - are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures. In this latter disorder, there are often florid symptoms of depersonalization and realization, but most amnesia symptoms derive from difficulties with focused attention rather than forgetting previously learned information. ~ James A. Chu

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

To live without love, compassion, or any other spiritual value creates a state of such severe imbalance that every cell yearns to correct it. Ultimately, that is what lies behind the onset of disease; the body is sending a message that something lacking in the present - an imbalance existing somewhere - has given rise to highly visible, unarguable, physical symptoms. ~ Deepak Chopra

It is growing up different. It is extreme hypersensitivity. It is a bottomless pit of feeling you're failing, but three days later, you feel you can do anything, only to end the week where you began. It is not learning from your mistakes. It is distrusting people because you have been hurt enough. It is moments of knowing your pain is self inflicted, followed by blaming the world. It is wanting to listen, but you just can't anymore because your life has been to full of people that have judged you. It is fighting to be right; so for once in your life someone will respect and hear you for a change. It is a tiring life of endless games with people, in order to seek stimulus. It is a hyper focus, so intense about what bothers you, that you can't pay attention to anything else, for very long. It is a never-ending routine of forgetting things. It is a boredom and lack of contentment that keeps you running into the arms of anyone that has enough patience to stick around. It wears you out. It wears everyone out. It makes you question God's plan. You misinterpret everything, and you allow your creative mind to fill the gaps with the same old chains that bind you. It narrows your vision of who you let into your life. It is speaking and acting without thinking. It is disconnecting from the ones you love because your mind has taken you back to what you can't let go of. It is risk taking, thrill seeking and moodiness that never ends. You hang your hope on "signs" and abandon reason for re ~ Shannon L. Alder

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms. ~ Alfred Adler

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

The steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind. ~ Philip Dormer Stanhope

If we cannot define stupidity, at least we can trace most human misfortunes and weaknesses to it. Its manifestations are legion, its symptoms are endless. ~ Richard Armour

Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55 ~ Marlene Steinberg

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell- tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower. ~ Sylvia Plath

I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. ~ Clayton M Christensen

The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers. ~ Warwick Middleton

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases - so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. 'It's because he's the man of sorrows,' Blinderman argued. 'He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction. ~ Cynthia Carr

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to "forget" the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital. ~ Dauna Cole

Life is algorithmic. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague. Maybe it's everywhere in the population already and we never noticed. Maybe this is end-stage. Terminal without symptoms, like poor Kip."
Kanya glances at the ladyboy. Kip gives a gentle return smile. Nothing shows on her skin. Nothing shows on her body. It is not the doctor's disease she dies of. And yet ... Kanya steps away, involuntarily.
The doctor grins. "Don't look so worried. You have the same sickness. Life is, after all, inevitably fatal. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

He keeps looking at me so oddly."
"Oddly? How? Give me an imitation."
Considering that she had only about a second and a half to do it in, I must say it was a jolly fine exhibition. She opened her mouth and eyes pretty wide and let her jaw drop sideways, and managed to look so like a dyspeptic calf that I recognized the symptoms immediately.
"Oh, that's all right," I said. "No need to be alarmed. He's simply in love with you. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

They were symptoms of another disease. I needed to become a man unburdened by love. ~ C.D. Reiss

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.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board.

What's more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person's disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress. ~ Neel Burton

I have a number of symptoms that are neurotic and are constricting in the sense that if I had a brilliant idea for a film that had to be shot in Tulsa, OK I would tear it up and throw it away. Anything outside of New York, 'cause I can't exist in a hotel outside of my own home, I have to be in my own home and my own environment. This is a neurotic symptom that is constricting to my work even. ~ Woody Allen

Sensitive to symptoms could enhance security. ~ Toba Beta

The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It's not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven't turned into monsters ourselves
survivor's guilt, that's called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn't notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I'd been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn't seemed like something to worry about ... ~ Scott Westerfeld

All day long because it's what you've been trained to do. But if, in your heart, you believe that the pain you're feeling is real and if you believe it's connected to some underlying condition, it is unlikely that the pain or the spirit will leave. Demons are more sensitive to what you think than what you say. Your belief in the legitimacy of the symptoms plays into the agenda of the evil spirit and what you believe can allow it to remain there. What we believe about the afflicting spirit can either empower it or remove its power over us. The degree to which any spirit can influence us is determined by how much we believe what it says. ~ Praying Medic

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface. ~ Alain De Botton

I have been sent many images by a Morgellons sufferer of extraordinary phenomena found in the bodies of those with the syndrome. Among them are hollow filaments, fibers, crystals, silica (often in hexagram form), even insect-like synthetic 'creature' remarkably similar to the one inserted into Neo's belly by agents in the Matrix movie....
Those tested who do not have visible symptoms of Morgellons have been found to be infested with fiber cultures grown from their saliva, body tissue, and urine.... Morgellons is proliferating because the takeover is proliferating and you will see this massive increase with the introduction of 5G which this body-invasion technology is designed to interact with. ~ David Icke

Uneducated therapists often have an inability to cope with the behaviors of persecutory alters. They commonly focus on helping one side of the personality system and battling with the other side. When "Satan" or some similar part talks in a deep scary voice to you or to the client, it is easy to think this is a nasty perpetrator or a supernatural being, and to and to oppose it or fight with it or try to banish it. However, if you do this, you will engender the hostility of this part, who has probably been very badly hurt and told a lot of lies. You will foster internal splitting in this way, and get nowhere fast.
Once you recognize that these alters have a protective intent, you can see that working with them involves enlisting them in the service of healing, just as they were originally enlisted in the cause of safety. You will see examples of these kinds of errors, which often result in clients leaving their therapists, in survivor LisaBri's story: When therapists make mistakes. ~ Alison Miller

When your interactions are inhibited by social anxiety, you are unable to get as much out of life as possible, and so a "harmless personality trait" can become a major obstacle that stands in the way of fulfillment and productivity. But this doesn't have to be the case. Social anxiety is a learned response-a habit that can be broken. This book will show you, step by step, how to break the social anxiety cycle that may have caused loneliness in your personal life, decreased productivity in the workplace, and an overall lack of fulfillment. As you begin to understand that social anxiety is a combination of attitudinal, emotional, behavioral, and physical responses, you will see that there is actually no such thing as shyness. Rather, what you may refer to as "shyness" is actually social anxiety, a psychophysiological response that you can learn to control. To recognize social anxiety is to give yourself permission to resolve the issues that cause your symptoms. In working through this self-help program, learn to substitute the phrase "social anxiety" for the vague term "shyness" and you will start to see your response pattern in a different light: as a way of reacting that you have chosen, not some unchangeable instinct that has chosen you. ~ Jonathan Berent

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most "ticklish" part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a "Christmas morning" feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences. ~ Susannah Cahalan

. . . the symptoms and effects of the life of faith are totally unspectacular. . . .true covenant faith is expressed by concern for others. . . .this concern is expressed by loving actions that promote the next person's well-being and by verbal expressions of prayer for the next person. Block, Book of Ruth, p. 612. See also James 2:17. ~ Daniel I. Block

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient, before that patient arrives at an emergency room. Symptoms are often denied by the patient - particularly us men, because we are very brave. ~ Robert Fischell

As a police officer it has been my experience that pedophiles are able to operate and stay functional over long periods of time and victimize scores, even hundreds, of children, because no one wants to believe his or her own intuitions about the symptoms in the perpetrator. ~ James Lee Burke

Christ did not come to civilize. He came to save. Civilization is not the solution; it does not destroy the works of the devil. All civilization aims at world improvement, at the gradual elimination of the curse; it is a process of evolution. It is like a man who is suffering from a terrible disease, and the physician who comes to help him gives him a salve to apply. He treats the skin symptoms but the source of the disease he never considers and never touches. Such is a boasted and progressive civilization. It is a delusion. ~ Arno C. Gaebelein

Disease is a speech of the psyche.
...the psyche is a polyglot, for if it converts fear into symptoms it also converts hope. ~ Saul Bellow

Ever since the fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy. When I was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms. Henry saw this, and had removed all my apparatus from my view. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim's stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy. ~ Winifred Gallagher