Quotes About Dissociation

We now understand that women and men are not "crazy" or "defective" when, in response to trauma, they develop post-traumatic symptoms, including insomnia, flashbacks, phobias, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, dissociation, a numbed toughness, amnesia, shame, guilt, self-loathing, self-mutilation, and social withdrawal.

What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there's this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don't put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don't light up."     And

There is no inherent awakening power in cultural forms that have become dissociated from the wisdom and practicality that gave birth to them. They turn into illusions themselves and become part of the drama of religious culture.

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

It was like I wasn't thinking. I swear to God. It was like someone else was doing it. I remember I'm looking down at her just before I bring it down and I'm looking at her face . . . she's so scared . . . but it's like I had nothing to do with it. It's like I'm a million miles away.

Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don't, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so. Maryanne

For as long as he could remember, he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

When consciousness is dissociated, you may find yourself feeling as if you or the world around you isn't fully real. This is most often a reaction to severe stress and trauma. The main difference between these two conditions is that depersonalization relates to your experience of yourself as a person, whereas derealization relates to your perception of the environment as amplified below.

Your capacity to stay present will increase as you (1) practice grounding, (2) defuse traumatic triggers and learn to self-regulate, (3) learn to recognize dissociation right away and how to come out of it, (4) develop more sense of safety, reinforced by good boundaries, and (5) cultivate witness consciousness, the capacity to notice your thoughts and feelings without being caught inside them.

Regardless of the name, your symptoms may change. You may be in the fog of dissociation and numbing for years and then come into hyperarousal.13 Unfortunately, chronic PTSD doesn't tend to disappear on its own, but instead often gets worse, for reasons explained in chapter 2 (see page 15 on kindling).

Although the number of these alters varies widely, the average is about ten, and research suggests that the average age at which alters begin developing is just under six years old.30 The transition from one personality to another (called switching) is most often sudden and triggered by some environmental cue.

I have a very simple definition of a good movie: a good movie makes you forget you're watching a movie.

Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you 'go away.' You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.

Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuse…The abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The whole scene does not fit into the 'real world.' It is simple to forget, easy to believe nothing happened.

Complex structural dissociation involves an extensive range of phobias that exacerbate and maintain dissociation and impede functional adaptation. They include the phobia of (1) mental actions (i.e., an individual's inner experience of emotions, thoughts body sensations, needs, wishes); (2) dissociative parts of the personality; (3) attachment and attachment loss; (4) traumatic memory; and (5) change and healthy risk taking (van der Hart et al., 2006).

The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!

La raison découle du mélange de la pensée rationnelle et des sentiments. Si les deux fonctions se dissocient, la pensée se détériore en activité intellectuelle schizoïde et les sentiments en passions névrotiques autodestructrices.

I have this strange feeling none of this is really happening. Like I'm standing far away from myself. Like nothing is real. Have you ever had a feeling like that?

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.

In fact, I can imagine that the level of dissociation that they bring to their sexual fixes is a direct response to all these uncomfortable emotional pulls. I would suggest that precisely because male sexuality is so relational, many guys seek sexual spaces that are the exact opposite, where they don't have to confront the litany of fears, anxieties, and insecurities that would render the biggest stallion limp.

He knew some of the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and she had now survived two near-fatal attacks. In the immediate aftermath of losing half his leg in Afghanistan, he, too, had experienced dissociation, finding himself suddenly and abruptly removed from his present surroundings to those few seconds of acute foreboding and terror that had preceded the disintegration of the Viking in which he had been sitting, and of his body and military career.

and no real warmth existed between the two

Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.

I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.