Quotes About Dissociation

In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.

About violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else's dissociated rage, disconnected fury.

Because of dissociation, many victims are able to remember the abuse only when a certain object, smell, color, scene, or experience triggers a sudden, severe reaction. During a flashback one seems to see, feel, hear, smell, or taste something from the past as if it were actually happening in the present. In a visual flashback, you actually see the scene of your abuse, or you may see an object or image that reminds you or is symbolic of your abuse.

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

Pathological dissociation is characterized by profound, functional amnesias and significant alterations in identity; normal dissociation is expressed primarily in the form of intense absorption with internal stimuli (e.g., daydreams) or external stimuli (e.g., a fascinating book or television program).

It made her unhappy, and down in the street she asked herself why she should bother to maintain contact with Czechs. What bound her to them? The landscape? If each of them were asked to say what the name of his native country evoked in him, the images that came to mind would be so different as to rule out all possibility of unity

Therefore, dissociation and distraction function as survival skills that offer a sense of distance when we're overwhelmed by stimuli.

In the fourth level, for example, Alice, after a major operation, becomes separated from her body, and she has to chase through the hospital to catch it, like Peter Pan and his shadow. This dissociation was something Sam had experienced many times—the feeling that your body, when it was sick, was no longer your own.

AFTER ALL, ONE OF THE DEFINING elements of a traumatic experience—particularly one that is so traumatic that one dissociates because there is no other way to escape from it—is a complete loss of control and a sense of utter powerlessness. As a result, regaining control is an important aspect of coping with traumatic stress.

The capacity to control your dissociative capabilities is very powerful. It allows people to be good at reflective cognition. It allows people to have intense focus on a specific task. Hypnosis, flow, being "in the zone"-all of these are examples of the trance state that dissociation allows. People who learn to control when and how they go into a trance state have a gift…be careful about labeling dissociation as a pathology…It can be an incredible strength.

What you are pointing out is how adaptive it is to dissociate in many situations. If a soldier in combat simply went down the arousal continuum-and got to the flee and then fight stages-he would jump up and get shot. In order to maintain access to parts of his cortex-to think and behave in the ways he was trained to keep him alive in combat-he needs to dissociate to a certain degree.

Dissociation as a coping mechanism will happen more commonly when the individual feels that a threatening situation is inescapable. If you're a child and your family has a lot of conflict, you don't have many options. You can't say, "Hey, I'm moving out." Very young children can't fight or flee. They have to stay.

This dissociative response is used when there is inescapable, unavoidable distress and pain. Your mind and body protect you. Because you cannot physically flee, and fighting is futile, you psychologically flee to your inner world.

And you can go to places in your head and imagine things in the future in ways that a lot of people have a hard time doing. That's dissociation. It's healthy, healing, and productive. That is why people need to be careful about labeling dissociation as a pathology, as strictly negative behavior. It can also be an incredible strength.

His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.

This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can't bring him to this. Working with others is one part of it, but it's not all. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It's a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy.

A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.

I could just stay there, in the place where I was always different. For years...I held myself apart. I will not commit to you. Though I am here, my real life is elsewhere. It was the only stance I knew how to take.

This is an aspect of the modern "cultural" mind that is well worth looking into. It shows an alarming degree of dissociation and psychological confusion.

For patients in this situation it is a positive life-saver when the doctor takes such products seriously and gives the patient access to the meanings they suggest. In this way he makes it possible for the patient to assimilate at least part of the unconscious and to repair the menacing dissociation by just that amount.

The aim of psychotherapy is therefore to narrow down and eventually abolish the dissociation by integrating the tendencies of the unconscious into the conscious mind. Normally these promptings are realized unconsciously or, as we say, "instinctively," and though their spiritual content remains unnoticed, it nevertheless insinuates itself into the conscious spiritual life of the patient, mostly in disguised form, without his being aware of it.

All this passes off smoothly and without difficulty provided that his consciousness contains certain ideas of a symbolic nature—"for those who have the symbol the passage is easy," say the alchemists. If, on the other hand, there is already a tendency to dissociation, perhaps dating back to youth, then every advance of the unconscious only increases the gap between it and consciousness.

It is in no sense sufficient to try to do so with nothing but a personalistically oriented psychology. Anyone who wants to treat serious dissociations must know something of the anatomy and evolutionary history of the mind he is setting out to cure.

The more that consciousness is influenced by prejudices, errors, fantasies, and infantile wishes, the more the already existing gap will widen into a neurotic dissociation and lead to a more or less artificial life far removed from healthy instincts, nature, and truth.