Dissociative Amnesia Quotes

“Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.”
― Judith Spencer, Satan's High Priest

“She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why." Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.”
― David L. Calof

“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, 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.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“some truths that were too difficult and frightening to know.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“There is a much greater skepticism toward the memories of those who claim abuse than toward the memories of those who deny it.”
― Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars

“I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist. . . . A lot of people involved in mental health tell you it doesn’t exist. Not that you don’t have it, but that it doesn’t exist.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“When a personality is created out of a trauma situation, the personality can watch and learn by looking and hearing out of your eyes and ears. The personality doesn't have to be the one in charge of the body to know what is going on. If the personality is created while you are of a very young age that personality can remain at that age, even though you are growing and maturing. A personality can also be hidden within the memory that created them and they don't realize time has moved on.”
― Angel Ploetner, Who Am I? Dissociative Identity Disorder Survivor

“When you are a child and the personalities are being formed, you don't realize it. You only understand survival. Yes, you are missing parts of events that you don't remember, but good you don't want to remember them anyway.”
― Angel Ploetner, Who Am I? Dissociative Identity Disorder Survivor

“Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33
Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . .

TAT: Please do.

Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome:

1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more;

2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators;

3. If there is denial by the entire family;

4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia;

5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and;

6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology.

Are these the kind of things you were asking for?

TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome."

Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy.

TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works!

Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved.

TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told.”
― David L. Calof

“The funny thing is, the more I dwelled on the possibilities of having DID, the more time I seemed to have to do it. For what seemed like forever, and certainly for the last few years since the acid and fire incidents, days had rushed by in a blur. It was strange to admit but I suddenly seemed to have more time to myself.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“The greatest impact my alters' behaviour had on me was not in the acts themselves but in the telling. And some of those tales I just was not prepared for. Opening my mind to DID was like opening Pandora's box. The demons that emerge could not be put back again. They were out forever.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“To most of the outside world I am 'Kim Noble'. I'll answer to that name because I'm aware of the DID and also because it's easier than explaining who I really am. Most of the other personalities are still in denial, as I was for the majority of my life. They don't believe they share a body and absolutely refuse to accept they are only out' for a fraction of the day, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I know how they feel, because for forty years that was me.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“The accuracy of my memories, whether things happened exactly the way that the personalities remember, doesn't really matter. If my memory, combined with the memories of the other
personalities, provides some coherent past, then that is far better than the blankness I have. Whatever inaccuracies may occur because of the passage of time or because of the colored intensity of "emotional truth" harm no one. All that matters is that I gain a firm grasp on what is real. The memories of the total entity, accurate or not, are providing me a handle. I must have some background to adequately explain where I am now. I must have a base from which to build an unfragmented future.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“Traumatic experiences in adults generally do not produce multiple personality disorder but rather states of catatonic withdrawal, out-of-body experiences, fugue states, or psychogenic amnesias.”
― Walter C. Young

“Lots of people with dissociative disorders are so used to losing time that they don’t even notice it anymore. Switching and the coming and going are so normal for them, and the covering for a “bad memory” are just natural parts of the day. In fact, it can be so natural, that many people with DID/MPD are firmly convinced that they don’t lose any time at all. However, a close examination of that belief can usually prove otherwise, but that is not an uncommon initial assumption.”
― Kathy Broady

“Most often, the "host" has some recognition of other parts of the personality, although a degree of amnesia may be involved. However, occasionally, the "host" does not know about the existence of other dissociative parts of the personality, and loses time when others dominate executive control (Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, Barban, & Post, 1986).

As C. R. Stern (1984) pointed out, it is more often the case that the "host" actively denies (active nonrealization) evidence of the existence of other dissociated parts of the personality rather than dissociative parts "hiding" themselves from the host. This nonrealization may be so severe that when presented with evidence of other dissociative parts, the host may "flee" from treatment.”
― Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Two entirely distinct state of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her normal surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was "naughty" —that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it (during her other state of consciousness) she would complain of having "lost" some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.”
― Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria

“So you really have the same conversations with two or or three people who look exactly like me?'
She nodded.
'Don't you feel embarrassed repeating yourself like that?'
'Not at all,' Dr Laine said. 'Remember, I'm not saying the same thing three times to you. I'm saying it once to three different people.'
That would take a while to sink in. At least it explained my history of people looking exasperated at work or school or even in shops when I sometimes asked questions. They'd obviously just gone through it with someone else who looked exactly like me!”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“As hard to conceive as DID was, it was such a relief to learn that my blackouts weren't caused by alcohol. I wasn't some drunk struggling to get by in life. My apparent memory lapses were actually gaps in my knowledge and they had a medical reason: I genuinely wasn't there at the time.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“Are any of these anxieties or beliefs about my past real? Maybe I'm just making them up⎯re-creating the past.
I have to smile as I look at what I just wrote. I can tell when my solitary exploration becomes too threatening, or when I'm treading close to a memory too frightening to be remembered. Rather than push through unfamiliar brush, I stomp the well-worn path of "Maybe I'm making all of this up." But retreating there no longer makes sense to me.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“Rusty visualized his mind as being like a fishing net. The only thing he could remember were the little drops that clung to his mental netting.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“The Flock required only four or five hours of sleep a night. That a lot of time for work. And the amnesia that in the past had crippled us became an advantage. Our production multiplied because each personalfty could focus on a separate task. Jo, for example, worked for many hours researching and writing a paper, unaware of what else needed to be done. When I pushed Jo aside to fulfill my graduate-assistant duties, I didn't worry about the progress of the paper. When Jo came back to work, she picked up precisely where she had left off, with no concern about her "lost time". She had near-perfect recall of all that she experienced. This was augmented by her near-perfect amnesia for all the time that elapsed between her points of consciousness.

Being a multiple apparently created more efficient use of my conscious and semiconscious mind. I didn't want to give up my greater productivity to become just like everyone else.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“It seems like someone new is here?"
I nodded.
"Is it okay to talk to you?"
I nodded again.
"Are you the one who doesn't like the grocery store?
"Yes," came the same soft voice.
"What is it about the grocery store?"
"It's not the store; it's the people. We get scared that some big person is going to hurt us. So we don't let her go places where there are lots of people."

I felt dizziness in my head and then a different voice—a little stronger but still young—came out: "And then there's all that noise. We won't let her go in places with too much noise."
"Is there someone new here?"
"Yes."
Is it okay if we talk together?"
"Yes."
"What's the problem with the noise?"
"It was always noisy. A lot of yelling and crying. There was too much going on."
"Is that the same kind of problem, the other part has?"
"Yes. It's too hard for her to watch everyone to figure out who is going to hurt us next."
"Don't you think Olga can take care of you?"
"We want to think that, but we aren't sure."
"Why is that?"
"Because she couldn't take care of us before."
"Do you all know what year it is?"
"1968?"
"Oh, I see. No, it's 1996, and Olga is big now. You all live inside her, and she has learned about you. She is also learning how to stop people from hurting you. She is strong and powerful. Were you there when she stopped the woman in the office from yelling at you?"
It's 1996? She's big?" I paused to let the information sink in to all the parts that were listening. "She stopped people from yelling at us?"
"Yes." Dr. Summer watched and waited. Home had been so chaotic. I had to watch Popi, Mike, Alex, and my mom very carefully. But I don't live there anymore. I'm grown up now.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Professional surveys that establish that the position that DID "does not exist" or that there is "no evidence" for the diagnosis are minority opinions, particularly among those who have any experience with alleged dissociative symptoms [12,13]. The related belief that traumatic memories cannot be forgotten is held by fewer than 10% of experimental psychologists and fewer than 5% of clinical psychologists [14].”
― A Steven Frankel

“Amnesia—A specific and significant block of time that has passed but that cannot be accounted for by memory.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“The patient mentioned that she compensates for her memory gaps by pretending that she recognizes people who claim to know her. In the follow-up section, later in the interview, she remarked, "I don't really have memories. I can basically tell you what people have told me, and then I have a memory of that, but it's not the actual memory."

These amnestic episodes have occurred without the use of drugs or alcohol and in the absence of acute medical illness, because the patient reports abstention from drugs or alcohol.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“I can no longer deny that bad things happened to me. I can’t be absolutely sure what happened to me, or who did them to me: I can’t ‘prove’ that 100%. But I have enough evidence to be able to state unequivocally that a lot of bad things happened to me from a very young age for a very long time.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Whatever people say about ‘false memories’ (which is mostly false, anyway) and whatever we feel about possibly making it all up, we can’t fake emotional illiteracy and screwed-up attachment patterns! That’s the real evidence of what happened to us. Someone who has had a car crash might have no memory of what happened, but they’ve got the evidence in terms of a mangled car and broken legs. I think it’s the same for us – we’ve got mangled emotions and broken personalities.”
― Carolyn Spring

“DID is often dragged into the debates about recovered and false memory. For example, it might be alleged that a person recovered memories from a state of dissociation. Such a claim reflects a misunderstanding of dissociation and a confusion with repression (Mollon 1998).
If a piece of mental content (e.g. a feeling, a memory, a fantasy, a perception) is in a state of repression, it is not directly available to consciousness. Its existence may be inferred from its displaced and disguised expression. For example, a patient who is angry with the therapist may speak of anger with someone else - a kind of unconscious hinting. Gradually the patient may become more consciously aware of the previously repressed material.
By contrast, the feelings, memories and other mental contents ofdissociated parts of the mind may be quite accessible to consciousness in that state of mind. Those contents may not be available, however, when the patient is in a different state of mind, or when another personality is in executive control. It is not that the objectionable mental content is kept in 'the unconscious (a horizontal splitting, implying a hierarchical gradation of consciousness), but rather that consciousness is distributed among the dissociated parts of the mind.
Thus, in state of mind A, the patient may speak of a narrative of events of which he or she appears completely unaware when in state of mind B. When asked what she thought about the accounts of abuse that she had presented, in a childlike state of mind, during a previous session, a patient replied that she had no idea whether the memories were true or not because they were not her memories. In this way, what is claimed in one state of mind may be disowned in another stale of mind. There may be a repudiation not only of the content of what has been said, but also of the fact of ever having said it.”
― Phil Mollon, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder