Multiple Personalities Quotes

“If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?”
― George Carlin

“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”
― Sigmund Freud

“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

“He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Well, it would have been 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

“Janna knew - Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn't make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn't look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I'd see.
~ Dr Cameron West describes living with DID whilst studying to be a psychologist.”
― Cameron West, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple

“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a whole, whereas I was made of multitude of selves, of fragments.”
― Anaïs Nin, Summary & Study Guide The Diary of Anais Nin Volume One by Anais Nin

“The word is dissociate. There is no 'a' before the 'ss'. People invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you're suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have and the answer is: I don't know. The first book about Multiple Personality Disorder to make an impact was Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, published in 1973, which carries the subtitle: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published the controversial The Three Faces of Eve much earlier in 1957, and Pete Townshend from The Who wrote the song 'Four Faces'. People seem to feel safe with numbers.
The truth is more complicated. The kids emerged over time. Billy, the boisterous five-year-old, was at first the most dominant. But he slowly stood aside for JJ, the self-confident ten-year-old who appears when Alice is under stress and handles complicated situations like travelling on the Underground and meeting new people. The first entity to visit was the external voice of the Professor. But he had a choir of accomplices without names. So, how many actual alter personalities are there? I would say more than fifteen and less than thirty, a combination of protectors, persecutors and friends - my own family tree.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“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, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33
Freyd: The term "multiple personality" itself assumes that there is "single personality" and there is evidence that no one ever displays a single personality.

TAT: The issue here is the extent of dissociation and amnesia and the extent to which these fragmentary aspects of personality can take executive control and control function. Sure, you and I have different parts to our mind, there's no doubt about that, but I don't lose time to mine they can't come out in the middle of a lecture and start acting 7 years old. I'm very much in the camp that says that we all are multi-minds, but the difference between you and me and a multiple is pretty tangible.

Freyd: Those are clearly interesting questions, but that area and the clinical aspects of dissociation and multiple personalities is beyond anything the Foundation is actively...

TAT: That's a real problem. Let me tell you why that's a problem. Many of the people that have been alleged to have "false memory syndrome" have diagnosed dissociative disorders. It seems to me the fact that you don't talk about dissociative disorders is a little dishonest, since many people whose lives have been impacted by this movement are MPD or have a dissociative disorder. To say, "Well, we ONLY know about repression but not about dissociation or multiple personalities" seems irresponsible.

Freyd: Be that as it may, some of the scientific issues with memory are clear. So if we can just stick with some things for a moment; one is that memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted no matter how long ago or recent.

TAT: You weigh the recollected testimony of an alleged perpetrator more than the alleged victim's. You're saying, basically, if the parents deny it, that's another notch for disbelief.

Freyd: If it's denied, certainly one would want to check things. It would have to be one of many factors that are weighed -- and that's the problem with these issues -- they are not black and white, they're very complicated issues.”
― David L. Calof

“I hold a beast, a celestial being and a maniac inside of me. It’s up to you which one you meet”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“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, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“The other personality that lives in your heart'...This is the central theme of Yu-Gi-Oh!. Perhaps the characters I draw are also personalities that exist inside me. Yūgi is in my heart. But also Jōnouchi and Kaiba...Pegasus and Mai...Ushio the bully, Insector Haga, Esper Roba...and the countless monsters! Just what kind of person am I?”
― Kazuki Takahashi, Yu-Gi-Oh! (3-in-1 Edition), Vol. 6: Includes Vols. 16, 17 & 18

“He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she said or did or said. She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. If she was different with Connel, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but between them, in the dynamic.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Even among professionals, beliefs about dissociation/DD often are not based on the scientific literature. Multiple lines of evidence support a powerful relationship between dissociation/DD and psychological trauma, especially cumulative and/or early life trauma.”
― Richard Loewenstein

“One of the most remarkable cases published in France is that of Louis Vivet, studied from 1882 to 1889 by many authors, by Legrand du Saulle, Voisin, Mabille and Ramadier, Bourru and Burot. This boy has six different existences. Each of them is characterized, first, by modifications of the memory affecting now one period, now another; secondly, by modifications of character; in one state he is gentle and industrious, in another he is lazy and irascible; thirdly, by modifications of sensibility and of motion; in one state he is insensible, and paralyzed in his left side; in another he is paralyzed in his right side; in a third he is paraplegic, etc.”
― Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms Of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given In The Medical School Of Harvard University

“I think DID remains quite threatening to many people – this idea that people could have multiple personalities and switch back and forth. … I think unfortunately the media has created a stereotype, often a violent stereotype. So that’s part of what is frightening to people.

Also, there are a lot of people who just simply can’t believe it. How could this be!? It doesn’t make sense to them, and they miss it, even when it’s right in front of them. I certainly have seen DID patients switching away and the interviewer having no idea that this is going on or asks a vaguely-perceptive question like, “Did you just hear an hallucination?” Something like that. They recognise that something changed in the patient but they attribute it to more “conventional” symptoms like hallucinations.”
― Frank W Putnam

“Memories are, by their nature, false, in as much as they construct pictures and narratives of the person who once was, with those cells which once were, but are no more. Those cells have mutated and turned into something else. Everything that is always has been and always will be. The dust in the light shaft beaming through the windows carries the dead cells off dinosaurs and the ashes of grandpa.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“The horizon is 25 miles away. You keep walking to towards the horizon and it just keeps moving back. Life is like that. You never reach your goal. We are doomed to disappointment because in our pursuit of perfection we are constantly reminded that we will never reach it. The goal, like the horizon, is beyond our reach.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“The horizon is 25 miles away. You keep walking towards the horizon and it just keeps moving back. Life is like that. We are doomed to disappointment because in our pursuit of perfection we are constantly reminded that we will never reach it. The goal, like the horizon, is beyond our reach.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“When friends say we'll see you again soon, keep in touch, it means you will never see them again. Friendship is like fire. You have to keep feeding it or the fires goes out.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“When friends say we'll see you again soon, keep in touch, it means you will never see them again. Friendship is like fire. You have to keep feeding it or the fire goes out.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“Disbelief is the universal Western affective countertransference, both to abuse and shifts in identity.”
― Elizabeth Hegeman, The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma

“Identity Alteration—Objective behavior indicating the assumption of different identities, much more distinct than different roles.”
― Marlene Steinberg

“There are distinct mood changes with borderline individuals that may be experienced as very alien or disconnected to the client. The loss of memory associated with DID, however, does not occur in BPD, and the mood changes do not constitute a change in personality to the extent that a part of the psyche takes control of the body outside the individual's consciousness.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock

“Catherine, you are not normal. You will never be normal. Don't try to be normal. Just don't.”
― Klatzker, Catherine

“Talking about yourself as a plural is actually more accurate than referring to yourself as 'I,' because it includes all of you, not just the one personality who is speaking at that moment.”
― Karen Marshall, Amongst Ourselves: A Self-Help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Nowhere else for Jekyll to Hyde, so he crawled inside himself and died.”
― Niedria Kenny, Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player