Carolyn Spring > Quotes

“The happy family is a myth for many.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness.”
― Carolyn Spring

“I have met many, many severely distressed people whose daily lives are filled with the agony of both remembered and unremembered trauma, who try so hard to heal and yet who are constantly being pushed down both by their symptoms and the oppressive circumstances of post traumatic life around them.”
― Carolyn Spring

“And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“There is a slave trade still in this country—yes, the real and horrific sex and human trafficking trade run by organised criminal gangs, which is appalling and must be stopped. But there's the hidden slavery too of children exploited and used within their own families, within organised and ritual abuse.”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Bemoaning my existence wasn’t changing my existence.”
― Carolyn Spring

“As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit—to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak—beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them.”
― Carolyn Spring

“society has an embarrassing history of denial”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Denial is our very real, personal response to our own trauma. But denial is the normative response to trauma—by everyone. Society may deny that anything bad ever happened to us. It may deny that DID exists. But that doesn't mean to say it's right. All it says is that like global warming, our histories and our stories are an "inconvenient truth".͏”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Recovery is not so much a dream at it is a plan.”
― Carolyn Spring

“No, my GP hadn’t ever heard of dissociative disorders and just wanted to prescribe medication, but I could still build a good, supportive relationship with her.”
― Carolyn Spring

“In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“I have come to believe with fervent passion that the focus on multiple personalities is missing the point. dissociative identity disorder is not rare; it is not unique; it is not special. It is just a logical set of symptoms to some terrible trauma. It is a normal way to react to very abnormal childhood treatment. In fact, I only have it because I am normal. If I had not reacted normally to chronic trauma and disrupted attachment, I would not have developed it.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Sometimes claims of polyfragmentation and ongoing abuse and victimisation can become a kind of ‘badge of honour’: it can be an earnest, unconscious demonstration proving that we cannot recover, rather than the tragic reality of overwhelming suffering that will take a lot of hard work and dedication to overcome.”
― Carolyn Spring

“In short, there are four main categories of experience with DPD: Detachment from the self Detachment from the world Lowered emotions Heightened thoughts (anxiety and ruminations).”
― Carolyn Spring, I don't feel real: A brief guide to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder

“It’s funny how, as a society, we feel that certain types of distress are normal and on the whole we can cope with them and tolerate them—although some people would still rather cross the road than have to talk to the recently bereaved. But when it comes to extreme trauma, when it comes”
― Carolyn Spring, Recovery is my best revenge: My experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder

“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

“We also need to recognise that denial is used by abusers to protect themselves. People who work with sexual offenders talk about a ‘triad of cognitive distortion’. This means that almost every abuser ‘thinks wrongly’ and this is a key area of work for treatment with sexual offenders. Basically they have three wrong thought patterns, and these are denial, minimisation and blame.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Trauma tried to tell me that I was not human and that I should be excluded from humanity.”
― Carolyn Spring

“DID is therefore the natural outcome for a childhood of persistent threat where it is not safe to signal for help: the child learns to hide what is going on, even from themselves.
As adults with DID, then, there may appear to be no sign at all of the trauma, as the mind successfully segregates awareness of it away from conscious thought.
Clients with dissociative identity disorder don’t always know that they have been traumatised. And that’s why it’s essential that every counsellor and psychotherapist should have a good grounding in dissociative disorders, so as not to collude with dissociation and avoidance, and thereby fail to help the client for whom hiddenness has become a way of life.”
― 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

“During the depersonalisation or derealisation experiences, reality testing remains intact. C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. D. The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or other medical condition (e.g., seizures). E. The disturbance is not better explained by another mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, panic disorder, major depressive disorder, acute stress disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, or another dissociative disorder.”
― Carolyn Spring, I don't feel real: A brief guide to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder

“When did it become acceptable for us as a society to become so snarky and cynical, shaming everyone who dares to be vulnerable?”
― Carolyn Spring, Unshame: Healing Trauma-Based Shame Through Psychotherapy

“The main cause of DPD, according to research, seems to be subtle forms of childhood maltreatment, in particular emotional abuse and neglect. Whereas physical and sexual abuse seem to be specifically linked to PTSD, Complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder (DID), lower intensity but chronic childhood trauma such as emotional abuse and neglect seem to more commonly result in DPD. Diagnosis issues”
― Carolyn Spring, I don't feel real: A brief guide to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder

“Depersonalisation: Experiences of unreality, detachment, or being an outside observer with respect to one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions (e.g., perceptual alterations, distorted sense of time, unreal or absent self, emotional and/or physical numbing). Derealisation: Experiences of unreality or detachment with respect to surroundings (e.g., individuals or objects are experienced as unreal, dreamlike, foggy, lifeless, or visually distorted).”
― Carolyn Spring, I don't feel real: A brief guide to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder