Dissociated Memories Quotes

“THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: RELIVING DISSOCIATED EXPERIENCES

The reexperiencing of previously dissociated traumatic events presents in a variety of complex ways. The central principle is that dissociated experiences often do not remain dormant. Freud's concept of the “repetition compulsion” is enormously helpful in understanding how dissociated events are later reexperienced. In his paper, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud (1920/ 1955) described how repressed (and dissociated) trauma and instinctual conflicts can become superimposed on current reality. He wrote:

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. .. . He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past. (p. 18)

If one understands repression as the process in which overwhelming experiences are forgotten, distanced, and dissociated, Freud posited that these experiences are likely to recur in the mind and to be reexperienced. He theorized that this "compulsion to repeat" served a need to rework and achieve mastery over the experience and that it perhaps had an underlying biologic basis as well. The most perceptive tenet of Freud’s theory is that previously dissociated events are actually reexperienced as current reality rather than remembered as occurring in the past. Although Freud was discussing the trauma produced by intense intrapsychic conflict, clinical experience has shown that actual traumatic events that have been dissociated are often repeated and reexperienced.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“It's as though I'm sitting in the audience caught up in a well-made film.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“when evoking personal recollections, patients with depersonalization often complain that memories feel as if they really didn't happen to them”
― Mauricio Sierra, Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome (Cambridge Medicine

“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

“Dr. Summer explained once again that he believed I was remembering real abuse that happened to me when I was growing up, that the thoughts were memories frozen in time by a dissociative process. We were piecing together a clear picture of what had happened to me so we could put my memories in their proper place: the past. He explained that the pain was my body remembering what had happened. He had explained the process many times before, just like this, but I still didn't understand. The words wouldn't connect. I asked, "How can I be a lawyer, be married? How can I be functioning if all this happened to me? I don't understand.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“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