Multiplicity Quotes

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“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

“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Every question, every problem doesn't have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: "To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That's why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression.”
― Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

“Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.”
― Judith Spencer, Satan's High Priest

“Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?

And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.”
― Vera Nazarian, Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

“I never had the ambition to do what clinicians call "integrate". Many clinicians think that until your mind comes into one piece, then you have not healed. But I don't care that much about what the experts say.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“What then? Who then?' she said. 'Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Multiple personality usually develops in the presence of severe and repeated trauma, beginning at a very early age, when the personality is developing.”
― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“DID systems need every single everyone in the system. Everyone has done an important job and has had a specific role that has helped with your overall functioning. Everyone in your system is valuable. Everyone in your system has made their very own unique contribution to the survival of your life events.”
― Kathy Broady

“All of us humans are hypocrite, owing to the multiplicity of our psyche.”
― Anurag Shrivastava, The Web of Karma

“Multiplicity which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“When you invest your life, you are multiplying it.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“as my understanding of and competence in treating the disorder have grown, multiple personality has come to seem, though still horrendous, less unique and incomprehensible, and thus more manageable”
― Lynn I. Wilson, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“if there are indeed many copies of "you", with identical past lives and memories, this kills the traditional notion of determinism: you can't predict your own future-even if you have complete knowledge of the entire past and future history of the cosmos! The reason you can't is that there's no way for you to determine which of these copies is "you"(they all feel that they are). Yet their lives will typically begin to differ eventually, so the best you can do is predict probabilities for what you'll experience from now on.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Perhaps DID raises problematic philosophical and psychological concerns about the nature of the mind itself... Ideas of a unitary ego would incline professionals to see multiplicity as a behavioural disturbance. However, if the mind is seen as a seamless collaboration between multiple selves - a kind of trade union agreement for co-existence - it is less threatening to face this subject.”
― Valerie Sinason, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Given that recent research has demonstrated the complex psychopathology of DID, equating the disorder with one specific but broadly denned behavior (multiple identity enactment) is clearly unwarranted. The latter should be conceptualized as one observable behavior that may or may not be related to a feature of the disorder (identity alteration). As an analogy, equating major depressive disorder with "acting sad" would be similarly unwarranted because the former is a complex depressive disorder characterized by a clear group of depressive symptoms, whereas the latter is one specific behavior that may or may not be related to one of the symptoms of the disorder (sad affect). One could also easily generate a list of factors that affect whether one acts sad that would have little relevance to the complex psychopathology of depressive disorders.”
― David H. Gleaves

“How can what seems to be many really be one? How can what is one manifest as many? Just what is it that there are many of, and what is it that remains one throughout?”
― John O'Neill

“Each of us is two, and when two people meet, come into contact or join together, it’s rare that the four of them can agree. If the man who dreams in the man who acts is so frequently at odds with him, how can he help but be at odds with the man who acts and the man who dreams in the Other?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“I wish to speak about the overall unity of all that exists - about unity in multiplicity. I wish to show you two or three facets of a precious crystal, and to draw your attention to the pale images faintly reflected in them.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World

“The Mind is a multiplicity of individuals.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence

“Not everything needs to multiply. Look at Zero. And its impact!”
― Shalaka Kulkarni, Tadow - Vivid Echoes of Modern India

“One clue that you might have a case of engineered rather than organic DID on your hands could be the intense feelings of being deskilled and inadequate that arise in you as you are treating one of these clients. They puzzle and confuse even the most experienced of therapists until their multiplicity is recognized as engineered.

Another sign might be the sudden appearance of self-harm, compulsions, or 'crazy' behavior after patient disclosures. These people have trip wires layered into their programming that are set to 'go off' whenever a therapist gets too close to a hidden truth or when the client remembers something new. These booby trap programs can look like:

• sudden suicidal impulses out of nowhere, especially ones that are 'supposed to look like an accident'. as one client told me

• scrambled words or word salad in a client that has no history of schizophrenia

• an abrupt nonnegotiable firing of the therapist when the client is making progress

• pseudoseizures—episodes that look like grand mal seizures or dropping into a semi-conscious state with no EEC evidence of seizure activity

• feelings of being electrically 'shocked' at different places on the body

• recurrent and constant migraines

• an unexplained compulsion to return to a previously abusive environment that they have successfully left, such as an abusive family of origin or spouse, especially at certain times of the year such as Halloween.”
― Susan Pease Banitt, Wisdom, Attachment and Love in Trauma Therapy: Beyond Evidence Based Practice

“We carry within us a multiplicity - we are not one voice, but many.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The Council of Gods

“We exist in multiplicity. In the eyes of our parents, we might always be the child they nurtured. To a sibling, we might be a confidant, to a colleague, a professional... . Recognising that we are different people in different contexts can be liberating. It allows us to be flexible without feeling inauthentic.”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“It was overwhelming in her body, the multitude, all the selves she'd been.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers