Depersonalization Quotes

“Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you ‘go away.’ You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.”
― Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

“Louise often feels like part of her is "acting." At the same time , "there is another part 'inside' that is not connecting with the me that is talking to you," she says. When the depersonalization is at its most intense, she feels like she just doesn't exist. These experiences leave her confused about who she really is, and quite often, she feels like an "actress" or simply, "a fake.”
― Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self

“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai

“Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles....) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“It was strange when I would hear myself talking. Who was this person speaking words out of my mouth? I didn't feel like it was me.”
― Malia Bradshaw, A Return to Self: Depersonalization and How to Overcome It

“As a teenager and young adult, I found being mute intensely isolating and dehumanizing. I felt truly like I was just a pair of eyes and ears - an entity without a body, without a face, and without a mouth. I felt as though I was barely a physical being.”
― Carl Sutton, Selective Mutism In Our Own Words: Experiences in Childhood and Adulthood

“Sometimes I look older than I feel. Sometimes my hands seem bigger than they should be or I feel taller than I think I should be.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Th dissociation continued to get worse, until I was living in a constant state of dissociation.”
― Malia Bradshaw, A Return to Self: Depersonalization and How to Overcome It

“Thing was though, before I´d gained the understanding of what was happening, my seemingly flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as time went on. At first an emotional numbness set it. Then my head, which initially had reassured with, 'Excellent. Well done. Successfully am I fooling them in that they do not know who I am or what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling', now began itself to doubt I was even there. 'Just a minute', it said. 'Where is our reaction? We were having a privately expressed reaction but now we're not having it. Where is it?' This my feelings stopped existing. And now this numbance from nowhere had come so far on in its development that along with others in the area finding me inaccessible, I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“000-x02 Dissociative reaction
This reaction represents a type of gross personality disorganization, the basis of which is a neurotic disturbance, although the diffuse dissociation seen in some casts may occasionally appear psychotic. The personality disorganization may result in aimless running or "freezing." The repressed impulse giving rise to the anxiety may be discharged by, or deflected into, various symptomatic expressions, such as depersonalization, dissociated personality, stupor, fugue, amnesia, dream state, somnambulism, etc. The diagnosis will specify symptomatic manifestations.
These reactions must be differentiated from schizoid personality, from schizophrenic reaction, and from analogous symptoms in some other types of neurotic reactions. Formerly, this reaction has been classified as a type of "conversion hysteria.”
― American Psychiatric Association, DSM I: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Mental Disorders

“I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“The first time I experienced dissociation I had no idea what was happening to me. I sat on the couch with my boyfriend. He said something to me and when I looked at him, I didn't recognize his face.

I still knew it was him, but his features looked mangled and foreign. This face that I had looked at thousands of times now seemed strange.

Needless to say, I was terrified.”
― Malia Bradshaw, A Return to Self: Depersonalization and How to Overcome It

“My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Children of borderlines may tune out by dissociating and disconnecting from their environment. They cannot feel embarrassed, humiliated, ridiculed, or hurt if they are no longer in their own bodies. Unfortunately, the sensation of depersonalization or dissociation makes them feel crazy.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

“Depersonalization—Detachment from one's self, e.g., a sense of looking at one's self as if one is an outsider.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“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

“I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Pity the introvert with the face of a therapist or a kindergarten teacher. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy in human spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin.”
― Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

“When I threw the stick at Jamie, I hadn't intended to hit him with it. But the moment it left my hand, I knew that's what was going to happen. I didn't yet know any calculus or geometry, but I was able to plot, with some degree of certainty, the trajectory of that stick. The initial velocity, the acceleration, the impact. The mathematical likelihood of Jamie's bloody cheek.

It had good weight and heft, that stick. It felt nice to throw. And it looked damn fine in the overcast sky, too, flying end over end, spinning like a heavy, two-pronged pinwheel and (finally, indifferently, like math) connecting with Jamie's face.

Jamie's older sister took me by the arm and she shook me. Why did you do that? What were you thinking? The anger I saw in her eyes. Heard in her voice. The kid I became to her then, who was not the kid I thought I was. The burdensome regret. I knew the word "accident" was wrong, but I used it anyway. If you throw a baseball at a wall and it goes through a window, that is an accident. If you throw a stick directly at your friend and it hits your friend in the face, that is something else.

My throw had been something of a lob and there had been a good distance between us. There had been ample time for Jamie to move, but he hadn't moved. There had been time for him to lift a hand and protect his face from the stick, but he hadn't done that either. He just stood impotent and watched it hit him. And it made me angry: That he hadn't tried harder at a defense. That he hadn't made any effort to protect himself from me.

What was I thinking? What was he thinking?

I am not a kid who throws sticks at his friends. But sometimes, that's who I've been. And when I've been that kid, it's like I'm watching myself act in a movie, reciting somebody else's damaging lines.

Like this morning, over breakfast. Your eyes asking mine to forget last night's exchange. You were holding your favorite tea mug. I don't remember what we were fighting about. It doesn't seem to matter any more. The words that came out of my mouth then, deliberate and measured, temporarily satisfying to throw at the bored space between us. The slow, beautiful arc. The spin and the calculated impact.

The downward turn of your face.

The heavy drop in my chest.

The word "accident" was wrong. I used it anyway.”
― David Olimpio, This Is Not a Confession

“The ultimate form of dehumanization is not to reduce humans to the rank of animals, but to elevate animals to the rank of humans; the ultimate form of depersonalization is not to take away the personhood of subjects, but to give personhood to objects; and the ultimate form of demoralization is not to lower morality to the level of caprice, but to raise caprice to the level of morality.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“Oh, dear mother, I've shed my human guise,
Left with a mind, where no emotion lies.
Reflecting in the glass, a face unknown,
The person I was, in shadows overthrown.”
― Blake Sevann

“If you are able to stay focused on this page, your thalamus is helping you distinguish between sensory information that is relevant and information that you can safely ignore...

People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down... The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Numbing is the other side of the coin in PTSD. Many untreated trauma survivors start out...with explosive flashbacks, then numb out later in life.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“In order satisfactorily to function, we depend, throughout our lives, on the presence of others who will accord us validity, identity, and reality. You cannot be anything if you are not recognized as something; in this way your being becomes dependent on the regard of somebody else. You may be confirmed, or you may be disconfirmed, and if the latter is the case, often enough and pervasively enough, you simply cease to exist as a person.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“I looked in the mirror a lot during this time. The body I once recognised as my own had melted away. Who was this creature beneath the fat? At the time, I failed to recognise her as my best self. I thought she was nothing like a real girl. I thought she looked like something a pervert imagined; something a twelve-year-old boy doodled in the back of a notebook.”
― Eliza Clark

“With nearly every part of their brains tuned out, they obviously cannot think, feel deeply, remember, or make sense out of what is going on. Conventional talk therapy, in those circumstances, is virtually useless.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Depersonalization can occur when the body and mind can’t handle the stress or trauma anymore. It’s a protective mechanism, a way for your brain to disconnect and survive.”
― Daniel Ruczko, Purgatory