Loss Of Self Quotes

“Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.
Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά... Beauty is harsh...”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Trapped within the confines of his mind, he is too aware of every thought passing through it, as if he were outside, looking in. At night he often lies awake ruminating endlessly about what’s wrong with him, about death, and about the meaning of existence itself. At times his arms and legs feel like they don’t belong with his body. But most of the time, his mind feels like it is operating apart from the body that contains it.”
― Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self

“I've missed you," he says.

I've missed myself, you want to say, but you don't.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“While he can interact with others who have no idea that anything is wrong, Ron lives without spontaneity, going through the motions, doing what he thinks people expect him to do, glad that he is able to at least appear normal throughout the day and maintain a job. He studied drama briefly while in college, and remains enamored of Shakespeare and literature, but an emerging self-consciousness eventually robbed him of his ability to act. Now he feels as if all of his life is an act—just an attempt to maintain the status quo.

Recalling literature he once loved, he sometimes pictures himself as Camus’s Meursault, in The Stranger: an emotionless character who plods through life in a meaningless universe with apathy and indifference. He’s tired of living
this way but terrified of death.”
― Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self

“I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά. Beauty is harsh.


― Donna Tartt, The Secret History”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It isn't depression, or anxiety, though it can sometimes appear as a symptom of these better—known conditions. Often, it emerges with cruel ferocity as a chronic disorder completely unto itself.
Its destructive impact on an individual’s sense of self is implied in its very name—depersonalization.”
― Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self

“The water and the wind will wear the wood down, until only water and wind remain.”
― Lisa Mantchev, Perchance to Dream

“Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

“Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was—to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends—albeit more by circumstance than by choice—he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed—and thereby strained—by comprehensibility.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I'd had of myself, some wholeness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I decide I’ll just have to be myself. I’m sick of pretending anyway – of policing my words and editing my thoughts. Husband never wants me to talk about the Slits or my ceramics or make rude jokes, I’m losing every ounce of the person I used to be. I know she wasn’t all good, but she wasn’t all bad either. I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not for this bloke who lives miles away across the sea. I’m not going to try and be nice and seductive for him. There are so many people in my life that I’m putting on a front for, I don’t need one more. If he doesn’t like me for who I am, forget it.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Jasper has turned her life into his own, his pen distorting her truth. She feels like a pulled flower, its roots severed.”
― Elizabeth Macneal, Circus of Wonders

“Success Orientation is like falling into a deep cave. It is not about how you climb out of the cave. Success Orientation is whether you climb out or not.”
― Deborah Bravandt

“When the people around you have lost their will to be free, then earth becomes a hell.”
― Ma Jian, Red Dust: A Path Through China

“Did she not see how the man she married was already irretrievable despite himself? Lewis hoped she wouldn't be the last to know.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“La jeune fille était probablement plus exigeante, plus gourmande que la moyenne. Elle avait déjà deux tentatives de suicide derrière elle. Je me souviens d'elle allongée sur un lit d'hôpital, qui cherchait à fixer un point indéfini sur le mur immaculé pour ne plus entendre les gémissements des autres, pour tromper le temps, les allées et les venues des infirmières au masque dur et impassible, mais qui finissait par se retrouver face à elle-même, qu'était-elle devenue, sinon encore un numéro à qui il fallait administrer ceci et cela.”
― Marceline Loridan-Ivens, L'Amour après

“I don't know what I want or don't want. I've stopped wanting, stopped knowing how to want, stopped knowing the emotions or thoughts by which people generally recognize that they want something or want to want it. I don't know who I am or what I am. Like someone buried under a collapsed wall, I lie under the topped vacuity of the entire universe.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Only the Perfect Man can wander in the world without taking sides, can follow along with men without losing himself”
― Chuang Tzu