Osdd Quotes

“Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

“Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“It appears that DDNOS is the intentional goal of these abusers, but DID sometimes results from a failure of programming.
In DDNOS, the ANP is always present, even when another part is in control of the behavior and feelings.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“Finally, those who do not meet the SCID-D-R standard for "distinct identities or personality states," but who do meet the SCID-D-R's other four standards (for DSM-IV's Criterion A and Criterion B) for DID, receive a SCID-D-R diagnosis of DDNOS-1a.”
― Paul F. Dell, Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond

“The SCID-D-R's standard for "distinct identities or personality states"
(DSM-IV, p. 487) is: "Persistent manifestations of the presence of different personalities, as indicated by at least four of the following:
a) ongoing dialogues between different people;
b) acting or feeling that the different people inside of him/her take control of his/her behavior or speech;
c) characteristic visual image that is associated with the other person, distinct from the subject;
d) characteristic age associated with the different people inside of him/her;
e) feeling that the different people inside of him/her have different memories, behaviors, and feelings;
f) feeling that the different people inside of him/her are separate from his/her personality and have lives of their own" (Steinberg, 1994, p. 106).
[The author believes that it is of considerable importance that none of the SCID-D-R's six criteria for "distinct personalities or personality states" are observable signs; each of the six is a subjective symptom or experience that must be reported to the test administrator. This striking fact supports the contention that assessment of dissociation should be based on subjective symptoms rather than signs (Dell, 2006b. 2009b).]”
― Paul F. Dell, Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond

“Lots of people with dissociative disorders are so used to losing time that they don’t even notice it anymore. Switching and the coming and going are so normal for them, and the covering for a “bad memory” are just natural parts of the day. In fact, it can be so natural, that many people with DID/MPD are firmly convinced that they don’t lose any time at all. However, a close examination of that belief can usually prove otherwise, but that is not an uncommon initial assumption.”
― Kathy Broady

“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

“Experience indicates that the more severe and/or ritualistic the abuse suffered as a child, the more fragmented is the adult patient's personality and thinking. Victims of satanic abuse are likely to exhibit polyfragmented atypical dissociative disorder (ADD) (dissociative disorder NOS) or polyfragmented MPD. Some victims of incest may not exhibit any exaggerated or special dissociative psychopathology.”
― Bennett G. Braun, Incest-Related Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology

“In my expcrience, complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesia barriers is associated with a 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—I have never met or heard aboul a complex multiple who had not experienced all three.”
― Colin A. Ross

“In principle, the number of parts of the personality in a given individual has little bearing on whether dissociation is at the secondary [OSDD] or tertiary [DID] level. A patient with secondary structural dissociation may have many EPs, while a patient with tertiary structural dissociation may only have two ANPs and two EPs. However, in general, more divisions relate to less mental efficiency and more likelihood that a traumatized individual will have tertiary structural dissociation.”
― Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Comparing the hippocampal volume of mentally healthy subjects and patients with PTSD, DDNOS, and DID, thus patients with increasing levels of dissociation, an increasingly smaller volume is observed: PTSD (primary structural dissociation), approximately -10%; DDNOS (secondary structural dissociation), approximately -15%; and DID (tertiary structural dissociation), approximately -20%. These findings are characterized by a remarkable relationship: the more severe the structural dissociation of the personality, the smaller the hippocampal volume. Furthermore, Ehling et al. (2008) found high correlations between the volume of these brain structures and psychoform and somatoform symptoms, as well as with the severity of the reported potentially traumatizing events. Correlations between the volume of these brain structures and the degree of general psychopathology and fantasy-proneness were lower or statistically nonsignificant.”
― Onno van der Hart

“The more severe and chronic the traumatization, the more dissociative parts can be expected to exist.”
― Onno van der Hart

“Because survival has been equated with internal separation, proximity can set off panic and fears of disintegration, i.e. 'fearing the trembling must turn to such severe shaking the vibration would dissolve her entirely, scattering her irrevocably wide'.”
― Sue Richardson, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“All parts need to be honoured for their role in survival and re-framed as helpful before new coping strategies can be developed. The ability to internalise the relationship with the therapist as a caregiver is key to the individuals ability to provide for self-care and management.”
― Sue Richardson, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder