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Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder QUOTES

Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder QUOTES

1 " Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.

This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

2 " How was it that we were all so blind? "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

3 " 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

4 " Multiple personality usually develops in the presence of severe and repeated trauma, beginning at a very early age, when the personality is developing. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

5 " It is hardly surprising that many survivors of ritual abuse develop DID in order to preserve their own sanity. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

6 " I have stated elsewhere (Sinason 1994) that the number of children and adults tortured in the name of mainstream religious and racial orthodoxy outweighs any others.
Wiccans, witches, warlocks, pagans and Satanists who are not abusive and practice a legally accepted belief system are increasingly concerned at the way criminal groups closely related to the drug and pornographic industries abuse their rituals. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

7 " Whatever the theory, it is important to note that clinicians such as Kluft draw attention to the clinical error of insisting that all alters talk as one or that only the alter with the legal name should be validated. 'Such stances are commonly associated with therapeutic failure'. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

8 " While professionals and patients can be blamed for 'believing' in an illness or having one, patients also report problems when they are believed. Some professionals, they commented, have worryingly simplistic ideas of 'integration'.
Ignoring the separately named alters in effect offers a psychic death sentence rather than aiding integration. If anything it can create a compliant false-self 'main person' who answers to [his or] her name and keeps all other 'states' in silent terror internally. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

9 " However, it is important to remember that only 15 years ago most major training schools did not accept the existence of child abuse and condemned what they saw as the unhealthy excitement that was considered to emanate from the earliest exponents. The language of their criticism is very similar... to what greets the clinician of today who speaks of DID. It has been a later knowledge that understands the way the shame and trauma of abuse become projected into the professional network leading to splitting and blame. "

― Valerie Sinason , Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder