Derealization Quotes

“Oh God just look at me now... one night opens words and utters pain... I cannot begin to explain to you... this... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it?

I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty...these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things...

If I told you what was really in my head, you''d never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive.”
― Emily Andrews, The Finer Points of Becoming Machine

“It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I honestly didn't believe I could bear any more suffering. I was convinced that the child within me was just too young to endure all this, much less understand it. She just wanted to be normal. But another part of me knew that to become normal, all the pieces of this puzzle had to become conscious.
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― Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse

“Dissociative symptoms—primarily depersonalization and derealization—are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures. In this latter disorder, there are often florid symptoms of depersonalization and realization, but most amnesia symptoms derive from difficulties with focused attention rather than forgetting previously learned information.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“Being stress and anxiety free is a human preset, I just show you how to 'flick the switch' to off. Permanent stress and anxiety recovery is possible quickly and simply despite what many are told.”
― Charles Linden, The Linden Method: The Anxiety and Panic Attacks Elimination Solution

“But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.

Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you're the painter, but you're the canvas.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream.
A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy.
I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“The point is, it didn’t even look like my face. It was the face of any twenty-four-year-old guy who might have been sitting across the way on the commuter train.
My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other’s self on the street – what do weh ave to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That’s about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“Dissociative Disorders have a high rate of responsiveness to therapy and that with proper treatment, their prognosis is quite good.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV Dissociative Disorders

“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

“Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though "satanic ritual abuse" did describe what had happened to me when I was a child. the concept was so foreign and so horrific that some part of me still wanted to stay in denial.
Devil worship dominated my childhood. That was undeniable, even if it was still nearly impossible to contemplate. Both of my parents and any number of their friends, as well as "respected" members of our community, had worshipped Satan.
I pushed the notion aside with all the power I could muster. I kept thinking to myself that it was ridiculous and impossible.
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― Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse

“I was not descending in a plane, coming Home.
I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“During this hour in the waking streets I felt at ease, at peace; my body, which I despised, operated like a machine. I was spaced out, the catchphrase my friends at school used to describe their first experiments with marijuana and booze. This buzzword perfectly described a picture in my mind of me, Alice, hovering just below the ceiling like a balloon and looking down at my own small bed where a big man lay heavily on a little girl I couldn’t quite see or recognize. It wasn’t me. I was spaced out on the ceiling.
I had that same spacey feeling when I cooked for my father, which I still did, though less often. I made omelettes, of course. I cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl, and as I reached for the butter dish, I always had an odd sensation in my hands and arms. My fingers prickled; it didn’t feel like me but someone else cutting off a great chunk of greasy butter and putting it into the pan.
I’d add a large amount of salt — I knew what it did to your blood pressure, and I mumbled curses as I whisked the brew. When I poured the slop into the hot butter and shuffled the frying pan over the burner, it didn’t look like my hand holding the frying-pan handle and I am sure it was someone else’s eyes that watched the eggs bubble and brown. As I dropped two slices of wholemeal bread in the toaster, I would observe myself as if from across the room and, with tingling hands gripping the spatula, folded the omelette so it looked like an apple envelope. My alien hands would flip the omelette on to a plate and I’d spread the remainder of the butter on the toast when the two slices of bread leapt from the toaster.
‘Delicious,’ he’d say, commenting on the food before even trying it.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“This new co-consciousness brought me to a state of awareness in which my core personality was directly able to experience "her" personality. Being co-conscious with her, he explained, would stop me from experiencing the feeling of leaving my body or dissociating.”
― Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse

“Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence:

Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.”
― Nicole Waller, Contradictory Violence: Revolution and Subversion in the Caribbean

“I heard this as if the doctor were at other end of a long tunnel. I had trouble connecting his words into sentences with meaning.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Derealization—A feeling that one's surroundings are strange or unreal. Often involves previously familiar people.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation: A Clinical Guide

“When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment.”
― Robin Wasserman, Skinned

“Plus de nom. Aujourd'hui, plus aucun souvenir du nom d'hier ; ni demain, de celui d'aujourd'hui, puisque le nom détermine la chose ; puisque un nom est, en nous, le concept de toute chose placée hors de nous. Sans appellation, toute conception devient impossible, et la chose demeure en nous, comme aveugle, imprécise et confuse ; ce nom que j'ai porté parmi les hommes que chacun le grave, épigraphe funéraire, sur l'image qu'il garde de moi, et qu'il la laisse en paix, à jamais. Un nom n'est qu'une épigraphe funéraire, il convient aux morts. À qui a conclu. Je suis vivant, et je ne conclus pas. La vie ne conclut pas. Et elle ignore les noms.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“Once, when I straighten up, I am beaten till I bleed.
I no longer know where I am in the world.”
― Chil Rajchman, The Last Jew of Treblinka

“I am immersed in another reality.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“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

“Her own voice sounds echoey, as if somebody else is speaking.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“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