Psychological Defense Quotes

“Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in.
As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…

We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.

Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.”
― S.E. Smith

“The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.”
― Warwick Middleton

“The human brain has a safety switch that gets engaged by traumatic exposure and experiences. It’s similar to being in shock but we remain there until it’s long over. We detach. We create degrees of separation between ourselves and what we feel, think, perceive, and ultimately, this impacts not only our worldview but also our perception of self.
Clinically, this is called “Dissociation.”
― Jim LaPierre

“They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened
Exodus (1960) screenplay”
― Dalton Trumbo

“Had I not been dissociative, I never would have survived.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“Dissociation can be interpreted as an “emergency defense,” or a “shut off mechanism.”[6] According to Allen and Smith,[6] it is understood as an attempt by the individual to “prevent overwhelming flooding of consciousness at the time of trauma.” It is argued that the individual subconsciously cannot tolerate being present emotionally during the trauma but cannot control the situation, and therefore protects him- or herself from experiencing it in the moment via dissociation.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“Debbie Nathan also puts a great deal of weight on a letter from Shirley Mason to Dr. Wilbur stating that her MPD was made up. Dr. Wilbur’s explanation was that the letter was based on resistance. Debbie Nathan takes the letter as a statement of the real truth. But if Shirley Mason was such an unreliable historian of her own trauma and mental health history, why should we take this single letter as the truth? If a person with a long history of treatment for alcoholism wrote a letter to her psychiatrist, in the middle of treatment, saying that she did not have a drinking problem, what would we conclude?”
― Colin A. Ross

“The classic psychoanalytical interpretation of la belle indifférence is that it is evidence that an intrapsychic conflict has been converted and kept from its unacceptable conscious expression by the production of a physical symptom – so-called primary gain. Freud was the first to admit that this process of conversion was not always complete.”
― Jon Stone