The Myth of Sanity Quotes

“-If I somehow possessed a set of videotapes that contained all the most significant events of your childhood, in their entirety, would you want to see them?

-Absolutely. Right this very second.

-But why? Don't you think some of the tapes would be very sad?

-Most of them, yes. But if I could see them, then I could have them in my brain like regular memories-horrible memories, yes, but regular memories, not sinister little ghosts in my head that pop out of some part of me I don't even know, and take the rest of me away. Do you know what I mean?

-I think so, If you have to remeber, you'd rather do it in the front of your brain than in the back.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“We are all a little crazy.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“But after all the years, her husband and children have come to accept that, once every few weeks, their usually warmhearted and approachable Camisha will get into her Honda Accord at the beginning of a seemingly random day, and disppear until well after supper, when she will return home and go directly to bed. Her family has learned never top ask her where she had been on such a day, because the most she will ever say is, "Out. I just went out for a bit."

Also, they learned long ago never to express irritation or anger of any kind against Camisha, because when they do, her reaction is to become mute and exit to the garden, where for several hours she will sit cross-legged on a favourite flat stone, her back to the house. Slender, straight-backed, and unmoving, at these times she resembles nothing so much as an elegant ebony carving, exquisite but not quite alive. Watching her is almost unberable, and so is the guilt. Or if the weather is not suitable for the garden, she will simpily go to her bedroom and lock the door. Then as a matter of course, without comment during or after, her husband sleeps on the sofa in the den. In the morning, Camisha is usually her old self again, just as if nothing had happened.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“But after recovery, after they have chosen to live, these same people often truly live—passionately, in a way many other people never achieve. Survivors embody extremes of human experience, such that everyday misery is a near-stranger to them. At first, their pain is much worse than our everyday misery, by a factor so large that it would be difficult for most to conceive of it. And then later, after recovery, everyday misery is simply unacceptable. Life must be a passionate, conscious journey, or it is just not worth the survival effort. In”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“It's so hard, because so much of the time when I'm here, what you're seeing is not what I'm seeing. I feel like such an imposter. I'm out in my ocean, and you don't know that. And I can't tell you what's going on. Sometimes I'd really like to tell you, but I can't. I'm gone.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“When the abuse began, she would “go somewhere else”; she would “not be there.” By this, she meant that her mind had learned how to dissociate Julia’s self from what was going on around her, how to transport her awareness to a place far enough away that, at most, she felt she was watching the life of a little girl named Julia from a very great distance. A sad little girl named Julia was helpless and could not escape; but psychologically, Julia’s self could go “somewhere else,” could be psychologically absent. Simply put, Julia did not remember her childhood because she was not present for it.       All”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“it is my trauma patients who seem the oldest souls in the world, though some of them are quite young people. They are proud human spirits who seem ancient and ageless at the same time. Over the years, I have seen brighter passions in their eyes than in the eyes of any priest or guru. I have heard more wisdom from their mouths than I have read in any book.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“I don’t change. It’s not that I change. Reality changes. Everything becomes very small, and I exist entirely inside my mind. Even my own body isn’t real.” Indicating”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do, trapped in a situation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do know that anyone wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face just this kind of dilemma, made yet more harrowing because her circumstance is not anything so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a solitary, unlockable confinement inside the limits of her own mind.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is instead quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. Our awareness is divided. And much more commonly than we know, even our personalities are fragmented—disorganized team efforts trying to cope with the past—rather than the sane, unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“A trauma survivor desiring lasting change must confront moments in which she feels an irresistible urge to run from the process of remembering, feels inexcusably stupid, in fact, for not heeding the shrill warnings of her own mind to abandon the attempt, to flee; and set upon by these intolerable feelings, she must nonetheless stand her ground. Repelled though she may feel, she must continue to stare directly into the face of the past, to see it as clearly as possible, to describe it in words, to attach names to the nameless emotional monsters that have promised to devour her should they ever be allowed to raise their heads above the amygdala bog.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“these severely traumatized patients, people who have been through living nightmares, people who might blamelessly choose death, often emerge from successful treatment by constructing lives for themselves that are freer than most ordinary lives from what Sigmund Freud, a century ago, labeled as “everyday misery.” They become true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know. Or maybe it is more necessity than irony. I have been told more than once by the survivors of trauma that it would not be worth the struggle merely to go on surviving. And that is exactly what most of the rest of us do: we do not choose to die, or to live; we go on surviving. We do not choose nonexistence; nor do we choose complete awareness. We slog on, in a kind of foggy cognitive middle-land we call sane, a place where we almost never acknowledge the haze.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“But I have learned that they all have one thing in common. Underlying the various forms of heartrending pain and diverse complaints with which they come to therapy is the same fundamental question—Shall I choose to die, or shall I choose to live? They come to therapy to help themselves answer that question, and I will get nowhere if I try to answer the question for them, or even delay its consideration. The rest of therapy never begins for a survivor of trauma until that ruthlessly basic question has been answered.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“I don’t know exactly. It’s hard to explain. Only what’s going on in my mind is real. I’ll tell you what it feels like: I feel like I’m dog-paddling out in the ocean, moving backwards, out to sea. When I’m still close enough to the land, I can sort of look way far away and see the beach. You and the rest of the world are all on the beach somewhere. But I keep drifting backwards, and the beach gets smaller, and the ocean gets bigger and bigger, and when I’ve drifted out far enough, the beach disappears, and all I can see all around me is the sea. It’s so gray—gray on gray on gray.”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“The person who suffers from a severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a barely sublethal misery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may well bring her a better life, but that feels like stupidly issuing an open invitation to the unspeakable horror that waits to consume her alive. And in the manner of the true hero, she must choose to take the risk. For”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by the spectral throat? —Joseph Conrad         We”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“Imagine that you are in your house—no—you are locked in your house, cannot get out. It is the dead of winter. The drifted snow is higher than your windows, blocking the light of both moon and sun. Around the house, the wind moans, night and day. Now imagine that even though you have plenty of electric lights, and perfectly good central heating, you are almost always in the dark and quite cold, because something is wrong with the old-fashioned fuse box in the basement. Inside this cobwebbed, innocuous-looking box, the fuses keep burning out, and on account of this small malfunction, all the power in the house repeatedly fails. You have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little bag of new ones is empty; there are no more. You sigh in frustration, and regard your frozen breath in the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be so cozy, is tomblike instead. In all probability, there is something quirky in the antiquated fuse box; it has developed some kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really reacting to any dangerous electrical overload at all. Should you get some pennies out of your pocket, and use them to replace the burned-out fuses? That would solve the power-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins in there. Using coins would scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box, but the need for a safeguard right now is questionable, and the box is keeping you cold and in the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason. On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is overloaded somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If you do not find the fire soon enough, if you cannot manage to put the fire out, the whole house could go up, with you trapped inside. You know that death by burning is hideous. You know also that your mind is playing tricks, but thinking about fire, you almost imagine there is smoke in your nostrils right now. So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark living room, defeated, numb from the cold, though you have buried yourself under every blanket in the house? No light to read by, no music, just the wail and rattle of the icy wind outside? Or, in an attempt to feel more human, do you make things warm and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and howling pain? If you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent smoke every moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of these waking moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep? Do you sabotage the fuse box? I”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“these severely traumatized patients, people who have been through living nightmares, people who might blamelessly choose death, often emerge from successful treatment by constructing lives for themselves that are freer than most ordinary lives from what Sigmund Freud, a century ago, labeled as “everyday misery.” They become true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know. Or”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

“With our thoughts, we make the world. —Buddha”
― Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness