Normal Forgetting Or Dissociative Amnesia?

[theshadowoftheliving]

I'm trying to convince myself that this sort of forgetting isn't as weird as I think it is. I'm realizing that I've spent a lifetime not remembering, and a lot of what I experience maybe isn't as normal as I think it is ...

Okay. So about nine months ago, I went on a trip to another city. Planned the trip, flew there, stayed a few days, saw museums, ate food, flew home. No big deal. It was pretty pleasant and nice.

Zoom ahead to a conversation I was having a week ago with friends, telling them that I really should go on a trip, because I hadn't been anywhere for a year and a half. In that conversation, I truly, truly believed that I hadn't traveled for over a year.

But then yesterday, organizing receipts for taxes, I found all my travel receipts. And it dawned on me that I did, indeed, travel - and faced with the evidence, I could then pull up the memory. This is the same sort of forgetting that happens when I forget I own a car for days on end or forget about one of the places I work, or can't remember or recognize friends. But once I remember, it's like I always knew - it isn't a surprise or something that I can't assimilate into my story. So, I always thought that maybe I just had a bad memory, or this was how everyone worked.

Is this normal? Or is this just my mind being dissociative? I'm asking because I really have no idea how other people's brains work and I don't know if I'm overreacting or not.

 

[GwenDR]

I'm not sure how dissociative memory loss usually manifests, so I don't know if it's from dissociation or not. But the examples you gave sound a bit unusual. My own memory is rather poor, but in the sense that it's very difficult for me to remember what I had to eat today or yesterday, and that I'll lose entire conversations and events pretty quickly, unless it just stands out for some reason. But in my case, it's not so unusually poor (as far as I know) that I think there's any specific reason behind it.

There is something called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory which is now being studied. Here's a site with information on that, if it helps: Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) They're actually doing research on the issue, and are collecting data through a survey. There may even be overlap between this and dissociative amnesia.

Edit: the suggestion that there's overlap between SDAM and dissociative amnesia is purely speculative on my part. I don't know what the research team or other relevent experts think of that, one way or the other. Complementary grains of salt available on request.

 

[Kieran]

I personally don't use the term normal in general because I feel like normal is relative and subjective. However, I have D.I.D, PTSD and memory issues. I forgot who my own mother, sister and father were, for a complete day. This happens several times a year, but the length of the memory loss seems to have decreased a little.

I'm not 100% certain of course, because I'm not a therapist, but what you're experiencing is something I've heard other people with dissociation and PTSD experience. I know this answer is short, but I honestly think it is normal, especially when in regards to anything mental health related.

 

[GwenDR]

I personally don't use the term normal in general because I feel like normal is relative and subjective...

That's a very good point. What most of us experience is completely normal for someone who's been through the same kinds of trauma. It's the trauma that's not normal. Our response is perfectly normal.

 

[BlueOrange]

The holiday example sounds like it falls within 'normal' to me. Your mind was focussed on 'I haven't had a holiday in a long time'. You forgot the most recent holiday (which wasn't really very recent). As soon as you were reminded of the most recent holiday, you remembered. I've seen normal & healthy people forget similarly. Therefore, normal IMO.

 

[theshadowoftheliving]

I think that the caveat here is that I've just been diagnosed with DID and I'm desperately scrambling inside to prove that my therapist is wrong. So, I want to prove that the memory issues I have are just normal memory issues, not DID memory issues ....

I also have spent a lifetime knowing that I lose chunks of info and time and have no idea what is going on, so I don't know what is me losing time or info and just me being normal - I've never found out. I've always just tried to be as normal as possible, and act as normal as possible, and I'm not sure where problem and playacting intersect.

 

[BlueOrange]

It's difficult and confusing. And having DID doesn't make you immune to 'normal forgetting'. I forget normally all the time, but being unable to recall the address where I lived with my ex-wife, two weeks after I moved out & having lived there for years? That doesn't seem normal to me at all.

It's normal to forget things that don't have a lot of emotional significance, that happened a long time ago, and where we aren't reminded of them. It's not normal to forget things where strong emotion was involved, that happened recently, or when we are reminded of them. And there's lots of judgement calls to be made in between.

 

[Sandstone]

This area is playing on my mind a lot. I keep remembering examples of things I have forgotten, only to forget them again. I'm particularly puzzled by the innocuous examples, none of which I can recall right now. I know they are things that don't matter, and that makes it all the more puzzling that my mind needs to forget them.

It's not normal to forget things where strong emotion was involved,

It may not be normal, but it makes sense to me. I can understand why my mind might prefer to forget something painful or distressing, but why would it need to forget that it was me who finished the peanut butter, not my husband?

 

[GwenDR]

I was realizing yesterday I couldn't remember the vast majority of a fight between me, my wife, and my mom a week ago, that led to people getting extremely upset. Though it was more of a collective breakdown than a real fight. I'd even gotten major details wrong, like thinking it was my dad involved instead of my mom.

Though in my case and as far as I know, my own forgetfulness is not related to my diagnosis in progress likely stress disorder. Even with the emotional criteria that BlueOrange suggested, I"m not sure where the barrier is between normal forgetfulness, normal forgetfulness at the lower end of a spectrum, and forgetfulness as a symptom of a psychological or neurological condition.

 

[BlueOrange]

I was realizing yesterday I couldn't remember the vast majority of a fight between me, my wife, an...

That sounds like 'potentially normal confusion' instead of 'forgetting'. You remember that there was a fight. Details (potentially important details) can easily go missing in a complicated, stressful situation (like a three-way fight). I do like the words 'collective breakdown', there's a subtle understanding implied :)

 

[BlueOrange]

I can understand why my mind might prefer to forget something painful or distressing, but why would it need to forget that it was me who finished the peanut butter, not my husband?

The brain prioritizes the memories that will make a difference to survival. These are the strong negative emotions (as in 'Ouch! Fire hurts!') and the strong positive emotions ('I learned how to track an animal, and got a nice meal!'). A brain that is working at 100% efficiency will remember that fire burns, even though the memory of being burned is distressing. It can and should forget who emptied the peanut butter, because it has limited storage capacity - if it doesn't forget, it does 'get full' and stop working.

So normal forgetting isn't about what's pleasant or distressing, it's about what's important or unimportant. When we decide to forget because we want to (because it's unpleasant), that's not normal forgetting, that's dissociation. The critical difference is that these unpleasant memories are not actually dissolved (which is how normal forgetting works). Instead, we set up a pattern of thoughts that says "Don't think about the following topic." That thought pattern can be effective at preventing those structures from being activated. Ironically, it also prevents normal forgetting, because normal forgetting loads things into dreams (activates them) and the content of the dream gets weakened. Dreams with highly distressing content tend to wake us up (taking us out of 'forgetting mode') and then we think about the content of the dream while we're awake (strengthening the links again).

 

[eloc]

I'm trying to convince myself that this sort of forgetting isn't as weird as I think it is...

I am pretty sure memory stuff in PTSD is associated with low cortisol and its affect on memory formation in the brain. Some even speculate it is why we don't get better - we don't remember what we are learning in all our treatments in a way that allows us to move on so the endicrinologists are thinking about trialling short term cortisol supplements combined with memory rebuilding treatments. I have been tested as having very low verbal memory recall and have trouble with stuff like remembering to medicate my kids three times a day when they are sick - oops let me just do something - and that there is boiling hot water in the sink or a pot is hot - I know it is I tell myself it and then two minutes later I stick my hands in the water or grab the pot.

Once there was a chance my husband had been attacked killed in a remote location- he was in same area and his description fitted someone so much that my own brothers/cousins usually aloof were asking me was he ok? I just kept forgetting that it had happened and therefore did not look it up on the internet nor ring my husband even though everyone else was really concerned - everytime someone asked me I would say oh yeah _ I will have to look it up and then I would just promptly forget it again ....anyway he was ok and my faulty memory saved me all the worry.