Dissociative amnesia

A phobia of memories

“You can’t change shit if you don’t know what’s wrong with you.” 
     -Andrea, in her podcast Adult Child, #81 “Repressed Memories”

“I have been dismayed to encounter psychiatry residents who have not even heard of dissociative amnesia.” 
     -J. Douglas Bremner, Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders

Dissociative amnesia is a structural form of dissociation. It is distinct from amnesias caused by physical damage to the brain from accidents, traumatic brain injury (TBI), strokes, and dementia.

Dissociative amnesia is what we’re sometimes referring to when we use the term “repression.” Amnesia is the older term, but repression is more commonly used. I used to wonder if I had repressed something from my childhood. A few incidents, maybe, hidden in the past?

Amnesia varies in the memories (or set of) memories it takes. Each individual is different. Here are some therapist-provided quotes from patients with “pervasive amnesia”:

Some individuals report pervasive amnesia for the past:
“I don’t remember anything before age 16”
“I can remember being at school, but nothing about living at home”
“I remember a lot about my father, but don’t seem to have any memories of my mother”
“I just draw a big blank between the ages of 8 and 12”
     (from “Assessing and Treating Complex Dissociative Disorders” by Kathy Steele and Onno van der Hart, 2020)

Amnesia is a gap, a lacuna in the conscious narrative. An absence of any kind is intrinsically more difficult to comprehend than a presence. Difficult to comprehend and difficult to believe in. Is it possible that one can be violently assaulted—repeatedly assaulted—and not recall it, not even to know that it happened?

                                                             🔻🔸🔺

Before I discovered I was amnesic, I might have said that chronic depression with accompanying suicidal ideation (recurring thoughts of ending my life) was my primary affliction. And general dysfunction in school and work. Gradually I learned that I had a fear of people—not just intimacy, not just a fear of strangers, but a puzzling fear of people generally. None of this made sense to me.

I was driven by a need to know what was wrong—a need to know what my depression and dysfunction actually meant—and to understand why I was so different from everyone else.

“Weird” was the word schoolmates occasionally threw at me, a label I sometimes claimed with pride—attempting to extract some dignity from what is the opposite of dignity. I referred to myself as a “loner,” “unconventional,” “different.” In college I majored in philosophy and psychology. I read books on depression and anxiety. When I was offered subsidized therapy, I seized it—five and a half years in my late twenties, three years with a different therapist in my mid-thirties.

All these attempts at understanding failed. Dissociation and amnesia sustain ignorance and confusion. They prevent insight and emotional growth.

                                                               🔸🔸🔸

The DSM-V (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) defines dissociative amnesia as:

An inability to recall important autobiographic information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.

“Ordinary forgetting” isn’t an easy thing to define. We may forget when our experiences fail to encode into long term memory, disintegrating in seconds, hours, days. Our experience may be stored in long term memory, but the memory may disintegrate over time. Or our memories may be intact, even vivid, but not brought to mind and thus shoved gradually into the back corners of the brain, until . . .

Think of Proust’s character in Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Memory) who dips his madeleine in a cup of tea and tastes it, activating reams of memories—seven volumes worth—some sweet, some painful, a life.

It is often mysterious as to why we remember some things and not others, but as a rough guide, the more often an experience is repeated and the more emotional it is, the more likely we are to remember it.

But if an experience is extremely emotional, especially if it contains terror, excoriating shame, or rage—especially if one emotion or drive is in conflict with another (if, for instance, we fear and hate someone we need and love)—the brain may retain the memories or pieces of it but not permit them to enter into consciousness. Thus “an inability to recall“—a rather different thing from “ordinary forgetting.” Though unconscious, such memories actively influence thought, behavior and emotions.

Another key word in the DSM definition is “information.” It’s not only particular experiences that you might not be able to recall, but information about what happened. In the case of amnesia for childhood, the information lost may be so extensive that you barely know the members of your family—you barely know yourself.

I used to have alarming dreams of being blind, of driving a car while blind. Dreams often present information in metaphors. With these dreams, I believe my non-conscious mind was warning me. Telling me how much I didn’t see—didn’t know—about my family and my life.

                                                               🔸🔸🔸

Psychologists refer to memories that are unavailable, unassimilated, inaccessible, unintegrated. They refer to traumatic memories, dissociated memories, motivated forgetting, divided or split consciousness, a phobia of memories, a narrowing of attention, compartmentalization, or repression.

I like “phobia of memories.” It expresses the intensity of the energy that repulses the memories, pushing them back, under, away.

I also like “inaccessible to consciousness.” Think of a barrier blocking the unconscious memories from the conscious mind, the memories lurking behind the barrier, maybe pressing against it, able to seep out only in dreams or poems or art or fantasies.

Or seeping out in emotional pain: anguish, anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal ideation, despair.

                                                               🔸🔸🔸

Some victims of trauma always remember the essential elements of their trauma. Even so, they often don’t connect the original experience with current symptoms, usually needing therapy to make those connections. (See the memoir Chosen by Stephen Mills)

Others have amnesia for years, and when they do recover memories they realize they are memories. Often they come flooding back so vividly, there isn’t room for doubt.

Others are uncertain, wondering if this new material might be imagination rather than memory. They may ask a relative—often a sibling or a parent. That relative may confirm that, “Yes, that happened; I knew about it.”

This validation is fairly common. Those with recovered memories who talk to their families about it are often able to find someone who knew about the traumatic incidents. Which, by the way, is (or should be) conclusive evidence for those who need it that people do repress memories, and that they do, sometimes, recover them.

Not that there isn’t plenty of evidence for dissociative amnesia—both partial and total memory loss—for anyone who isn’t set against believing in it. Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps The Score:

There have in fact been hundreds of scientific publications spanning well over a century documenting how the memory of trauma can be repressed, only to resurface years or decades later. Memory loss has been reported in people who have experienced natural disasters, accidents, war trauma, kidnapping, torture, concentration camps, and physical and sexual abuse. Total memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidence ranging from 19 percent to 38 percent.

                                                               🔸🦎🔸

See my Resources page for book recommendations and links to more information about dissociative amnesia.