Struggling to come to terms with the loss

Hey,

I don't know if anyone will answer on here or not but it's worth a try as I see lots of posts are older now.

Really struggle at times to come to terms with the amnesia I suffered. My life, maybe like others on here, was built upon my ability to understand/compute/analyse/memorize, and when that was taken so was my life in a big way. I've regained some of my memory now thankfully, but there are things that bug me such as ideas I had stored, perhaps knowledge I had the understanding of and it doesn't seem to come back to me. I wonder if I was a fool to ever attach value to them? I wonder if I need to let them go along with the hopes of my ideas coming back to me. I'll give you an example here: I was about to write a book on a subject at the time I was very knowledgable about and so I set out on my quest to realise this dream I had, amnesia came along and now I don't even remember what I was going to write about. It's like I have a memory that I was going to do it, I even have sort of "Shadows" of memories that are still there in a way but I can't ever understand or access those memories.

How do I overcome this? I hated the people who pushed me over the edge to cause what happened, I've since let them go and wreak havoc elsewhere, but it seems I'm still stuck here despite that letting go process. Its been 4 years now and I'm losing hope. Just wondering if someone can light some form of hope for me that this can be overcome and that I can get what I lost back somehow.

RC

Hello RC,

Sorry you're stuck with this stuff. We don't have any answers or solutions to offer, unfortunately, but we're familiar with the loss.

We used to be really good with computers, programming was a big part of our job and everyone knew us as 'the computer genius'. Since about 18 months ago though that's been all but lost. Among other things.

We've kind of let it go though, stopped stressing about the amnesia and just work on fixing other things. It still bothers us though when people still act like we're still that person, with those skills.

Anyways, from what we understand about dissociative amnesia, it's all still in there somewhere. It's not that the memories are 'gone', but that they're not currently accessable? So there's always the possibility of recovering them.

Do you work with a therapist at all? I think that would be the best bet, to work with a therapist and make sure they understand your goal is to work at recovering those dissociated memories.

Good luck.

Arin

Hi Arin,

Thank you for your reply. Struggling with the depression at the moment still but I want to start therapy soon now so that I can hopefully start to overcome this piece by piece. Are there any specific models of therapy that I ought to be looking for that you or perhaps others here have experienced and seemed to help with? I've been scared to approach help because of the stigma I guess.

I'm sorry to also hear of your loss. But what I got from your message is that you feel better able to cope now because you are able to push the things aside and move onwards that perhaps were too much to overcome at first. Have you also experienced feelings of anger/frustration at what caused your amnesia?

Thank you again
RC

Hi RC,

I'm not really an expert at this stuff, but my understanding is psychotherapy / talk therapy is the preferred treatment for dissociative disorders. There are some other things, cbt & dbt & emdr but we're still early in our therapy and haven't done any of that stuff so I don't really know about it beyond what I've read from other folks.

As for being angry or frustrated, I haven't experienced that myself but Viola definitely has. She's frequently angry at our family for the way we were treated and raised, that led to all this stuff.

Arin

p.s. You might want to try posting in the DID forum. It's a lot more active than this one, and the dissociative disorders are all treated pretty much the same way.