What are the different ways you experience amnesia?

Hello!
I'm a lover of hearing others' experiences, and this is something I've been reflecting on recently so I wanted to bring this question up:
How do you experience dissociative amnesia (or lack therof, since OSDD1B psystems probably flock here with no OSDD forum)? How does it feel? how does it vary?
Thank you to anyone willing to share their experience.

-Love from Passion (She/They), Logic (Couldn't care less), and Dark (She/Her)

We mostly have full amnesia except we get fuzzy memories of TV shows and other media we've experienced, and it's also fuzzy between big me and little me (Dorothea and Dotty). We do have DID though. Little me also doesn't know a lot of adult things and the littler she gets the more things our brain makes her forget. She fluctuates on knowing what sex is and where babies come from and she often forgets a lot of wrods and just generally doesn't understand money.
WE share a lot of skills, but only Emily and Hazel can tie our shoelaces, so we have to wear laceless shows lately such a boots or slippers or crocs unless we get help from mum. The kids also can't drive, and no one taught Bridie to be road safe, so she needs an adult to cross the road with her and hold her hand so she doesn't just bolt across. It's kind of funny but also really dangeorus

This is Veronica here...

I understand a lot of adult things despite being a Little. We're not sure why. It might be because we were exposed to a lot of that young.

But...I don't have access to everyone else's memories. So, Violette's memories aren't mine, nor are Marcie's or Angel's or Angela's.

We hadn't really thought beyond that. I write like we did when we were ten though. So...kind of blocky without all the flourishes.

I get easily distracted too.

We have a common pool of memories and skills, but that covers basics like how to do certain things, but that doesn't mean we know everything. Violette can't really drive. She can drive, but not as well as Leila. I can't drive without feeling panicky.

hope that helps.

Hey,

First of, I believe you're new so welcome to the forum.

Then to my experience. It comes in multiple forms for me.
Important to know, my alters actively work to keep me in place. Neither of them enjoys being out, so they only come out fully if they feel like they have no other choice.

As such, the most frequent kind of "memory loss" I experience is when I've had this trance like state in which an alter controlled the body but didn't shut me out entirely. So... like co-fronting. It's like I'm a spectator inside my own body. When I try to remember anything that happened during this state, it's hazy like I was day dreaming while my body was just acting on its own. The alter who was co-fronting with me tends to debrief me when I get back to the front. They leave a message for me on discord or a sticky note with tasks they did and I still need to do. I can then sort of remember my body going through these motions, but I feel detached from it because it wasn't me doing it.

Aside from this co-fronting haze, I have black-outs that come in two types, I suppose?
Type 1. Normally when you remember something, you see it as you see the world. So, from first person perspective, right? Well, when people tell me "hey I saw you buy ice creams last week in the city" for example, and this is a thing that happened, I can think back and my alters will tell me they were there, and I will remember it as if I can see myself, so from third person perspective. This one has always been strange to me because I can't actively recall ever having an out of body experience.

Type 2. Total black-out amnesia. There are some things my alters don't want me to remember. So no matter what I'm told or what evidence I'm confronted with, I will not remember it. It'll just be a black gap in my memory. It gives me a headache to try and fill in these gaps and usually Kay (that's my gatekeeping alter) gets very upset with me for trying. If I accidentally remember something that fits the gap, it's just a flash usually before it gets cut off.

So that's how that goes for me.

Curious to see what others will say!

~ Grey

Welcome aboard!

Amnesia has been very different for me through time. As a kid I would completely blackout, completely forget a type of situation when being in another type of situation (forget about home when at my grandparents', forget about school once home...)

As a teenager, it was specifically my social memory that was a mess. At this time of my life the main host was a trauma holder so I would spend a lot of my days in flashbacks while forgetting about the people around me at school. Then suddently I would "zone back in", remember the people and the bad things they did while forgetting about home entierly. People would make fun of me and ask me questions and laugh that I was unable to answer due to the blackouts.

Adult and pre therapy it kept going with similar vibes: forgetting about a context while in another context, forgetting about people... all the while having all the micro amnesia of ADHD of course (why not both? )

With therapy and integration I now have all my ressources shared across all my parts/identities, same with autobiographic memories (except for the last crumbs here and there that still need to be found and integrated) and I no longer fit the diagnosis criteria for any dissociative or traumatic disorder. I still have work to do in order for things to be perfect (maladapted behaviors to unlearn, the last open wounds to heal, staying grounded still requires a bit of effort...) but the symptoms are under the thresehold of diagnosis so according to the books, I'm healed.

I'll still have the ADHD micro amnesia though coz that's something genetic for me. But all the tools I developped to compensate for the huge dissociative amnesia are helpful and so ingrained in my habits that I cope well enough.

When we were younger and had no understanding of the DID we would only find ourselves triggered out front..the memory of who we were supposed to be (the 'host' from the outside worlds perspective) and what we were supposed to be doing would be present for whoever found themself out front to continue but when we looked back at the whole day/time period... if it was me for eg I would only actually remember from the time I found myself at the front to the time I disappeared back inside.

We have better communication now but still if we switch I do not remember someone else's entire time out only a brief idea of what they were doing. I have no trauma memories, others carry the details..I may know ..something happened at this age etc.

Shutting others out from memories gives some of us an intense ability to hyperfixate and hyper-visualise..though we don't all carry this ability or others skills to the same level.

TS

I forget a lot of things I did in the past unless it's important to what i am doing then the memory sometimes does come. but I have very little awareness at all what I did last week like in any detail. in some vague way I maybe could figure it out.
I also am not allowed to read things I wrote in a past time beyond like say a week. My system is very careful to not let me see previous versions of myself unless I am ready to. It feels like I am high all the time or something. I only bring it up very occasionally cause I don't want people to know about it being different.
But as I say sometimes the memory will come back if I need it to. and other times I can't.