Not losing time or blacking out, what's wrong with me?

A strange question I know, but I don't seem to have similar experiences as most of here. My T on the other hand is convinced about DDNOS or possibly DID based on what I've told. I guess the problem is my subjective experience - even though I sometimes clearly act like different people I'd be lying if I told my therapist that the guy watching sports all night is clearly someone else (I hate watching sports).

Losing time & memory loss:
I have really bad memory! In DES there's a question: "Some people find that they have no memory for some important events in their lives (for example, a wedding or graduation)." and I'm like: "Wtf some people actually have memories from some important events in their lives"

In the evening I hardly ever have more than passing glimpses of what has happened during the day. I do remember most of the appointments I've made and have mostly pretty good image of what should be done in tomorrow though so It's not real amnesia/dementia.

It's also weird that there's no pattern. If I have understood correctly there should be one. For example If were/had a Nanny-alter taking care of my child I should be able to remember things related to that (past vaccinations, visit in the park, names of her friends ect.). A 'sort of a coherent' memory of this babysitter person that's out.

But I don't! It seems that apart from small variations here and there all I have in any given moment of time is few minutes to few hours max. Everything else is fuzzy to nonexistent.

I don't really lose time in the sense of 'Some people have the experience of finding themselves in a place and having no idea how they got there.' but I do 100% of 'Some people find that sometimes they are listening to someone talk and they suddenly realize that they did not hear part or all of what was said' and 'Some people have the experience of driving or riding in a car or bus or subway and suddenly realizing that they don’t remember what has happened during all or part of the trip.'

****not meant to be insulting for anyone****
I wish I heard voices, wrote posts in several colors and I wish I would black out for weeks at a time and when coming back I'd be all confused about what month it is. That would make accepting things a lot easier!
***************************************************

Can you relate? Any thoughts?

***TW MENTION OF RAPE******


Hi. I dont know of how much help I'll be to you but I saw there was no response on your post and I felt bad I know that dissociation runs on a continnum so the fact that you're not losing complete time or hearing voices as you said does not mean you don't have a dissociative disorder. I have been diagnosed with DDNOS which is I guess is pretty similar to DID but I don't meet the full criteria. I do have amnesia for almost my whole life and it looks very cloudy at best. I have heard voices but they are not distinct and do not have names but they have ages...my T and I are thinking the ages are me stuck in different traumatic times in my life. I have severe depersonalization and identity issues and have even been mildly psyhotic but I don't have DID. Your symptoms sound very familiar to me. I spent years and years in the mental health system trying to get help, getting diagnosed with one disorder after another with no relief. It wasn't until I was raped that my symptoms and flashbacks/body memories started happening (I'm 27 now). It's all so confusing but the more you educate yourself the more clear things will hopefully become. Once I learned what a dissociative disorder was I read and read and read, as much as I could. I was so happy to finally find a reason for my symptoms and I'm finally on the right road to recovery but it takes a lot of time. Be patient with yourself.

hi! i dunno if i can help but i'll try. i'm sorry things are so tuff right now. *hugs! if wanted* i hope you feel better soon.

i'm cassie! i'm 8. but i understand things real good. i don't talk so good sumtimes thou. but anywho the host is cassandra. she's 21. she's old! haha. sorry. i'm not good at staying serius either. but it goes like this:

cassandra's in denyle...denyal? denyal about us because she's been finding out that she never lost time. she never blacked out. she switched but she never had memory problems. she just told herself she blacked out because she hated having to watch herself do stuff and say stuff that she didn't wanna do. so she told herself that she didn't remember that stuff until she believed it. but then shay started to pop up and i gess she's been in the background for a long time. cassandra didn't want to believe shay was real and shay got mad and started showing cassandra all the memories that cassandra told herself she had blacked out for. so cassandra started figuring out that she was lying to herself about losing time and blacking out and that it never really happened and so she started thinking all of it was a lie and now she's in denyal about the whole thing. but the important part is that cassandra never lost time when she switched. so you don't hafta lose time or black out to have DID. and there dusn't hafta be a pattern. DID is different for every person. maybe there isn't a pattern for you. maybe there's not enuff of a pattern to be found yet. maybe your parts aren't ready to be found yet. maybe your parts aren't seperated clearly so it's hard to tell if they're there or not. you never know.

i hope this place helps you and i hope you get stuff figured out soon. *hugs! if wanted*

Hi pasttime.

My name's Jane. I'm the boss in the system 2. System 1 is...a bit out of control at the moment so I'm replying nowadays. ^^; Or my group's parts.

Loosing time is hard to recognize especially if you don't have any memory of what you have forgotten! It's like forgetting that you have forgotten something. So even if it feels that you haven't had any black outs, it doesn't mean that there hasn't been ones. You just don't remember them. That's what usually happens in our system if the communication is VEEEERY BAD.

When the communicationg with the parts gets better and smoother, black outs usually become clearer and more noticable. You realize that you don't have any idea how you ended up cooking dinner and just moments before you were driving a car. Also the amnesia gets milder and your black outs are not as severe as when you and your parts are not communicating.

So to put it short:
GOOD communication in the system = notiacable blackouts & time loss, slight amnesia, fuzzy/bad memory
BAD communication = no memory of blackout & time loss, full amnesia, no memory of lost memory

I hope this helps. It's put into very simple package so this doesn't include the more complicated stuff. But it's great to keep things simple!

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I just wanted to say thank you for everyone!

While reading the replies and feeling sorry for not replying earlier I just started to wonder why I'm not posting more often. I post a question and come back a month later - no wonder people don't reply to my posts

So what if I'm an alter? There are some problems though:
-I know that I should be working instead of posting this. So there's sadly no blacking out from stressfull things.
-I sort of remember yesterday (ok it was surprisingly hard but after 5 min I've gathered that my kid had a play date with 2 friends - which is enough to dissociate even normal parents - and what I made for dinner). So my timeline is as fuzzy as usually.
-I don't feel any different than usual.

It seems to me that posting here is working: working on yourself. In my next paragraph I am going to italicize some key phrases that you can use in searches on the web and in book indexes.

What you are describing sounds a lot like my own subjective experience about 2 years ago. You are extremely "foggy" on recent day-to-day events of your life. Being foggy is a common symptom under the heading of depersonalization. It could be due to anxiety or depression, or due to a superordinate dissociative disorder (with the anxiety and depression being a natural result of your suffering and not yet getting the help you need). Your therapist thinks you have a major dissociative disorder, meaning either DID or DID-like DDNOS. When many dissociative symptoms are apparent and there is also apparent identity alteration (seeming like different people, sudden mood changes, etc) that is a major dissociative disorder. If you also have dissociative amnesia, that is DID. Often the amnesia is present but missed at first because we tend to have amnesia for our amnesia!

The next version of DSM, due to be published in 2013, will expand the scope of DID to include DID-like DDNOS.

if you're an alter, you're still you. simple as that.

and you can post in pretty colors if you want to

-wolf

Una+ wrote:Often the amnesia is present but missed at first because we tend to have amnesia for our amnesia!

I have had exactly that, amnesia about my amnesia. My mind has then filled in the gaps to smooth over the boundary between events I do remember. Sometimes, I've just made things up, which I now know are ideas Jonathan or someone else suggested.

I've also been actively prevented from gaining access to the memory that I am searching for. So a few times in adult life I've felt there was an answer somewhere, a sense I was missing something, and I would go looking for a memory. But it was like trying to find a skittish mouse in the dark when you only have a small flashlight with a dying battery. I might get a quick glimpse of something moving just beyond the reach of the light, but when I focused right on it, nothing. Sometimes the focusing would make my mind go fuzzy and I had to shake it off because I hated that feeling. I felt sure there was something there but when nothing turned up, I began to doubt my perceptions. And to avoid the fuzziness (dissociation), I would give up trying to focus on things when nothing turned up. I could tell my mind was actively messing with me, but I didn't realize it was a personality such as the gatekeeper because I didn't know I had DID.

As far as anyone can tell, I have lost very little time in decades. It was this lack of evidence of lost time that caused me not to pursue the possibility of DID more consistently. Yet there's no question I have DID. I did lose time as a child. I not only don't lose time anymore, I don't even go fuzzy when someone else is out. I have found, however, that my memory of what happens when someone else is out fades more quickly than when I'm out. It also doesn't feel like my memory.

I think that difference in losing memories or time is just human, we're all different so why wouldn't that be?

I have no vision once I'm inside, I am totally blind, but on the outside I can see (a bit). Other alters can see everything just fine, why would memory or oriëntation be any different? I'd rather say that everyone with DID is special, there are no standards or rules in our memories or whatever, I've also had a billion half-switches in which I behaved like another alter, but still felt like I was in front. Maybe something that only a few systems have/can do, but why would you care? if you're not losing time and not blacking out, be happy, might be convenient.

I don't actually know how much time I lose or how much information I could have if I really tried. Cassandra's story sounds similar to how I'd describe it. I just say I don't remember anything to keep it simple. Often I don't remember anything from the alters, but often I can't remember things that have happened when I WAS the one out either. There have been a few occasions where I've known something that I shouldn't have known about and someone had to point out that I wasn't the one out at the time for me to notice that I shouldn't have known it to begin with. But me and Jen are also very good at making walls, limitations, rules, and denial. Or so LElly has said. Things seem to work smoother for the others in there; LElly and the other kid and Teen... I don't know where they are or how to reach them, or how they do half of the things they do, Jen doesn't want to know, and they can't explain it to me. It feels like two different worlds sometimes. I worry sometimes that if I try to loosen up, I might find that they aren't there, or they are weaker, or something like that. I'm scared of being wrong. When I express these thoughts to Jen, she tells me I'm being absolutely ridiculous, and when I express them to LEll, she shrugs like she doesn't know what I'm talking about, and Teen just smiles at me, like "Who knows." I don't feel any of them are much help.

But still we go beyond different colored text. Jen has her own account on any site we share. She gets about as far away from me as possible, considering the circumstance. When we go in, we are usually asleep and can rarely stay awake. In fact, for me at least, staying awake has only gotten more difficult. Yet occasionally I'll know something I shouldn't. Jen often knows things she shouldn't. She has theories for why that is, but I've just accepted that it works that way and given up figuring it out. As for losing time, sometimes I do, to a degree. I will always know when I wake up what day it is, but I won't necessarily feel like the time has passed. It feels more like saturday came after tuesday, and that's just how it is. But the point I'm trying to make is that even for me, it's not all that cut-and-dry all the time.