Dissociative Amnesia - Tumblr Posts
Our therapist was talking to us the other day about memories cos we have severe amnesia and she was saying how some memories will be appear when we’re ready, some will never appear and some might not have even begun to form in the first place because our brain decided it didn’t need them.
And like that’s so fucked up. It’s so fucked up that we don’t even get memories of what happened to us but we have to live with the consequences and it’s fucked up that things happened to us and the brain didn’t even try to process them so we’ll just never know.
So much of your sense of identity gets taken away due to trauma. Our abuser took our chance at having a childhood, took our ability to feel certain things, took our sense of stability and any kind of security and took our memories before they even existed.
That’s just so fucked up.
How To Write Supressed Memories
From @differentnighttale we have a new ask: "How do I write a character who becomes a murderer without knowing while dealing with his repressed or surpressed memories?"
The condition that causes "repressed memories" is called dissociative amnesia.
A) Dissociative Amnesia
Dissociative Amnesia is caused when a traumatic or stressful event is so emotionally overwhelming that the brain builds walls surrounding the memories. This either blocks out severe or long-term trauma.
In most cases, the person still has the memories but they're just kept seperate from the everyday consciousness. Ultimately, dissociative amnesia is one of many different kinds of coping mechanisms that the brains adopts whenever a situation is so deeply traumatic and life-altering that the brain needs to shove it away.
However, despite the fact that the consciousness can't actively recall the memories, the traumatic event would still impact their behavior subconsciously.
For example:
giving them a phobia with seemingly no beginning
a refusal to enter in locations for no obvious reason
an avoidance of certain types of people
flashbacks
nightmares
Most people aren't aware of their missing memories until outside circumstances remind them. For example, military men with PTSD might forget the days following the return until someone mentions it.
This time can stretch from days after the trauma to months to even years.
B) Can Murder Be Traumatizing?
Answer: it depends
If the person is murdering people with a cold-hearted attitude and generally fine with murder, then they probably wont be traumatized.
However, if these murders were commited by a person when the tensions were high then it might result in dissociative amnesia.
Another contributing factor in this hyperspecific scenario might be the person's own internal beliefs of themselves! If someone is so convinced they are a great person, then they might shove down memories where they weren't a good person.
Random (pop culture) psychology headcanon #8
Agent 8(from Splatoon 2 & 3) has Selective mutism, Acute stress disorder, and Dissociative amnesia
Random (pop culture) psychology headcanon #1 REMADE
Sunny (from OMORI) had Autism spectrum disorder, Dissociative amnesia, Post-traumatic stress disorder, and Selective mutism.
The Dissociative amnesia literally doesn’t even bother me, I can write stuff down and ask other people about stuff my brain purges. The real problem is how hard it can be to retain media. And it’s stupidly selective. I can’t remember a damn thing that happened in Assasination classroom nor any of the characters barring the one, in spite of having rewatched it only like a year ago. Even with media I engage in regularly, the trivia of my hyperfixations elude me. It was nice exactly once, because I got to rewatch Banana Fish blind by actively pretending it didn’t exist for a while, but it’s generally a nuisance. It’s not that big a problem and it’s not exactly hard to recap stuff, but specifically rn, I forgot I was rewatching tmnt 2012, and reading over my notes, I remember like 5% of this. I don’t wanna have to read through the wiki to pick it back up. That’s annoying and the nuance of my observations is gone. It fucking sucks
having trauma and reading old journals like “oh hey this one’s new”
I don't remember the moment we realised we were trans. I don't know if any of us do. I know the feeling we had and a vague knowledge of how it built up to that, but the details are lost...
So many of the details of our entire life are lost.
It's one of those nights where you want to scream to the gods to return what this illness stole. We did not ask to be traumatised. We don't want to forget.
I love his character so much, cause I struggle every day because of this condition and just seeing it makes me sob
And what if I said that Kinger is the perfect representation for dissociative amnesia, and what then?!
every person that says theyre an “endogenic system” i hate you. endos are not and will never be valid i dont support you or like you as a person. you will never be good for those who actually have dissociative disorders and for that i will never accept you.