#that's dissociative amnesia!

[five-nights-at-artsys]

shakes fnafblr shakes fnafblr shakes fnafblr

hey i know we are talking about a franchise steeped in the supernatural since day 1 but i beg you to read up on dissociative disorders

[rustybutterknife]

Microdosing polyamory by dating a system

[solidwater05]

Apparently this needs to be said so

Forgetting things is morally neutral! Memory issues are morally neutral!

You're not a bad person if you...

forget things quickly

forget people

can't remember entire stages of your life

can't remember important things

can remember some things very well and forget other things all the time

can't remember things (or anything!) about your interests

forget to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, etc

forget to reply to texts

remember things and immediately forget them again

can't remember birthdays, events, etc

frequently answer 'I forgot' to questions

can't retain new information

forget things you used to know

only remember things when it's too late

have vague, distorted and/or unreliable memories

depend on others to know how an event you were in played out

have other symptoms that are worsened by memory issues and vice versa

... and anything else I might have missed!

[caintooth]

seeing people my age talk about how scared they are of memory loss, which they only associate with old age, is so surreal to see as a 24 year old who has actively experienced memory loss for a long time now

there are causes for memory loss besides dementia and alzheimer’s, i hope y’all know that. dissociative disorders, trauma, brain injuries, thyroid problems, even just stress and lack of sleep can fuck up your ability to store, process, and access memory. and that’s just a few of the many causes i can think of off the top of my head right now.

please stop treating disabled people like some scary “other” that you might become only in the distant, decades-away future. we are your age, too. you may become one of us sooner than you know. stop acting like memory loss marks the end of a life, when so many of us have so much living left to do!

[theapollosystem]

i hate how a lot of people who believe systems are faking DID are like well if you were actually a system it would be debilitating and you’d never joke about it

like i’m sorry the concept that i experienced childhood abuse and now i have nagito komaeda in my head is funny get over it

[evilneo]

dissociative amnesia haver: wow i wish i remembered shit

dissociative amnesia havers when they remember:

dissociative amnesia havers when the memories then get taken from them:

[rin-and-jade]

Types of Amnesia

Diagram created by me

General criteria for amnesia:

Memory loss

Confusion

Inability to recognize familiar figures/places

Difficulty recalling names or places

Not remembering where you went

Worser ability to remember things that had happened Post on how to handle these kinds of amnesia: click here!

Generalized Amnesia Where a person completely forgets everything about themself and have no recollection of what, where, and who they spoke to. This can describe a blackout switch and may still recognize who they are.

Localized Amnesia Where a person is unable to recall a specific/series of event from the whole, which creates an incomplete picture of the situation. For example, remembering childhood but not the abuse.

Selective Amnesia Where a person only lost some and retain the rest, forgetting parts yet not all of them. This can describe greyouts as it grasps some information/sensory yet not enough to tell what exactly happened. One example is playing the phone and unable to recall what occured, only to jump its memory right to being at bed.

Emotional Amnesia Where a person has an intact memory and it's details on what had happened, but do not remember what the event feels like (e.g. was scared, happy, etc.). One description is that you're watching something that didn't happen to you, because you don't feel like being in the scene itself.

Continuous Amnesia Where a person fails to retain full parts of the event/day, for a set period of time (can vary from minutes to days) and create an accumulative, small bits of selective amnesias, continuously, leaving many gaps in a chronological timeline. This usually happens in times or stress, or abuse.

Fragmented Amnesia Where a person has an unrelated, and/or disjointed memories that does not go with the timeline's order, creating confusion and difficult to grasp the cohesive picture of what truly happened. Emotional amnesia may be present in this type. Bonus for systems:

Amnesia barriers Where a person fronting is not able to recall other alter's memories, which is a form of retrograde amnesia and compartmentalization. Because the fronter will only retain any information before switching out with the next one, the rest experiences anterograde amnesia as it cannot form and remember those memories, unless being coconcious or cofronting (even though, this is not always guaranteed).

Take notes that amnesia can still happen outside system things due to comorbidities like anxiety disorders or depression, this does mean systems are bound to experience more amnesia compared to non-systems folks out there.

Do you have any discussions about this? Or would like to describe your own way of seeing these different types of amnesia? Or have more to add? Feel free to tell them here!

- j

[thenightsystem]

Most people only get 4 stress responses: Fight, Flight, Fawn, and Freeze.

people with DID unlock the secret fifth one: Forget

-host

[quasar-sys]

i forgot i can draw

[oursystemblog]

Hi I’m a newly discovered system and its been causing me a little stress that I (the host?) don’t experience blackouts or full amnesia, but then I read some of your old posts about feeling like everything’s in grayscale and emotional amnesia and was like “:0 that’s like me!”

I was wondering if you would be okay describing what it feels like when someone else fronts? That’s something I’m trying figure out for myself and maybe hearing other people’s experiences would help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Also all the comics are amazing keep up the good work 👍)

so the uhhh. so the person fronting never really feels like they "disappear" or get pushed away it just feels like they Change Into A Different Person . but we still Exist while not fronting but nobody remembers what that's like because w. yeah no i don't get the technicalities of how this works i'm not worrying about it too hard

[diditself]

"real people with DID wish fakers would stop faking"

girl there are people in my head who don't like me and my memory resets every 2½ hours. I promise you I have better things to fucking worry about.

[b1gr4tm4n]

pretty much

– Elliot

[theapollosystem]

this tweet is insane, my alters aren’t instant coffee in the bathtub fucked up

[nonaltercdd]

For being a dissociative disorder the CDDs are the ones who I see less of dissociative symptoms be talked about in the community

So I thought, why not make a post about some of the dissociative symptoms the CDD has!!

Depersonalization: Depersonalization is one of the big levels of dissociation that, in certain cases, can be categorized as a disorder in company of derealization. Depersonalization can present in various forms, but as general definition it's when someone it's so dissociated from themselves that they don't feel connected to their body or sense of self, just like you were external to yourself

Derealization: Derealization is one of the big leves of dissociation that, in certain cases, can be categorized as a disorder in company of depersonalization. Derealization can present in various forms, but as genera definition it's when you feel strange, fake, unreal and distorted your reality and all the things surrounding you.

Depersonalization and derealization tent to come hand in hand and sometimes together, this is most common between systems and it can overlap with a lot of other things making the experience more unique and worst for the pwCDD

"Autopilot" mode: Autopilot is a state of being in which your body reacts to what is needed and, like the name suggest, in an autopilot mode, is not necessarily a depersonalization mode cause it can come from more light dissociation, and sometimes you don't even feel it or realizate it happens (when depersonalization tend to be a semi-conscious and aware state), even though it can come hand in hand is not always like that

Crisis identity: Alters aside, being pwCDD can give you a lot of crisis identity, and when it comes to dissociative part is one you feel some kind of blurriness, disconnection, confusion and lost about you, can be because of many factors and can lead to severe impact in your personal view to the point of not being sure if you're you and questioning a lot of things about you, this kind of dissociative behavior can overlap with many factors which makes it worse

Emotional amnesia: Emotional amnesia is an specific kind of dissociative amnesia characterized by remembering the facts and/or events but feeling emotionally disconnected to that, not feeling or remembering the feelings regarding that memorie/event, and the sense of third person regarding the event, is being emotionally separated

Blackout amnesia: Blackout amnesia is one of the most named kinds of amnesia a pwCDD will experience, though is less common than emotional amnesia, the blackout amnesia is characterized by forgetting all about what you experienced, counting emotion and memory

Dissociative amnesia: Dissociative amnesia is a very big spectrum, this is why it's a diagnosis/disorder by its own. But for being general dissociative amnesia is when you dissociate things about yourself, this can be memories, important information, daily life, etc, to a point you end up forgetting that information

Flashback: Did you know that flashbacks are a dissociative response to trauma? You didn't? Now you know! Flashbacks are a way in which your brain dissociates from reality to relive a memory or experience you previously have, in this connotation, a traumatic experience

"Non-pain" mode: Sometimes even hurting yourself (accident or not) you can't feel the pain of that, it's like that physical damage isn't yours, this is a kind of dissociation more connected to how the brain is connected to your body and the sense of physical pain. SO sometimes your brain, aiming to protect you, dissociates from the physical pain to be "safe"

Denial: In some cases denial can be a dissociative response as a way for keeping you away from understanding and knowing you have certain trauma and passed trough certain experience. When you deny having or passing through something you tend to dissociate the memory and sometimes to the reality as a way to try keep yourself safe

Daydreaming: Daydreaming is a dissociative coping mechanism and sometimes it can come to the point of being maladaptive and dangerous for yourself. Daydreaming is a way in which trough dissociation your brain makes up a new "reality" in hopes to scape the real life and reality

Emotional disruption: Did you know that if you feel sad and then you stop being sad is dissociation? One of the dissociative ways of coping with a stressful and heavy emotion is "turning off" your emotions, or in the other hand, feeling like the past emotion was replaced by another one, it's important to note that this mood change is without any apparent explanation and you cannot return to the previous emotion cause you know feel detached to it, like isn't yours anymore. In the other hand you can be ok and a new emotion comes up to you, you feel detached to this emotion and don't have any idea where it come from and why are you feeling it, but you do, and it doesn't feels yours

Skill variation: Having in one moment one skill and in the other don't, having different skill abilities in which one time you can be good and other not that good, and all the variations within the ability to do certain skill (can be any skill, like writing, talking, moving, drawing, etc.)

"Emotionless" state: The emotionless state is when, for one or another reason, you feel empty, null, like you lack any kind of emotions, like there's a void in whee your emotions should be, this emotional dissociation can happen for many reason and in company of other symptoms, though sometimes one doesn't notice it because of this emotionless state

This are some of the dissociative symptoms I can recall at the moment, maybe there are more that I didn't put here and you want to add in comments/reblogs or you can ask me to add them to this list

Well some of this symptoms can overlap with the alter part of the disorder they're not 100% attached to them and it's important to recognize this as very prominent symptoms of the disorder, after all this is a dissociative disorder, isn't it?

If you want to add more to this or ask a question go ahead, we'll see it 100% sure!!

[cringe-is-inevitable]

"everytime I think about my childhood my head hurts"

wow maybe it's because you're fighting layers of dissociative amnesia that were put there for a reason and you're thinking about things you aren't supposed to know

(this is a self callout)

[nobodybutnova]

“yeah i cant remember a lot of my life since I’m like constantly zoned out”

“I dont think thats normal”

oh shit