I wrote this for a dissociation sub, and thought about whether to also share it here. Asked the r/SDAM mods who told me to go ahead, so here it is. Likely irrelevant for most readers here, but possibly a little interesting anyway; and hopefully helpful for the few who, like myself, have a dissociative presentation resembling SDAM. I also wrote an earlier post about the science behind dissociation resembling SDAM if you're interested. And this post looks at the types of dissociation most likely to produce this presentation.
One important note: I was around 40 when I started experiencing episodic memories and visualisation in therapy, and I still only experience them rarely. Before that, I have no recollection of having these glimpses, though as I am generally unable to recall my internal experience, I can't say for sure that I never did. I only remember my internal experiences if they are accompanied by something external, e.g. talking to someone or writing them down in my journal.
Apologies for the length.
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My conscious memories start at age 8, though I know there are earlier memories than that somewhere within me, beyond my conscious reach. With what level of detail, I don’t know. I have only seen glimpses in therapy sessions. Lots of emotional detail and some visual, but not much else so far; and the visuals I have seen to date have been more conceptual than rich in specific detail.
The memories I can recall consciously are probably broadly as detailed as anyone’s. By way of example, I remember being 8 and running from older kids at school into a school toilet and locking the door so they could not reach me; I think they wanted to exact revenge on me for something my older brother had done to them a year or two earlier. He was a bully, to his siblings and beyond.
I remember the school playground, the carpentry classroom (yes, we had one!) and how bad I was at carpentry. Never had the hand-eye coordination for anything. I remember one failed miniature ship in particular; I kept dripping paint all over it so often that I had to repaint it multiple times, ending up with a coat of paint so thick, it never dried properly. The final layer was a murky shade of green. I also made a small copper chandelier, with slightly better results.
I remember a reading competition in second grade (aged 8) which I won. It was a straightforward competition of who read the most books in X weeks at home. I was the kind of kid who didn’t do much apart from reading books, averaging at least a couple a week, including everything Enid Blyton ever wrote (and random encyclopaedias!). My prize was one more book: one about a knight, a princess, and a dragon. It had a black and white cover with some details in bright crimson.
I have thousands of memories like this, and I can generally place them on a timeline easily enough; definitely the right year, maybe close to the right month as well. Ish. From age 15 or so onwards, I would be able to confidently describe more or less every month of my life in reasonable detail, certainly on a level comparable to most people. If you knew me at some point in my past, ran into me and wanted to share stories, I would be able to trade blows as well as anyone.
However my conscious experience of my memories would be very different from what normal people have.
I don’t see my memories (aphantasia). I don’t hear them (anauralia). I don’t have an internal monologue describing them (anendophasia). I don’t feel them emotionally (not alexithymia!). I also don’t taste them, smell them, or experience any sense of touch or movement. I can run through any place I remember in my imagination using my spatial sense, but that also doesn’t come with any of the above.
Mostly, I just know the contents. I can use words to describe them like I just did, but my mind doesn’t autogenerate words internally. Words are reserved for communication with other people. I could paint and draw fairly crappy versions of what everything looked like, which is more down to a lack of drawing and painting skills than to any lack of memorised detail; my visual memory is well above average.
I recently compared my memory of a particular childhood place (my maternal grandparents’ farmhouse) with my younger sister. We remembered the details equally well, where everything was and who would be around, but where hers is a rich re-lived experience replete with cinematic visuals, rich sound, strong scents, distinct textures and so on, mine is “just knowing”.
She is there in her memory, feeling it in elaborate detail, which emotionally often means sadness and anxiety for her; we didn’t have a happy childhood, so painful memories outnumber happy ones.
I know my memories, but I don’t experience them. You wouldn’t be able to tell it if you talked to me about my memories, because words can only convey knowledge, and my knowledge covers every facet you can cover with words, including visual descriptions, even what kind of emotions people would exhibit.
But what did I feel in those memories? What was it like to be me, visiting my grandparents and them barely knowing who I was? “So you are so-and-so’s son, right?” Too many grandchildren to remember them all (around 200, I think; I don’t remember either). They likely knew more about their favourite chair than they knew about me, which is also true of my knowledge of most of my cousins.
Fundamentally, my own internal experience is not part of my conscious memories; it belongs to other mes.
When I have a glimpse of an episodic memory in therapy, that is the missing component most distinctly present. Yes, I see visuals, but they seem less central somehow; I’ve seen glimpses of my childhood living room before the walls were finished, so probably when I was 5 or 6. But in that memory, it was not what the living room looked like that felt central; the central feature was a powerfully ominous feeling, one of danger and threat, though the glimpse was too brief to tell what its source was.
A more recent and hence distinct glimpse in a similar vein happened last year when my son graduated high school. After the celebrations were over and I was alone in my room, I felt a crushing sense of defeat. Tears filled my eyes, and I started seeing image upon image of my son from when he was born and onwards: Crawling unhappily on a sandy beach (he was never into those); sleeping calmly against my chest in his baby sling; excitedly playing Minecraft on his first computer; jumping high with a wooden sword in his hand, enacting some fantasy play with his friends.
It felt like that was still him, that was still now, he was still just a baby, I was still trying to fix myself so I could be the dad he deserved.
But almost two decades had passed, I had failed to fix myself, and now he was all grown up; I had failed, and there was no fixing it. No going back, no returning to when rescue was still possible, no second chances. Time, as insubstantial as it felt, had beaten me.
That went on for a few hours, my shoulders shaking as I typed it all out, the pile of wet tissue on my desk growing ever taller.
I knew I would not be able to feel any of it when the moment was over, so I made sure to write it down for my son while I felt it. He did not get the dad he deserved, so the least I could give him was honesty: This is why I failed him, this is how terrible it made me feel, and this is how fervently I wished I could go back and steal him away from his mother, the Monster, when I still had the capacity to do so.
Later that evening, the feelings began to recede. I could feel them go the way you can sometimes feel a painkiller kick in after an injury. Soon enough I was back to my dissociated default self, which is not alexithymia but rather highly effective dynorphins and endocannabinoids produced by me, for me.
Unlike alexithymics, when my baseline dissociation recedes enough for me to consciously feel an emotion, I never have any trouble identifying, describing, and expressing it. (They tend not to come alone I should add; usually by the time I can feel them, there’s a whole lot of them in one complex bundle.)
I sometimes wonder if my memories consolidate after moments like that. Or do they live on inside me, just as painful as they were that day? Maybe it’s a mix. Seems like a whole lot of human things tend to be a mix, clear-cut B&W realities seem to mostly exist in our internal models. Maybe a little bit of consolidation and a little bit of retaining as-is. Or more like, as-was.
I am fairly agnostic when it comes to early memory glimpses in therapy; I’m not sure my childhood living room looked quite as yellow as it did in the glimpses I’ve seen, though my older brother says it did. Whether it did or didn’t isn’t really the point, I feel. Details are fairly ephemeral even for people with a normal autobiographical memory, and memory is fundamentally reconstructive in nature.
The feelings are likely real, as much as feelings ever are. I did likely feel lonely and abandoned a lot. That tracks both my current emotional self-experience, and what I know of my childhood; it wasn’t the sort of place where someone would care that you exist. It was the kind of place where a handshake was the height of intimacy, and life was mostly about hard work and waiting for heaven (so basically death, because that’s how you get there).
My sister once described it as a “nest of emotionally starved birdlings fighting over emotional scraps”. Unlike my older brothers, I was never much of a fighter, always more likely to shut down and quietly wait for my turn. “The only one of my nine babies to let me sleep properly”, as my mother once remarked. An excellent dissociator from birth, likely thanks to inheriting my mother’s dissociative base temperament, however that works; my brothers clearly failed to inherit it.
The feelings of anger I have connected with in therapy over the last half a decade or so have always been less about my mother as a person, and more about existential choices: Why have so many babies when you lack the emotional resources to provide for them? What kind of a god would send you to hell for only having five or six, and let you ascend to heaven once you’ve produced nine? What kind of a god would even insist on a causal relationship between where you ejaculate and the afterlife? As so often in life, the people who should be asking the most questions tend to ask the fewest.
When I do stream of consciousness journalling, it sometimes comes out like this:
“this is the recipe of life,”
said my mother
as she walked out of the room where i froze
“think of those flowers they plant
in the garden each year
they will teach you
that whatever grows
deserves life
and you
don't”
- Not Rupi Kaur
P.S.
If you'd like to rule out dissociation, you can start with these free, non-diagnostic screeners. They can only produce a rough estimate and are poorly adapted for people with aphantasia/SDAM, however a DES-II score of 30 or more, and/or a CDS score of 90 or more, would still be significanly higher than what SDAM alone would predict. Ultimately, a thorough assessment will require seeing a trained mental health professional for a structured interview.