I would just move on. A flaky person like this is poor relationship material, especially if you see children in your future. "Where am I? What are these kids doing here and why are they calling me Mom?" Like, no thanks!
Hotness trumps madness.
My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my very limited contact with people who were suffering from schizophrenia, it's clear their minds, their ability to think, is broken in some fundamental way. This is indeed completely different, the person can think properly, it's just that some things are gone. If it's like my girlfriend who had it when with me, this woman regressed in time a bit, not so far she forgot that previous boyfriend, but enough to forge…
Agreed. I've lost three friends over the years to schizophrenia. I knew them all well before, during and after. Their minds are simply broken, their reality is not the same as ours. One believed he was a ninja protecting the world, another saw himself as the hero of a WWIII future, the third wanted to bind his spirit with alligators to grow his spiritual totem. DID sounds very, very different.
How so? Genuinely trying to understand, as DID was formerly characterized as multiple personality disorder, and the way you describe your friends seem like it would fit (i.e. a dissolved idea of identity).
I know 3-4 people with schizophrenia, and none of them displayed the kind of wild delusions you're describing (though I am not discounting them! Don't get me wrong). In my experience schizophrenia manifests itself more like a worse form of anxiety, paranoia and depression mixed together (all my friends are under treatment and medicated).
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#43I would just move on. A flaky person like this is poor relationship material, especially if you see children in your future. "Where am I? What are these kids doing here and why are they calling me Mom?" Like, no thanks!
For three hours a year?
I bet I can find 3 hours a year you're poor relationship material, starting with the time you spent writing this comment.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#44There was a novel[1] about a woman with DID and a psychologist who tied that to suppressed memories of sexual abuse. I wondered after reading it whether or not it was a thing or just a creative fiction. I found at least one paper [2] which indicates that DID can be a symptom of prior abuse. [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01452134939... was cited by a [1] http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Memory-Greg-I…
Note that the concept of 'suppressed memories' is not very well accepted by the psychological community. People can be convinced that they remember something they don't, so it's extremely difficult to tell between a 'suppressed' memory and a false one.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#45Does anyone have an explanation for why she can tell a dissociatve episode is about to happen? It strikes me as really odd.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#46Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture?
Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours.
Hmm, maybe this is actually a feature, not a bug. In ancient times people often had to deal with being abused, enslaved, etc. Maybe being able to blank out really unpleasant experiences helped young slaves tolerate their abuse without becoming totally insane or going the route of suicide or rebellion (assuming the latter's success rate was negligible, rebellion would basically be the same as suicide from the standpoint of evolutionary pressures). Which ultimately helped them survive and reproduce.
Then once the mechanism exists, it can still get triggered naturally in modern humans if they're abused, or artificially by drugs.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#47I'll believe it because I had to be "that person who drives people home after a rave" a few times in my life. There's "I forget my name" drunk, but that's a joke, then there's people who are having a semi-bad trip who literally forget who their friends are. It never got as bad as this fortunately. Use dissociatives responsibly, be in a familiar environment etc.
I do not agree that having a semi-bad trip makes you forget who your friends are. In fact, I wouldn't call that a semi-bad trip, at all. If someone forgets their friends while tripping (and I assume you mean on acid) they actually, likely, never liked that person enough anyway. Breaking down the barriers and lies is what it does.
He mentions dissociatives, like ketamine, not LSD.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#48I would just move on. A flaky person like this is poor relationship material, especially if you see children in your future. "Where am I? What are these kids doing here and why are they calling me Mom?" Like, no thanks!
That is an horrible thing to say. She is not 'flaky' as a spoiled socialite would be, she has a mental disease. One that only seems to crop up from time to time. 'Poor relationship material'? She is still a human being in need of support. I'd say you're poor relationship material.
I'd say you know nothing about me.
My life experience tells me that it's not worth meeting broken people and supporting them, fixing them and so on.
It's a good way to make yourself miserable. If you have a pattern of doing this, it says something about you. Maybe you don't think you deserve better or something, or you need to feel that someone depends on you and needs your support.
Latching on to needy people and supporting them doesn't mean that you're good relationship material in any objective sense; it's just your self-image of what you think makes you "good" is in a relationship.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#49Does anyone have an explanation for why she can tell a dissociatve episode is about to happen? It strikes me as really odd.
Because she's experienced it before and it doesn't happen instantaneously?
Even some of the most fast-acting drugs still have a ramp-up. I'm thinking, IV propofol, if you've experienced it before (and even if it's your first time), you can tell that something is happening.
Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
#50This is an interesting story and if I were a psychiatrist I would be fascinated to study how consciousness can be separated from the ego. In addition, props to the writer; call me selfish all you want but I could absolutely never love someone in a romantic way who had this kind of issue.
First you love the person, THEN they have this thing happen, THEN you keep on loving them in spite of it. Like everyone else you love. Or maybe you didn't love them enough in the first place.