Live data from Hacker News

My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

vice.com

111–120 of 205 posts

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#111
post #21

You ... get used to it. Familiarity, is, as mentioned, the key - narrating the location and why it should be familiar and when they moved there and ways they can prove it's theirs (e.g. keys fitting the front door) tend to help quite a bit. A dissociated mind still wants to believe it should be where it is and that that makes complete sense, it just doesn't have the data available. Eventually, with luck, you can get…

Wouldn't something like polaroids be a good strategy, you know, like in Memento? When she forgets everything, have her grab photos from her bag, one together with every person she trusts, one of her in front of her building, one of her in front of a street sign for her neighbourhood. Also, a pocket mirror if she really forgets who or even what she is.

Disassociating doesn't always work like played out in films or TV, sadly. It's terrifying, and often find it hard to trust what's in front of you. Familiarity is needed, as it acts to ground you, and a key part of this is to feel safe on a number of different levels. Simply having photos alone may not be enough, unless those photos are something you regularly examine and experience.

Grounding is a common method of dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues. The idea of finding your place, finding familiarity, centring yourself. Something you are very used to doing normally and when safe is important, as is having that also associated very strongly with being safe.

For some people, photos will work well for this - they might capture moments with strong association with safety and happiness. Some people may be able to instead use an object, a talisman of sorts.

For others, or for when the disassociation is worse, a single grounding method may not be enough. It's about building the complete story - getting home and watching something familiar. The grounding only happens from weight of evidence.

Finally, there's something you don't hear talked about much. Coming back around from disassociating can be utterly terrifying in it's own right. Both as one tries to return, and after coming back. Having multiple entirely different means to ground helps with this.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#112
post #79

> She'd wake up with no memory of what had happened, and wouldn't want to know. This was probably the most painful part of that whole story. Naturally, I was thinking of my wife and myself as the main characters throughout the whole story, and while it would be incredibly difficult to go through this, it would be harder if she woke up the next morning and didn't want to acknowledge or know about what had happened the…

It's difficult and unpleasant to acknowledge what happened. By doing so they would have to acknowledge and deal with what happened in the past (that caused DID in the first place). Part of therapy is to take them on this road. They're able to cope with reality because they're able to compartmentalize their history. Hearing about it, while necessary, weakens the coping mechanism that helped them survive. So you can im…

I've seen that "exposure" therapy is often used in the treatment of OCD, another form of anxiety disorder. Patients with OCD often have an anxiety about something and use their quirks and rituals to avoid/ignore the anxiety. To help them cure their rituals, they must actively try to experience the often very extreme anxiety that some situation puts them in. Is the treatment similar in cases of DID?

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#113
post #101
post #46

Whenever 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…

Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.

"Human" includes the drive to figure out how things work and how to fix them when they break.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#114
post #79

> She'd wake up with no memory of what had happened, and wouldn't want to know. This was probably the most painful part of that whole story. Naturally, I was thinking of my wife and myself as the main characters throughout the whole story, and while it would be incredibly difficult to go through this, it would be harder if she woke up the next morning and didn't want to acknowledge or know about what had happened the…

It's difficult and unpleasant to acknowledge what happened. By doing so they would have to acknowledge and deal with what happened in the past (that caused DID in the first place). Part of therapy is to take them on this road. They're able to cope with reality because they're able to compartmentalize their history. Hearing about it, while necessary, weakens the coping mechanism that helped them survive. So you can im…

And on a far more simple level, disassociating and returning from it is utterly terrifying, and worse still one might know that their loved ones will have also had a very difficult experience

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#115
post #102

I thought dissociation was part of the symptoms of PTSD. Given the history of being abused as told in the article, I am bit perplexed why doctors decide it was DID. Or is DID some kind of subset of PTSD?

It is often difficult to get a diagnosis of PTSD when you've not been at war or subjected to a singular catastrophic event. And even if you did, there may not exist treatment pathways for those with PTSD from more complex or long lasting situations :(

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#116

Wow, such an amazing read! > A few hours after she first told me, I took some time to read up on dissociative identity disorder. Shouldn't he have read up on DID in detail when she first told him about rather than when the episode happened? Seeing this mid-way through the event makes it seem like he didn't really do his homework beforehand. > at its worst, she said, she would not only struggle to identify who she was…

Downvoting doesn't always mean you did anything wrong, it can mean you have incorrect information and the comment being gray is there to warn people.

A comment should suffice in that case, shouldn't it?

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a mental disorder, but an uncle was a sleepwalker, nothing scary, except he was in the military; and sometimes, he'd reenact war scenes, some times he'd take people for allies, some times not. It never ended badly, but it could have.

I had a high school friend who I strongly suspect suffered from either schizophrenia or DID. There were times when he would swear he was a soldier, even though he was just a high school student and the closest he came to marching was in band. At first I'd pass it off as a joke or prank, but one day I took a really good look at his eyes when he started wigging out, and it was like seeing a stranger. It sounds crazy bu…

A second cousin , as a child , her father had cancer at the time, he awoke one night and his little girl was just about to stab him with a big kitchen knife, apparently based on what the family said , his little daughter had no recollection of the drama the night before, she became a totally normal adult with no mental problems.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#118
post #55
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would assume as the poster is talking about raves, they are referencing ketamine or MDMA, and both of these are more than capable of making you forget who you are, let alone who your friends are.

MDMA is not capable of making you forget who your friends are, except maybe in serotonin-syndrome inducing doses.

Primarily it is an empathogenic[1] drug, not a hallucinogen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathogen-entactogen

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#119

What I don't get - if this girlfriend could remember an ex-boyfriend, why couldn't she remember she had DID? And, if I could remember I had DID, I would probably have coping mechanisms for dealing with complete strangers who indicated they where my close intimates, and coping with physically being in places that I did not remember. Think about Memento, and the person who couldn't form new memories, but had a number o…

Real life is not a film. We're talking about a disorder that's likely caused by a traumatic event and is associated with _proper bad_ anxiety. You don't necessarily respond to logic in those cases, you respond to things to which you have a strong emotional response -- and which will, hopefully, comfort you.

Reversely, when you see someone in that state rushing for the door, knowing they'd be helpless to deal with actual risks, 'de-escalating' is the least of your concerns. "I must keep her safe, with me" is the only thing in your mind.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#120
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult and unpleasant to acknowledge what happened. By doing so they would have to acknowledge and deal with what happened in the past (that caused DID in the first place). Part of therapy is to take them on this road. They're able to cope with reality because they're able to compartmentalize their history. Hearing about it, while necessary, weakens the coping mechanism that helped them survive. So you can im…

I've seen that "exposure" therapy is often used in the treatment of OCD, another form of anxiety disorder. Patients with OCD often have an anxiety about something and use their quirks and rituals to avoid/ignore the anxiety. To help them cure their rituals, they must actively try to experience the often very extreme anxiety that some situation puts them in. Is the treatment similar in cases of DID?

No, that would be too much for a DID patient and could lead to further splitting (creation of new parts). First step is to teach them to stay grounded, to stay present and not take the easy path and dissociate (i.e. go away). When struggling to stay present someone with DID may exhibit OCD patterns -- scratching, grabbing, fiddling with fingers etc. -- all without realizing. However, when this happens there's usually some level of co-consciousness with a part that is suffering or has OCD. So in this case the OCD behavior would "belong" to that part while some other part is "out" (they'd actually both be "out" at the same time). It's a very complex disorder.
Post reply on HN