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My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

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Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MDMA absolutely is. I am well aware that it is not ordinarily associated with hallucinations or disassociation. I can also absolutely say that you do not need a serotonin-syndrome inducing dose to forget who your friends are, who you are, or have no idea why you have are sitting on a bed (your own), or who it belongs to. It can also make you hallucinate and "disappear" into your hallucination for several hours, befor…

"Or so I have heard."

Someone has misinformed you. Please do your own research. There is absolutely no mention of anything remotely like what you are describing in the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#173
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why a lot of cognitive psychologists study abnormal psychology. It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. I do think being able to blank things out (including times of immense pain) is a feature that increases survival rather than a bug. If you are excessively afraid, your ability to pass on your genes goes down.

>> It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. Please correct me if I'm wrong, early part of Medical academics is all about studying how a healthy body body works. So that when they start studying the diseases they can learn to distinguish between a disease and a expected behaviour. So to know if something is an abnormal psychology, you need to first know what is normal.

I'm not an expert but my guess is yes, though normal is harder to define in psychology. Psych 101 was all about how things work. It took a few classes to get into why things break.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#174
post #15

It was a voluntary response. This is moronic. Its unbelievable that so many well paid, "highly educated" professionals give this kind of nonsense credence. The girl elected to have a little flip out episode after she told her boyfriend "I'm about to dissociate". She obviously had no conscious part in her decision, right? Nothing is mentioned about her being under the influence of psychoactive substances - so discussi…

There's definitely not enough information in the article to draw that conclusion. Moreover, the description is entirely compatible with a disassociative episode. You have some pretty clear biases you're projecting onto the situation that are clouding your judgement. EDIT: The original post, now flagkilled, asserted that the girlfriend in the article had faked the episode.

> There's definitely not enough information in the article to draw that conclusion.

On the other hand, I don't see enough information to discard this hypothesis.

I'm tempted to believe the author of course, but I don't think this is not plausible as an explanation for this truly crazy story.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#175
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…

>> having the intelligence to call her ex as a substitute was a brilliant move on the author's part.

I still don't understand why he didn't have her look for HIM in her phone. Like dude, you know me, look in your phone I'm so-and-so. Look at texts between us. There should be a picture of him too. And why TF was there a picture of her ex in her appartment, but not this guy? This aspect of the story made it seem fake to me, but OK maybe it was very stressful to him and he honestly figured the ex would be more familiar than himself. IDK.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#176
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…

>> having the intelligence to call her ex as a substitute was a brilliant move on the author's part. I still don't understand why he didn't have her look for HIM in her phone. Like dude, you know me, look in your phone I'm so-and-so. Look at texts between us. There should be a picture of him too. And why TF was there a picture of her ex in her appartment, but not this guy? This aspect of the story made it seem fake t…

She would have seen that he was in the phone, but she wouldn't have known what to do with that information. In any case, he had her call George because he knew what to do in that situation. I think her remembering George was just fortuitous.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#177
Being late in the discussion, I wondered how many times in the thread the word "unconscious" had been used. Well, it came back as "zero". This, I think, reflects what happened to psychology/psychiatry over the past, say, 30 years and at least in the US: the generalization of an homomorphism between the brain and the current state of data computing. Although a very useful concept, the "unconscious" has been dropped because it doesn't fit in this morphism. Or does it? Low level processes are somewhat "unconscious" to computer operation. There are memory leaks and odd stuff happening with memory blocks that one could see as the expression of an unconscious. But, as some people pointed out, this aspect is only a sort of malfunction of the system. The beauty of the unconscious in the brain is that it is productive. Strictly whatever it does serves a purpose: it can be protective (as in dissociation to tolerate trauma), it can be optimizing (as in handling survival functions in the background), it can be productive (by constantly scanning its database and I/O for patterns, convergences, anomalies, etc.) and, I believe, it is the very source of creativity. To the point that I wonder if data computing might not benefit from emulating such a sub-architecture... As people pointed out, we all dissociate, somehow, in our days and that’s because we have an unconscious that does all that. It has been a huge loss for psychology to lose the unconscious to the data computing model. And it might be a huge loss for data computing to not try to emulate our unconscious.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#178
I searched this thread and didn't find any reference to "Internal Family Systems" therapy. If anyone has any thoughts on IFS, I'd be interested in hearing them. I'm currently reading a book ("Internal Family Systems Therapy" by Richard Schwartz.

Additional info here:

http://www.selfleadership.org/

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#179

That is an incredibly moving story, and it's wonderful how well it turned out. But the author acted irresponsibly. As soon as he realized that his friend was dissociating, in the taxi, he should have called 911/999/whatever and informed the driver of the situation. If this had been a stroke or heart attack, that would have been the obvious move. Why not for dissociation?

What would the cops or an ambulance do in this situation?

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#180
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.

That's how problems like this get solved.
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