I have always had a very difficult time with faces and names, so I can totally relate to this problem. It has been particularily difficult because I have held a professional job for over thirty years and during that time, if I haven't had regular and consistent contact with a person, I can NOT remember them. Even if they work in the same program or building with me. They simply vanish from my memory.

For example, if I have a professional contact required for a child I'm working with, if I haven't seen or had consistent, every week, sometimes, every day contact with that person, I don't recognize that person when they come to my office. I can go into the waiting room to meet that person and I am totally lost. I don't recognize them and even if someone points them out to me, he/she is totally unrecognizable to me. This is true even if I've met with this person many times in the past. It's very disconcerning. I can pretend to know him/her, and I've gotten quite good at ways to "fool" the person that I actually recognize them. BUt in reality, it is as if I've met them for the first time. I personally think that it is often related to the trauma a person has experienced. . . or maybe it is a genetic thing. But whatever the case, it is very troublesome.

I've read a lot about face recognition and I have learned that many of us who have emotional dysregulation, connected to trauma, have a dysfunction in our amygdela. We just DON"T recognize familair faces and we often overreact to facial expressions.