[writingwithink]

I came to this board on Aug 10 and started the “New here, unsure and afraid” thread. Well, I’m still unsure and afraid, so I feel the need to throw this back out to everyone. Since my post on Aug. 10, a little kid has come forward, like a new pet being introduced into a family. I now have headaches and I’m feeling nauseous a lot.

Here’s the thing that is causing me to not believe: I don’t have significant loss of time. There are some very brief areas, such as getting to the end of a day at work and not knowing what the hell I did all day, but when I go back into my sent emails, my memory is jogged. There’s this fog of confusion over my daily life, and it has been there for as long as I can remember; I’ve always assumed it was a bad memory and even went to get tested once by a neurologist (all systems were fine).

On Aug 13th I posted a conversation I had with T when trying to tell her my suspicions about having DID. I vaguely remember the conversation I had with her, and while the post reminded me of it, there’s one line in there that I don’t remember saying at all. (Since then I have, finally, told her via email last week, and she wrote the most comforting/reassuring response. I needed that so bad, and now one of the parts is all over me for allowing myself to be so vulnerable. I feel so crazy and my head hurts!)

I’d like to hear from folks about their experiences with loss of time.

Peace

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I sometimes have the experience of ALMOST remembering something...kind of like what you're talking about. It feels like it was a dream (and in fact I do have a really hard time telling the difference between dreams and reality because they feel so similar to me). And like you, sometimes I will read something I wrote and it will jog my memory a bit...

I also have periods of just darkness. I know I went through time, because time has passed, but it's like I just MISSED IT. Sometimes those are short and sometimes they're long.

I'm glad you are talking to your T about what's going on with you.

My experiences are similar. Actual blackouts...if at all are probably only for seconds. Somedays I just got to stop and think what was I just doing? because my brain pushed the restart button and I can't really remember what I was just doing or why....

[Fuzzybear]

somewhere in between what treehouse and kaika said
relating to the fog of confusion


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[LivingMiracle]

For me,
I usually lose a huge amount of time a day where I have no idea what happened. I am lucky if I only lose a couple of hours a day. Its been better than what it has been before. I have lost up to a month before and only thought I was in the hosp for a few days 3 max where it was actually way over a month.
Sorry that you are having headaches now though, their no fun.
Hope you are doing well!
Hugs if okay

[Eriksplus]

We don't loose time at all!
I guess that makes us freaks, hu?
(Dance)Erik

[multipixie9]

I lost more time when I allowed my denial alts yo put that idea in for eveyone. When I got more accepting of my others I began to experience more co-conciousness with them.

However, when I go to work with my T. I "feel like I am each one who speaks"(this is Leslie, the host writing this response). Within minutes to hours parts of the session go foggy and slip away. and begin to forget what we went through in the session. we sometimes lose a lot of the time we spent with T.Before we were dx'd with D.I.D. we lost parts of most days - whenever we felt stressed or insecure we would disappear inside the host and let her deal with whatever it was. sneaky, hunh??

It is no ones fault we lose that time,it just happens to us that way. I sometimes lose time when we have an argument with spouse or someone else. It triggers us and we just go into hiding and only explain ourselves when things cool down. Sometimes we never get the info back at all.

[Elysium]

Ink....

We experience a fog too. We also don't experience lots of time loss currently, but if we try and look back at our past there are blocks of years that we don't remember being and only recognize ourselves as being anywhere in particular because we see us in photos.

What we experience now is we can have a conversation or interaction with someone and later (maybe 20 minutes, maybe two hours) it will all seem/feel like a dream and we will not know if it really happened and we won't be able to remember lots of little things about our experiences.

Our T's refer to this kind of thing as "micro-amnesias". I don't k now if this is an actual technical word, or if it is just the best wording to describe the experience but the understanding is that a DID diagnosis or DDNOS do not require long bouts of lost time necessarily.

Hope this was helpful!!

Take care!!

We experience a lot of memory issues. Depending on who you ask, it can be dissociation, my lack of paying attention or in some cases we believe people take advantage of this by telling us things we said or did that aren't true. After we wake in the morning, we usually loose most of the rest of the day or at least portions of it. It gets on other people's nerves but there's not much we can do about it. We almost alwayd forget or at least our T visits are foggy. It is what it is, not fun.

[wanttoheal]

My loss of time stretches from a moment or two, to missing years. I have woken up in different months and years, trying to piece enough of what I see to continue on. I have ended up in different countries, states and cities. I am the best tap dancer in the world, lol, and often find myself in situations, conversations and places where I have to figure out what's going on. It's helpful to me that I am a quiet sort overall. I do a lot of observing, all the time, to help me figure out as fast as possible what is going on. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I look like a fool. People see me as eccentric, child-like, forgetful, a daydreamer and sometimes just downright weird.

I am getting better at it though and sometimes now I receive information in my head about the situation. It probably always happened, but I am more aware of it now and try to look for it now.

Originally Posted by Calista+12

We experience a lot of memory issues. Depending on who you ask, it can be dissociation, my lack of paying attention or in some cases we believe people take advantage of this by telling us things we said or did that aren't true. After we wake in the morning, we usually loose most of the rest of the day or at least portions of it. It gets on other people's nerves but there's not much we can do about it. We almost alwayd forget or at least our T visits are foggy. It is what it is, not fun.

oh yes, sometimes I think people try to take advantage of my memory issues by saying things happened when they didn't. It makes me mad

[Luce]

My ex t explained to me that there can be two types of losing time in DID. One kind is where you have a discrete missing chunk of time. Like, you were somewhere doing one thing, then suddenly you are somewhere else doing something esle entirely, and time has gone by and you have no idea of what has happened in between.
The other kind is more like a fog, and you are not necessarily aware of time chopping and changing, or of losing time at all as it happens, but if you try to remember what you were doing you may only remember bits and pieces of it and it all feels very unreal and kind of confusing.

I have experienced both types, mostly the missing chunk of time with alts that I've had little awareness or coconsciousness of, and more of the fog stuff as healing progressed and we became more communicative internally. These days I don't even have much 'fog', a lot of the time. Is goooood!!

[writingwithink]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts. My life is constantly in a fog, with the exception of childhood and teenage years, where there's huge stretches (years) of no memory at all.

[FooZe]

I've never been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder and have no reason to suspect I have one. When I go to remember what I did, say, four days ago, I initially have huge blank spots: Oh, yes, I worked on that project and I remember that it eventually did get done, so obviously I did it; but I remember hardly anything about it.

Having some kind of framework helps me a lot in remembering. When I picture the steps that would've been required, for instance, I start remembering doing at least some parts of each step, and before long I seem to have assembled something like 3/4 of my whole day in considerable detail. By that time I also remember the smaller project that I did just before the big one, and the second project I started but didn't finish, that I'll be getting back to in a few days.

When I'm writing a post or PM here at PC and I'm not under any time constraint, I may look at the clock and suddenly realize that it's two or three hours later than I would've expected, with only what feels like 15 or 20 minutes' worth of writing to show for it. When I actually reread what I've written, though, I may still not remember the whole process step by step but it begins to make sense to me that it would've taken that long.

When I think back to some previous time in my life (my teens, say), the specific incidents I'll remember will depend a lot on the theme of whatever I'm looking at. I may remember mostly times I was lonely and depressed, or times I enjoyed (but they were over too soon), or other times I enjoyed (but there turned out to be some kind of catch), or times I didn't feel ready for whatever was coming so I alternated between hopeful and fearful about it.

Generally speaking, if there's a period -- two or three years, even -- from which I remember almost nothing right now, there's pretty sure to come a time when I'm looking for something different -- occasions when I used to daydream a lot, say -- and I'll realize that that was what I did a lot during that period I couldn't remember.

I guess if my theme for the day happened to be "I can't remember anything," I might even prove it by being able to remember hardly anything for a while. What did I have for breakfast two days ago? I'm sure it wasn't cereal, so was it scrambled eggs? No, that would've been either three or four days ago...

I never realized I replied to this thread. Point made.