I mean, I could think of it as different people, like most people like me seem to, but I fear in doing so it’d literally become so. I’m not sure I would like that, so I prefer to think of it as something like modes of the same person. Like brain electrical activity “waves” occupying the same medium, my frontal lobe, but doing so in distinct patterns at the same time, like electron orbitals.
eh, maayybe. I think they’re more likely to stay masks in most people. They don’t really feel like masks, but they don’t feel like full people either, none of them, I do have behavior and elements of my personality that stays constant between them.
What I think it actually is, at least, I hypothesize, is caused by the same thing that causes lost memories, but on a much larger scale where so much of yourself is lost that you start to fragment into parts that stop making associations with other parts. That’s why it’s permanent once you reach the different people stage, because you have like partitioned your brain into these different states that struggle to interconnect well with each other, that can’t recall the other parts of you, and start developing divergent personalities to work around the parts that they can’t connect to. Also, your experiences stop affecting the whole cluster and start affecting the specific mode that is active more so than the ones that aren’t, so that contributes to the drifting apart.
Also I think (despite having no knowledge of psychology and only myself to go off of, so don’t agree with me) memories are lost because you dissociate while remembering them and that corrupts them, because whenever you remember something you kind of visualize / experience it again, but if you’re out of it and don’t re-live the experience when you access it, then it gets stored away as like a degraded version of itself with less clear details, and if you keep doing it, then all that’s left are like the emotional reactions that seem to come from nowhere at all. I think that’s also why in some people they distort into things totally different than what actually happened (I don’t think you can create “false traumatic memories”, though).
memories are lost because you dissociate while remembering them and that corrupts them, because whenever you remember something you kind of visualize / experience it again, but if you’re out of it and don’t re-live the experience when you access it, then it gets stored away as like a degraded version of itself with less clear details, and if you keep doing it, then all that’s left are like the emotional reactions that seem to come from nowhere at all.
This sounds plausible, although it might be more that the emotional reactions overtake the rest of the details in the memory as they’re the only thing that gets recalled. It could also be that the brain just becomes less capable of retrieving certain details about the memory, effectively eliminating details from the memory by misfiling them as not a part of the memory. Those details might continue to have an effect on thought processes, but the brain no longer identifies where the details came from.
Then again, I don’t know that much about cPTSD in particular, so this is mostly what I know about memory more generally. Psychology doesn’t know how this sort of stuff works with any certainty. It also doesn’t understand stuff like divergent personalities and plurality very well.
when you’re dissociating your brain is kind of like in the “do not write information to disk, we’re dealing with a threat that you can’t escape, so remembering this isn’t useful for your survival” state, so when you recall a memory when that’s happening it fucks up at putting it back.
I mean, I could think of it as different people, like most people like me seem to, but I fear in doing so it’d literally become so. I’m not sure I would like that, so I prefer to think of it as something like modes of the same person. Like brain electrical activity “waves” occupying the same medium, my frontal lobe, but doing so in distinct patterns at the same time, like electron orbitals.
Maybe if you mask for long enough, the masks become real
eh, maayybe. I think they’re more likely to stay masks in most people. They don’t really feel like masks, but they don’t feel like full people either, none of them, I do have behavior and elements of my personality that stays constant between them.
What I think it actually is, at least, I hypothesize, is caused by the same thing that causes lost memories, but on a much larger scale where so much of yourself is lost that you start to fragment into parts that stop making associations with other parts. That’s why it’s permanent once you reach the different people stage, because you have like partitioned your brain into these different states that struggle to interconnect well with each other, that can’t recall the other parts of you, and start developing divergent personalities to work around the parts that they can’t connect to. Also, your experiences stop affecting the whole cluster and start affecting the specific mode that is active more so than the ones that aren’t, so that contributes to the drifting apart.
Also I think (despite having no knowledge of psychology and only myself to go off of, so don’t agree with me) memories are lost because you dissociate while remembering them and that corrupts them, because whenever you remember something you kind of visualize / experience it again, but if you’re out of it and don’t re-live the experience when you access it, then it gets stored away as like a degraded version of itself with less clear details, and if you keep doing it, then all that’s left are like the emotional reactions that seem to come from nowhere at all. I think that’s also why in some people they distort into things totally different than what actually happened (I don’t think you can create “false traumatic memories”, though).
This sounds plausible, although it might be more that the emotional reactions overtake the rest of the details in the memory as they’re the only thing that gets recalled. It could also be that the brain just becomes less capable of retrieving certain details about the memory, effectively eliminating details from the memory by misfiling them as not a part of the memory. Those details might continue to have an effect on thought processes, but the brain no longer identifies where the details came from.
Then again, I don’t know that much about cPTSD in particular, so this is mostly what I know about memory more generally. Psychology doesn’t know how this sort of stuff works with any certainty. It also doesn’t understand stuff like divergent personalities and plurality very well.
I don’t think cPTSD is specifically people who dissociate. It’s a bunch of different stuff.
Correct, but issues with memory is one of the symptoms.
I think you’re right, that makes a lot of sense
when you’re dissociating your brain is kind of like in the “do not write information to disk, we’re dealing with a threat that you can’t escape, so remembering this isn’t useful for your survival” state, so when you recall a memory when that’s happening it fucks up at putting it back.