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Yes, I have dealt with this and am still dealing with this, and much of it it all came down to early childhood trauma and how I needed to survive situations as a kid. I ended up that I had a pretty extreme amount of dissociation and symptoms of PTSD, and after grappling with literal decades of therapy and many diagnoses I started looking into dissociation, from which things truly clicked into place and finally I had a model to understand how I worked. If you have memory issues, please check in about CPTSD and dissociation - it’s not well known and it’s been life changing for me, and it’s massively undiagnosed compared to people who have them (6% of the population has one).

With the help of therapists and peers I have been able to figure out how I work and make progress on things I haven’t been able to for much of my life, after dealing with a spate of pretty extreme burnout. There’s no telling what your journey might hold, but I can say with experience that it is possible to figure out what underlies the hangups that have been hamstringing you.




That's oddly reassuring in that I have CPTSD. How has your memory improved? And through what modality – just therapy?


It’s a lot of things, and it takes a while. EDMR, modified IFS, somatic work, massive amounts of internal reflection and relational work have all contributed - it’s not something I could just buy. I remember 80% of my childhood whereas before I only remembered something like 20% (the nicer parts and a few impactful moments). I remember school, I remember real details of being in my 20s including emotional memory, I remember what it was like to teach myself to code. All of this stuff wasn’t accessible until I started learning about structural dissociation.


Also as an FYI, dissociation can greatly reduce the efficacy of so many other treatments if not detected.

See here for a short primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWRnewwMO2U

Also if it might help, I'd recommend doing a self assessment for dissociation. The MID-60 is the one that I'd recommend over the DES-II, as it gets much closer into real experiences without as much wiggle room.


Has dealing with your PTSD actually improved your memory or has the damage already been done?


Yes. My memories are fragmented and dissociated from each other, especially traumatic ones. Processing the PTSD is literally reconnecting with and processing those memories that were pushed away to protect me.




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