Transcription
[Music] Hi and welcome to another video from the Sea Clinic. My name is Dr. Mike Lloyd and I'm the clinic director. Today I'm going to be looking at something that I consider to be one of the hardest parts about having complex trauma and dissociation.
So this is, I mean, I've been working in this field for over 15 years and time and time again, this comes back as being the biggest, biggest problem that people encounter because it isn't something that can be dealt with easily just using technical skills. What I mean by that is just by applying a skill set or, you know, taking something out of the toolbox and working with it more or less guarantees the result in time. This is the thing that really doesn't work like that. This is the thing that the brain holds that really makes people not be able to function properly, not being able to just get on and do things properly, and just makes everything really, really difficult.
Now, we'd think in stuff something like other specified dissociative disorder or dissociative identity disorder, which are considered to be the most severe parts of dissociation, the hardest bits, the most serious parts of dissociation, that those would be the hardest things. So dealing with internal parts, dealing with parts that are fronting, taking over, doing all those kind of things. And yes, that is extremely difficult and creates many, many difficulties for people in everyday life. But it's not really the hardest thing. The hardest thing is actually the simplest thing. And this is dissociative amnesia.
This is the first thing that we look at when we're starting to assess for dissociation. And in my professional opinion, in the, in the clinical experience that I've had with all of these years working with people who are dissociating, amnesia is the toughest, toughest component because that's the thing that we just can't make better just by wanting it to be or applying a skill set. It's like we have to sort of lay all the foundations for dissociative amnesia to reduce and go away. But it still doesn't mean it will do because if the brain doesn't want it to go, then it won't go. And the brain is often the thing that knows best for us, whether we like it or not.
This is, this is again, this is sort of like another difficult thing about amnesia is there's just the absolute lack of control. And there are two factors. So I called this video doubling down because the brain is doing two things with amnesia. The first thing it's doing is it's protecting the brain, protecting the, the self, protecting all of it from the impact and the, the nature of the trauma that was experienced that led to the dissociation in the first place. So it's compartmentalizing all of the pain and the suffering and moving it away. Now, for some people, that means that they have no memory whatsoever, or very little memory outside of sort of like fragmented kind of trace memories of all the things that have happened earlier in life. So this is the first feature is that there's this lack of knowledge, this lack of understanding about what's going on. And those amnesia kind of gaps in memory can, can persist all the way into adulthood and really sort of take away a person's sort of consistent timeline of whatever it is that they're doing just in normal everyday life. It can be sort of robbed and taken away from them. So what people are having to deal with is that lack of consistency, the lack of reliability about their own presence in the world. So there's the history, there's all the background, there's all the things that may or may not have taken place, and then there's the everyday stuff like planning and organizing and just being able to, you know, predict how a day is going to go more or less. That really isn't something that can be done for. So dissociative amnesia kind of takes away the person's presence in the world. It takes away where they've been, takes away where they are, and it removes them from the possibility of pretty much guaranteeing where they're going to be. And this is almost like an hour-by-hour or a day-to-day thing. It's incredibly difficult. So that's the first component.
Then, if we actually do work therapeutically with somebody and we address the amnesia. So it is a using skills, but we have to rely on the brain wanting those skills to be applied and being used. So if that actually happens, so if the person gets access to therapy, if all of the things are being done and we start laying the foundations for rebuilding that sense of memory, that the dissociative amnesia is the thing that kind of gets rid of because with, with parts and alters, we never work with getting rid of, but with dissociative amnesia, that is something that we like to think we can get rid of, like we can just stop people being amnesic for their everyday life and things, right? So to start with, we work in the present. But this is where things get really difficult. If that works, and we always want it to work, if that works, that can mean that all the stuff that's been forgotten starts coming back. And that's incredibly difficult. And that can often lead people to not wanting to remember it all over again and wanting that amnesia to come back. So what can actually happen is we can spend months or even years sort of reducing the dissociative amnesia or more or less removing it. Memories start coming back and this isn't just narrative memory. A lot of people do have the knowledge of what's happened to them, but they don't have the know, don't have the sort of the experiential, the feelings, the emotion, the impact of what's happened. That is the thing that often starts coming back. That's the worst part because that's then leading people to feel what they never felt at the point of trauma. And often then people might be saying, I just don't want this. I want it to go away. I want it to come back. And then really, what might happen is the amnesia starts coming back in because the brain is listening and going, well, okay, if you don't want it, I've got a really brilliant way of being able to get rid of it. Let's make you amnesic all over again. So that's quite a rare thing, but it does happen and it can happen quite more commonly in smaller doses that aspects of that memory start sort of like, you know, being lost all over again and people start having this really strange balance between, I really, really want to have full memory and I really don't want to have full memory. And the brain is kind of sitting there going, well, which is it? Which one would you want? I can give you both. I can make it go away or I can make it stay. And it doesn't really have that ability to be super convenient like, oh, I'll just give you the bits that you want and I'll keep away all the bits that you don't want. It's not really going to do that in that way. It's not, it's not kind of cognitive in the way that we are. So, it really has its own way of doing things and which can be quite difficult and problematic.
So, I like to think of this as doubling down, which is the title of the video. We desperately want the, the memory to come back so we can function in everyday life, but it might not come back. And then if it does come back, we might not want it to be there because it's just so horrible and, and some of the feelings can be terrible because we're just not geared up for it. And I'm going to be doing a series on this or I'm going to be doing a webinar on this later in the autumn. We're really kind of focusing a little bit more about amnesia, working out why it's doing what it's doing, working out what the skills and the things that we can start doing to adapt to the memory coming back because we just don't want it to come back straight away. We want to be prepared for it. So, a lot of the therapy for amnesia is about helping people prepare for the possibility of memory coming back so that when the memory starts coming back and the amnesia is lost, people are kind of skilled up. So the, the technique building isn't just about how to get the amnesia to stop. It's about how to cope and manage when the amnesia does eventually stop.
So I think that this is a really problematic thing and again, 15 years or so of clinical experience working in this field of dissociation. This is one of the most disabling constructs that the brain actually applies to overcome and look after the impact of, you know, childhood trauma in the main because this is a developmental process for most people with complex trauma and dissociation.
So I hope this video has been useful. Um, as always, I'd really like to hear the comments and, and see what people have to think about this. And I hope as many people as possible are able to join us when we do the webinar about dissociative amnesia where we'll be really sort of digging down into the roots of it, making sense and trying to work out what the strategies are because this is just simply a therapeutic process to go through. It's incredibly difficult for people to do this sort of thing on their own. Not impossible, but incredibly difficult. So, thanks very much for watching this video. Uh, look forward to hearing all the comments. Do all the usual like, subscribe stuff and I hope as many people as possible can join me in the webinar later on so that we can really look at dissociative amnesia. So between now and the next video we put out, cuz we'll continue doing this through the YouTube channel anyway. Please do take great care.