Bad dissociative episode

[Forestmistheather]

Hi,

So some of you may have read my post back in June (Dissociative Identity Disorder?) about a couple of fragments of missing time.  Well it's happened again, but on a much greater scale.  This time, I'm missing around 1hr - 1hr and half of my life.  And the weird/scary things is that I only know that I'm missing it because I was playing a pool match and I can remember 5 games.  But I know that 9 games are always (and were - I later saw that score card on the group chat) played.  But 4 games are completely missing.  That's literally half the night. I do have a couple of neurological conditions, and I have been to my GP about this as well as contacted my neurology teams who are looking into it.  But their first thoughts are that it isn't neurological.  But how do you just loose an hour of time?  Tbf, I'm not even 100% sure that it hasn't happened before.  As I say, the only reason I knew was because I knew that there should have been 9 matches.  The whole timeline itself seemed totally seamless to me.  And no-one said that I'd acted in any way out of the ordinary.  So idk.  Has anyone any experience with this/any words of wisdom?

[Hope67]

Hi Forestmistheather,

It sounds unsettling to lose that chunk of time, especially in a setting where everything seemed normal from the outside. One thought that came to my mind is how sometimes, in familiar or repetitive activities like driving or playing pool, we can slip into a kind of automatic mode—almost like being in a state of flow. It's not uncommon for people to lose track of time or even forget parts of what they did when they're deeply focused or dissociating mildly. Of course, I'm not saying that's exactly what happened, but it might be one piece of the puzzle. I'm glad you're getting support from your GP and neurology team, and I hope you get some clarity soon.

Hope

[Blueberry]

Just want to let you know that I read and am standing with you, Forestmistheather. I think I might be too dysregulated myself atm to say anything helpful.

I mean, I was really badly dissociated once when retraumatised in FOO, but I was sort of aware during it that I was going in and out of reality. A particular stretch of this time felt like about 2 weeks but it was actually only 5 days and nights. But I was acting strangely, people round me knew something was off. In fact I had to go on the psych ward for those 5 days. In and around those 5 days I was as I say slipping in and out of reality for about 3 weeks I think and there is a lot of it that I don't remember, and I suppose this is lost time that will never come back.

Dissociation is a protection, either from something now or because something now is triggering us to something back in the past. My experience is that people don't always notice if I'm dissociated or not. I probably don't have DID, but possibly partial DID or OSDD. Even a therapist in inpatient trauma group didn't notice that I was half-dissociated for about 2 weeks.

I'm sorry I don't know if anything I wrote helps you in any way since my dissociation experience seems different from yours. The difference doesn't count for anything of course, cuz as far as I can tell here on the forum we with cptsd often react differently from one another, but the foundation of it all is cptsd. Just ignore if this doesn't make sense. I'm kind of a mess this morning, but wanted to reach out. 

[Forestmistheather]

Thank you Hope67 and Blueberry - and yes it did make perfect sense Blueberry and was helpful     Yes, I guess that could explain it a little Hope67, but I'm not sure it completely 'fits' so to speak.  If it was a little bit here and there that was missing throughout the night, but I still had general memory of it, I think that would make sense (like you may remember bits of your drive to work but not others).  But the fact that it's a whole chunk, it just seems so weird.  And yes, very unsettling.  Good thought though.  Thank you

[NarcKiddo]

My personal experience of dissociation is that I do not lose full memory of chunks of time. Certainly not long ones. Typically I will be aware that I was somewhere but will forget completely what may have been spoken about. I am, however, reading a book about dissociation which posits that it is entirely possible for a part to take over completely such that the regular adult self has no idea of what has been going on. The book gives examples such as people finding themselves wearing outfits of clothing they are sure they did not put on. Or they might come across someone their normal adult self does not know and has never met, but that person clearly knows them and engages with them - presumably because some part of them had always taken over in previous encounters with that person. It's called "The Haunted Self" if you are interested. But it is a hard read as it is aimed at therapists and is very academic so it can be hard to wade through all the citations mid-sentence to follow the flow of the text.