We sometimes have difficulty having a sense that an event really happened in the past while we intellectually“know”that it really happened. Memories in the past events can become fuzzy, foggy and almost lost beyond the fading process due to the effect of time. I hear many patients say “I don’t remember anything during my entire days of junior high school” or “I don’t recall anything when I was staying with my aunt and uncle for three months” and so on.
These foggy memories could have been formed while an individual was in dissociative state or at least in a different state of mind for some reason, if not frankly in a state of different personality or identity. It has been more and more widely believed among clinicians that past traumatic events are processed and contained by our past state of mind that can be somewhat discontinuous to our current self. The fogginess and unrealistic nature of the past memory can be its indication. It might be extreme and perhaps incorrect to say that people with foggy or lost memories have DID-like condition, but their state of mind is not totally foreign to that of people with DID.
The Structured Dissociation theory (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele, 2006) has been widely accepted in the community of the studies of dissociation, and it proposes a clear and succinct model for our mind and memory. These authors discuss at length how our mind processes traumatic events. What they call“apparently normal personality (ANP)” and “emotional personality (EP)” are dissociated part of mind which are formed in various ways according to the nature and degree of the traumatic events.
The traumatic experience can produce an EP that is dissociated from ANP which avoids experiencing the memory. ANP is a sort of ordinary or usual self, and from its viewpoint, past traumatic memory appears blurry and foggy.
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