Comment by taurath

> recovering" memories as a therapy

Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy that leaned heavily on suggestion or was associated often with fairly coercive interrogations during the 80s CSA panic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

> Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them.

Agree, though I think the mechanism can be a bit more towards the idea of a “recovery” of traumatic memory, even if the term as understood carries false connotations.

The concept you’re missing is dissociation, and dissociative disorders. In the 40s it was called just “hysteria”, and for many cases up to the late 90s an extreme form was called multiple personality disorder, now DID (dissociative identity disorder). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder

Not everyone who goes through traumatic events will respond to it via dissociation of identity, and indeed not all people are equally capable of developing a dissociative disorder, 2 people may go through very similar events (say survive a war as siblings or even twins) and one might dissociate the traumatic experience and one might not. Dissociation doesn’t work quite like you might imagine from a term like “multiple personalities” - that happens in some extreme cases, but think of identity dissociation as an adaptive response to events or situations that are paradoxical (esp to a child’s mind), extreme or traumatic, and can’t be escaped or use of other mechanisms cant be called upon.

Dissociation is on a sort of spectrum, where at one side you have common experiences like zoning out when on a common commute, and on another you have separated self-parts/alter egos to handle wildly different situations.

It’s a mechanism I frankly wasn’t aware of and I’m not sure that I would be able to fully beleive or empathize with, but for my getting a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder changed my life, and made a thousand things about me that I could never figure out make sense. The “model” as it put it at the time responded to experiment, and by recognizing that I was dealing with pretty constant, heavy dissociation and different self states with memory deficiencies helped me figure out how to work through a ton of really intractable problems for me. I’m finally after decades of ineffective therapy able to really understand how I work.

Idk how to talk about it without sounding like I’m trying to sell the idea. But yeah it was a mind blowing thing to me. Over the last 20 years especially a ton of truly respectable research has been done and the increase in efficacy of treatments on dissociation, and trauma generally is one of the unsung advancements for humanity in the last decade. I think the number is that around 3-6% of people meet the clinical criteria for a dissociative disorder - OSDD, DID, DPDR, or dissociative amnesia. 5x more people than have schizophrenia, 5x more than have red hair.

My favorite public clinical resource I point to people is the CTAD Clinic YouTube - https://youtube.com/@thectadclinic?si=5AyR5H8K8Cf2sn3C

Pretty easy to understand explainers from a clinician in the UK.

For a more clinical and study approach this one is the currently best put together research IMO: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97810030573...

The TLDR is dissociation is an important mechanism that most people don’t know about but has had a wave of research and study and is much more common than one might expect. The sad part is how often dissociative disorders correlate w abuse.