One impactful symptom of DID that I struggle with is amnesia, which is significant enough for me that it impacts my daily functioning and severely affects my awareness of my life history. I not only have difficulty constructing a functional narrative of my past, but I also often struggle with day-to-day amnesia. The puzzling part of this all is that I seem to have gaps in awareness for things that are not at all trauma related. For example, I have at least one playful kid part, and after she has come out, my more regulated adult selves don’t necessarily remember what I did when that part was out. Additionally, when that kid part is out, I seem to have trouble fully remembering my adult life, along with my adult responsibilities. Why is this? Why do my non-trauma-holding parts have amnesia for the actions of other non-trauma-holding parts? Isn’t the point of amnesia to protect against difficult memories and experiences? Yes, but in my case, I believe it’s also to protect me from the awareness that I have other parts of self with potentially ego-dystonic ways of being.
I believe I have day-to-day amnesia because I still haven’t come to terms with the reality of having DID. I have multiple versions of me that I switch between, and each only has a narrow view of how my life is supposed to function. The playful kid part doesn’t want to deal with adult responsibilities, so she simply does not remember the boring aspects of my adult life. The more responsible parts of me do not want to realize that I can be so careless at times, spending hours obsessing over my fish tank, terrariums, and plants rather than dealing with the adult responsibilities that I’m supposed to, so my responsible parts disown the actions of the kid part from my view of myself, resulting in partial amnesia. My parts want to remain separate from each other because they each have different and conflicting ways of being in the world. Different parts have different views of who I am, each following their narrow view of who they believe I am supposed to be. In reality, I am all of my parts, and they are all me. I just haven’t come to terms with that yet.
Since realizing this, I have tried to take on a new mindset of fully accepting all of my parts as they are. However, since I’ve spent my entire life operating with several disconnected versions of myself, each disowning the actions and experiences of the other parts, I have been incredibly unsuccessful at adopting this mindset thus far. It’s going to take a significant amount of effort, and a whole lot of teamwork between my parts, to change my ways and learn to accept all parts of myself. The process of disowning the different versions of me has been an automatic process for my entire life thus far, so I can’t expect this mindset change to be quick and seamless. I feel like I’m at the stage now where I am aware of my parts, but still have not accepted them yet. I hope that, with time and acceptance, my amnesia will reduce and I will be able to gain more control over my life again.