amnesia

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments'. which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the 'personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a range of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have 'executive control some substantial amount of time over the person's life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesia barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.' Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

A child who is being abused on an ongoing basis needs to be able to function despite the trauma that dominates his or her daily life. That becomes the job of at_least one_ANP [apparently normal part of the personality], whom the child creates to be unaware of the abuse and also of the multiplicity, and to __ass_as normal_ in the real world._The ANP is just an alter specialized for handling the adult world__n other_words, the __ront person_ for the system.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

A steel door clapped open as a guard stepped from the bulletproof viewing station across the hall. "Adams!" "That you?" "I told you, I don't know-" The cop pointed straight at him. "Jeffrey Adams! Front and center!" The black man helped him rise to his feet. "Ain't everybody gets called back from the pit, man. Question is, what are you gonna do when you find out who you are?

We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

If I had amnesia, I know I would fall in love with you all over again.

Right now I__ having amnesia and déj_ vu at the same time. I think I__e forgotten this before.

Not knowing who you are is a certain kind of hell.

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

While some accused and convicted child molesters have inappropriately influenced the media, the public, and many in the clinical and legal professions by claiming that traumatic amnesia does not occur in child sexual abuse, workers in the field of trauma psychology have accumulated solid empirical evidence over the past 100 years that it does occur and is common. Its existence and natural history are documented throughout the clinical literature. from:Traumatic amnesia: The evolution of our understanding from a clinical and legal perspective, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1997

I looked at him and the other two people whose names I__ just learned. __o . . . so this is home then?__kinli looked at me, perplexed, then turned to Ben and Julie.__he said some girls left her here and told her it was home. That__ all she knows. She doesn__ even know you._ Julie wiped at her tears, trying to calm herself.He moved his eyes back to me as quickly as he could manage. __ahlen? You remember me, right?__ stared into this face, searching for something familiar. I didn__ recognize the angle of his chin, the length of his fingers. I didn__ know the slope of his shoulder or the shape of his lips.__kinli, right?_ I asked. This poor boy. I pitied him in the depths of my heart. Clearly, he__ already been going through something, and I could see the last scrap of fight he had in him dying with those words.__es.___ don__ remember ever seeing you before in my life. I__ sorry.__e pressed his lips together as if he was swallowing the urge to cry.__ut,_ I said, __ know your voice. I know it as if it were my own.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. "Coming to," she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows: It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.

Matthews asked:__ow intimate was your relationship with Dr. Miller?___ntimate?_ Phil still couldn__ grasp what they were asking.__y colleague is asking if you__ ever had sex with Dr. Miller before that evening._ Jones added curtly. ____e never_We__e never_We__e friends. We__ never had sex before that evening, and we didn__ have sex that evening either.___ow do you explain your semen in her sheets then, Mr. Marshall?

Elizabeth had amnesia and her defenses were down. Bruce had tried to take advantage of her _ what guy wouldn__? Unfortunately, she got her memory back just in time, ran right out of his house, and wrecked his plans for the evening.

Madmen, criminals, and rapists! Isn__ it fantastic? All the romantic proposals I__e ever got from anybody. Somebody up there has an extremely dark sense of humour.

Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.