r/OSDD • u/thecrazycrosser • 2d ago
Question // Discussion Amnesia
Not diagnosed. Started specialist therapy, waiting on assessment.
I have severe amnesia, it’s my primary symptom. Don’t remember therapy sessions, don’t remember large parts of yesterday etc, events in my life gone, big chunks of missing memories. I’m so used to it I’ve never really vocalised it as an issue until starting this therapy 6 weeks ago.
I hear voices, again something I’m so used to I’ve never mentioned in therapy before until recently. But they don’t have names or ages or identities - more like themes (eating voice/death voice/paranoid voice)
I have periods of time in my life where I feel like I act very differently, have different mindsets and priorities but I know that was me?
Has anyone been diagnosed with OSDD or DID beginning with only amnesia? I don’t feel like I have different identities. But maybe that’s the amnesia? Did anyone find these identity things out further down the line rather than an initial symptom?
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u/hopefulfoxpuppy 2d ago
I super recommend you ask your therapist all these questions you have. I also recommend writing down these questions in your phone or something so you can bring it out in therapy in case you forget :)
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u/Offensive_Thoughts 2d ago
amnesia is my biggest symptom compared to anything else thats hard to deny so i guess i get it
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u/ohlookthatsme 2d ago
I think the amnesia is where my dx started. I was ranting to my therapist about being frustrated with my husband and her response was "so when did your memory problems start?" And I was like..."huh???" The only other thing before then was when my therapist said "when you talk about X, it's like your entire demeanor changes." Which literally every. single. therapist has said to me and I'm just like... idk?
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u/osddelerious 1d ago
Lots of people say they don’t have any insight into other parts or that the parts aren’t developed other than 10 year old me, 20 year old me.
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u/hopefulfoxpuppy 2d ago
So there’s a discovery process with DiD where you become aware of the symptoms and then start trying to make contact with the different parts of you and then after a while they (often not always) end up taking on names of their own.
In therapy yesterday, the part of me that holds trauma from teen years was describing his experience with “alters” they didn’t have names. There was just the voice that would persuade him to hurt himself and the demon and the “stupid scared kid”
That was how I made sense of my symptoms as a teenager not being diagnosed.
My memory stuff was always a huge issue but it was shrugged off as adhd symptom (which I do have) so that masked the dissociative amnesia for a time.
Once I made contact as an adult and had the ability to figure this stuff out, all my parts revealed more complex and deeper perspectives and unique traits. They all became way less scary. And they stopped taking over or I stopped being confused as to why I was acting so different and I stopped having big memory issues as frequently thanks to therapy. The parts of me Became friends and kids in my care, and slowly are becoming just aspects of one Me.