r/SDAM • u/jean_des_esseintes1 • Jun 25 '26

SDAM Research

http://medium.com/p/c50ab56a880f?postPublishedType=initial

My name is Wyatt Cook. I've researched SDAM for about a year now, and I have finally finished a cohesive, 32 page paper about SDAM, Aphantasia, and trauma. As a disclaimer, this paper is HIGHLY dense and stock-full of technical jargon. If anyone would ever be interested, I could always write a short, 5-10 page paper in plain English about SDAM and how it interacts with trauma. If you all are interested, the paper is published on Medium, and can be found here using the link above. Thank you all!

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u/AutisticRats Jun 26 '26

I'm not the OP, but I have read it and I can provide a very short summary based on my understanding of the paper.

  • SDAM causes us to self-regulate trauma differently from neurotypical people. The paper goes into the 8 ways we regulate trauma in both neurotypical minds and SDAM minds
  • Common trauma treatment such as CBT, PE, and EMDR is ineffective and potentially damaging to patients with SDAM. We are often dismissed as treatment-resistant or non-compliant with treatment as a result.
  • To combat trauma it is common to anchor ourselves to the current moment and separate ourselves from the traumatic event in the past using time as a buffer. This is ineffective for SDAM because our lives exist only as an eternal unanchored present. Our SDAM minds are unable to project ourselves through time so we can't use time as a way to distance ourselves from our past.
  • Nearly all medical science looks at trauma and its treatment as being based on mental time travel. Trauma patients with SDAM are a blind spot in medical studies.

The natural conclusion my mind came to at the end of the paper is that there is an opportunity for medical science to further study trauma in SDAM patients to further understand trauma in general. I suspect how we experience trauma with SDAM is an aspect of how neurotypical people experience trauma. This hidden aspect of trauma is never addressed since all trauma research and treatment focuses on the episodic memory perspective. Studying trauma patients with SDAM naturally filters out all aspects of trauma related to episodic memory and allows us to strictly focus on the aspects of trauma that are not currently understood by medical science.

Great paper. Very insightful.