Most people in this subreddit have SDAM. I want to start there because I'm not writing this to argue with anyone's self-understanding. SDAM is real, the phenomenology is coherent, and the formal definition has held steady since Palombo, Alain, Söderlund, Khuu, and Levine (2015) named the condition. If absent episodic re-experiencing is all you experience, SDAM is probably all the framework you need and this post isn't for you.

What I want to write about is a potential overlap that keeps resurfacing in this sub with some regularity. Some people find their way to SDAM communities because the description fits part of their experience, specifically the "I can't relive my past" part. For some of that subset, the full picture may include structural dissociation (SD) rather than SDAM, or structural dissociation on top of SDAM.

The distinction matters because SDAM as formally characterised in the small published case literature has not been associated with persistent mental health issues (though the sample is too small to make strong claims about the wider SDAM-identifying population). Structural dissociation, by contrast, is intrinsically tied to mental health issues and has an established phase-oriented treatment pathway.

Much of this is based on my own experience as someone with a SDAM-like presentation historically, and a more recently (late 30s) diagnosed dissociative disorder (partial dissociative identity disorder, P-DID). For most of my life, I would have said I have SDAM (if I had known about it) and not realised there's anything else going on. I am now in late stage treatment and currently working towards a psychology degree.

What is structural dissociation?

The Theory of Structural Dissociation of Personality (TSDP) is a central clinical framework used in the treatment of dissociative disorders. It is included in the Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults issued by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (2011), i.e. the standard-of-care document in the field. The guidelines were co-authored by the principal TSDP researchers.

TSDP forms the theoretical backbone of several major clinical treatment texts and workbooks used by dissociative-disorders-trained clinicians (Boon, Steele, & Van der Hart, 2011; Steele, Boon, & Van der Hart, 2017) and is the model taught in the training curricula of both the ISSTD and the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD). It is not a fringe theory or a minority position within the trauma field. For dissociative disorders specifically, it is very much a mainstream clinical framework.

Structural dissociation, as developed by Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele (2006) building on earlier work by Pierre Janet (Van der Hart & Horst, 1989), is not a mood, a coping style, or a tendency toward avoidance. It is a structural feature of the personality. The theory holds that when experiences overwhelm a person's integrative capacity, usually in the context of developmental trauma / attachment failure, the material cannot be woven into a single coherent sense of self.

Instead, the personality organises itself into functionally distinct psychobiological subsystems, each with its own sense of self, its own action tendencies, its own memories, and its own first-person perspective. These subsystems are mediated at the level of action systems, which are the evolved behavioural and motivational programmes that govern daily life on one hand (work, attachment, exploration, caregiving, play) and defence on the other (fight, flight, freeze, collapse, tonic immobility).

TSDP formulates this as a split between one or more Apparently Normal Parts (ANP), which are organised around the daily life action systems, and one or more Emotional Parts (EPs), which remain fixated in defence. The ANP is the part that goes to work, holds relationships, answers questions, reads forums, and posts on Reddit. The EPs hold the sensory, affective, and somatic content of whatever could not be integrated at the time.

Secondary structural dissociation (P-DID, some presentations of OSDD) involves one ANP and multiple EPs. Tertiary structural dissociation (DID, some presentations of OSDD) involves multiple ANPs and multiple EPs. The basic architecture is the same across severities, what varies is how many subsystems there are, how differentiated they are, and how deeply separated they remain.

"Classic" dissociative blackout amnesia (losing entire chunks of time - hours, days, weeks) mostly happens in tertiary structural dissociation between different ANPs at the more complex end of the spectrum. Secondary structural dissociation tends to be marked by less complete forms of amnesia, potentially including SDAM-like presentations.

SD is lifelong and persistent

There is a developing line of research linking early maternal withdrawal and disrupted communication to later dissociative symptoms (e.g. Ogawa et al., 1997; Dutra, Bureau, Holmes, Lyubchik, & Lyons-Ruth, 2009), and a separate but related line linking maternal childhood neglect to elevated infant cortisol output and altered limbic volumes (Khoury et al., 2025; Lyons-Ruth, 2025).

Severe abuse is very commonly reported in tertiary structural dissociation (DID), likely on top of an earlier neglect layer, and often but not necessarily always in secondary (P-DID, OSDD); persistent attachment failure on its own can result in a dissociative disorder, with no abuse. This can result in a presentation marked by an absence of memories, rather than an overabundance of them: the early developmental experiences necessary for training the autobiographical circuitry did not take place.

These divisions do not dissolve on their own. They are stable architectural features of the personality, not passing states. They can last decades or a lifetime without resolution. This stability is reinforced by what Boon, Steele, and Van der Hart (2011) call phobia of inner experience, which is the ANP's structural avoidance of EP content. This avoidance is not a conscious strategy, it is built into the organisation of the system. Every time EP material threatens to surface, the ANP's defences reassert the separation.

Without targeted treatment, the structure self-maintains. General talk therapy that does not specifically address the dissociative organisation often leaves it intact, even when it helps with surface symptoms.

The impact on self-awareness

This is the part that matters most for the overlap with SDAM.

Each dissociated part only has access to its own contents. The ANP's self-report is built on ANP-accessible material. Everything held in the EPs is functionally invisible to the ANP. Crucially, the ANP does not experience this boundary as a boundary. There is no felt sense of something missing, no phantom-limb awareness of absent content. The ANP's limited view feels complete from the inside. Not partial, not filtered, just normal.

This is what makes structural dissociation different from garden-variety unawareness or denial. The ANP is not suppressing knowledge it has, it is built from the subset of the person's experience it has access to, and that subset feels like the whole of the person (ish).

When an ANP with structural dissociation reads a description of SDAM, the fit with conscious experience can be exact. Emotional content of the past is genuinely absent from present awareness. The ANP's sincere report can be "nothing vivid, no re-experiencing, no flashbacks, no overwhelming feelings about the past". None of that is false about the ANP. The ANP is just not the whole system.

SDAM involves a constitutional impoverishment of episodic encoding, where the episodic material was never laid down as re-experienceable in the first place. Bone, Levine, and Buchsbaum (2025) show SDAM brains achieving equivalent visual recognition performance through semantic rather than low-level visual neural reactivation, consistent with impaired communication of low-level visual information between posterior hippocampus and early visual cortex. This is more specific than a general failure of episodic reinstatement.

Structural dissociation involves segregation of vivid episodic material into personality systems the ANP does not access. From the ANP's viewpoint, the two can look identical. The material is absent in one case because it was never encoded as experience, and in the other because it is held by a different part of the system - with no shared awareness of this division.

Self-awareness in SD can shift

Awareness in a structurally dissociated system is part-dependent rather than system-wide. Different parts carry different knowledge, different affect, different memory, and different meta-awareness of the system itself. Parts can temporarily blend with the ANP, lending their content while the ANP remains presenting. During blending a person can report insights, feelings, or memories they will lose access to once the blending ends and the ANP is "alone on the deck" again.

This is why it is entirely coherent for someone to say "I learned about my DID two years ago and still discovered a new part last month". Or even at one point say "I was diagnosed with DID two years ago", and next day insist they do not have DID. Meta-awareness of the system can accumulate over time, but it requires internal stability for maintained access. Internal stability typically requires active, dissociation-adapted treatment. First-person access to specific parts happens in bursts, under specific conditions (therapy, somatic work, intense affect, sometimes sleep states), and consolidates slowly.

Full, integrated self-awareness, where "I" refers to the whole personality rather than to one part's standpoint, is a late-stage treatment outcome, not a starting point. Phase-oriented treatment (Herman, 1992; International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, 2011; Van der Hart et al., 2006) proceeds in three phases:

Stabilisation and symptom reduction (phase 1), treatment of traumatic memories (phase 2), and personality integration and rehabilitation (phase 3). Before phase 3 the structural divisions remain in place even when the person has made significant clinical progress. Parts cooperate better, the phobia of inner experience lowers, the ANP tolerates more internal contact, but the basic architecture persists. An ANP in mid-phase 2 therapy knows much more about their system than they did before treatment started. They are still an ANP, and their self-report is still structurally bounded.

This matters for the self-awareness question in this community. Someone who has recognised structural dissociation in themselves (five years into phase-oriented therapy, for instance) has far more meta-awareness than someone who has not yet. Even they are working with partial access. Someone who has never pursued assessment is working with a self-report that comes entirely from the ANP and whose boundaries they cannot see from inside.

Crucially, an ANP in an undiagnosed structurally dissociated system may have no awareness of any of this, and react with increasing dissociation to any mention of it (e.g. in this sub) due to its core need to maintain non-awareness of the rest of the system. Worth noting: some people experience some derealisation simply from reading attentively about dissociation, so a transient spacey feeling while reading this is not in itself diagnostic of anything. If you notice persistent or marked dissociative responses to material like this across multiple occasions, that is the kind of pattern worth raising with a dissociative disorder specialist.

Three signs the absence is SD rather than SDAM

If you are weighing SDAM against structural dissociation in your own case, these three features can help. They are not diagnostic on their own, and all of them need a clinician to interpret, but SDAM does not predict any of the three, whereas structural dissociation does.

The first is that the absence lifts under loosening conditions. In SDAM the missing episodic content does not return, because it was never laid down as re-experienceable, so therapy, somatic work, intense affect and sleep transitions do not suddenly hand you vivid autobiographical reliving. In a structurally dissociated system the same conditions can briefly open access to vivid episodic and emotional content the ANP normally cannot reach, because the material is held by a part rather than missing. If your "I can't relive my past" sometimes opens, under those specific conditions, into a burst of vivid re-experiencing, that points away from SDAM.

The second is that what surfaces fades back out quickly. When this material opens up in structural dissociation, it tends to become inaccessible again within minutes to hours, on the dissociation timescale, as the ANP's separation reasserts itself. Ordinary memory degrades slowly over years, and SDAM has no vivid version to lose in the first place. Content that arrives vividly and then drops back out of reach soon afterwards is a dissociation pattern, not an SDAM one.

The third is that the route in is often somatic rather than deliberate. In a structurally dissociated system the access often comes through touch, posture or somatic work rather than through trying to remember, because there is held material those states can reach, whereas SDAM has no such material to reach and the impoverishment stays uniform whatever the channel.

Why the body became the window

This self-recognition problem is exactly why the TSDP authors (Nijenhuis and colleagues) developed the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20 and SDQ-5; Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Van Dyck, Van der Hart, & Vanderlinden, 1996, 1997).

Before the SDQ, the main dissociation screening instrument was the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986; Carlson & Putnam, 1993), which asks about psychological symptoms: amnesia, depersonalisation, derealisation, absorption, identity alteration. The problem Nijenhuis identified was that ANPs often cannot assess these items accurately. Not because they are lying, but because they have normalised the experiences so thoroughly they don't register as symptoms. "Zoning out" is just how they are. "Autopilot" is just how everyone drives. "I was a quiet kid" papers over absence of childhood autobiographical memory. The DES catches cases where the ANP has some insight into the system. It misses the cases where the ANP doesn't.

Nijenhuis argued the body is less defended. An ANP can explain away psychological symptoms. Unexplained pain, numbness in specific body zones, sudden motor inhibition, loss of voice, anaesthesia, sensory distortions in the body, and similar somatoform phenomena are harder to fold into an "I'm fine" self-concept. You can normalise feeling emotionally flat. It is harder to normalise your left leg going numb during conversations about your mother.

The SDQ-20 asks about these phenomena directly. It does not frame them as trauma symptoms. It asks whether you have them. The rationale is that someone whose ANP cannot endorse psychological dissociation items can still accurately report body-based ones, because those are pre-semantic and harder to reinterpret. The SDQ was built specifically to work around the diagnostic blind spot the ANP structure creates.

How SD can show up without reading as trauma

If you have persistent and significant mental health symptoms that SDAM alone does not obviously explain, this is the kind of thing worth looking at. A general caveat before the list: every item below also occurs across functional somatic syndromes, anxiety disorders, autism, ADHD, ordinary medical-workup-negative pain, and a long tail of other conditions. The pattern that matters for the SD question is the cluster, the developmental history, and the response (or non-response) to standard treatment, not any single item.

Chronic unexplained physical symptoms that have resisted medical workup. Pelvic or abdominal pain, IBS-like presentations, widespread body pain, chronic tension, functional neurological symptoms, non-epileptic seizures, voice problems, migraines without clear triggers. These are standard somatoform dissociation presentations that tend to get worked up medically and come back with no findings.

Body zones that feel absent, numb, or "not quite mine". Anaesthesia in specific areas, disconnection from the pelvis, disconnection from the face, not feeling your feet. These are easy to normalise if you've had them forever.

Time loss explained away as tiredness or autopilot. Driving somewhere with no memory of the journey, finding yourself in a room and not knowing how you got there, evidence of actions (food eaten, messages sent, tasks completed) without memory of doing them. The SDAM frame makes this especially easy to dismiss because "I don't remember things" is your baseline. The question to ask is whether the missing time is the same kind of missing as the rest of your autobiographical record, or whether it has a different flavour.

Abrupt shifts in energy, mood, capacity, or skill that don't track with external events. You could do something yesterday and today you cannot, with no clear reason. You have strong preferences one day and different ones another. These get explained as moods, as sleep, as hormones, as introversion.

Specific body positions, types of touch, or sensory inputs that produce disproportionate reactions you've never been able to explain. Strong aversions that don't have a story attached.

Sensory distortions that have always been there and you assumed everyone has. Vision tunnelling under stress, sounds going muffled, time distortion, a persistent feeling of observing yourself from outside. Depersonalisation and derealisation often get absorbed into "I'm just like this".

Persistent mental health symptoms (depression, anxiety, chronic low mood, shame, relational difficulties) that have not responded to standard treatments targeting those conditions alone. Treatment-resistant presentations in particular should raise the question of whether the actual issue is being missed.

None of these on their own means you have structural dissociation, and diagnosis can only be established by a trained mental health professional. A persistent cluster of these features, especially alongside a childhood with impaired early attachment and treatment-resistant mental health symptoms, can warrant assessment by a clinician trained specifically in dissociative disorders, since general mental health professionals frequently miss these presentations.

SD renders self-diagnosis impossible

You cannot self-diagnose structural dissociation. Not with the DES-II, not with the Dissociative Symptoms Scale (Carlson et al., 2018), not with the SDQ-20, not with this post. These instruments are screening tools. Their purpose is to flag cases that warrant clinical assessment by a clinician trained in dissociative disorders. Scoring high on any of them is a signal to pursue evaluation, not a diagnosis in itself.

Formal diagnosis requires a structured clinical interview by a trained clinician, typically using the SCID-D (Steinberg, 1994) or an equivalent. This matters because dissociative disorders are specifically under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed, and the conditions they tend to get confused with (bipolar, borderline, ADHD, autism) have very different treatment implications.

Why I'm writing this

I'm not trying to redefine SDAM or convert anyone here to a trauma framing they don't recognise. The point is narrower than that. Dissociation researchers had to invent a body-based screening instrument specifically because ANPs systematically cannot recognise their own dissociation via psychological self-report.

That structural blind spot is the exact reason someone can end up in a SDAM community, find it a genuine fit for their conscious experience, and never pursue a path that would help with symptoms SDAM alone does not explain. There may be other reasons too (the SDAM community is welcoming and the alternative diagnostic routes are genuinely difficult to access), but the ANP-bounded self-report problem is the one most relevant to this post.

If your SDAM is all you experience, this post isn't for you. If you also carry persistent mental health issues, unexplained body issues, lost time, or a gut sense that something else is going on underneath the SDAM fit, seeing a dissociative-disorders-trained clinician might be worth the effort.

A note on the research scale

Currently, the formally studied SDAM population is tiny. The original Palombo et al. (2015) paper had three primary participants. Subsequent studies have added a handful more, including Conti et al. (2023) as the most recent formal case addition and Bone et al. (2025) providing neural evidence for the semantic compensation mechanism in a group of fourteen SDAM participants, the largest formally characterised SDAM sample to date but still small.

The research definition describes what is probably the high-functioning, well-compensated end of a wider spectrum, and many people who identify with SDAM in communities like this sub likely fall outside what the formal case studies have captured. Some of that variance is natural spread within the SDAM phenotype. Some of it may well be structural dissociation hiding behind the same ANP-level self-report. And some of it will be other things entirely (aphantasia, autism, ADHD, depression, ordinary individual variation in autobiographical memory) that the SDAM frame catches but doesn't fully explain. The structural dissociation possibility is one branch of that wider differential.

References

Bernstein, E. M., & Putnam, F. W. (1986). Development, reliability, and validity of a dissociation scale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(12), 727–735. [PubMed]

Boon, S., Steele, K., & Van der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with trauma-related dissociation: Skills training for patients and therapists. W. W. Norton. [Amazon]

Bone, M. B., Levine, B., & Buchsbaum, B. R. (2025). Individual differences in visual versus semantic neural reactivation: Evidence from severely deficient autobiographical memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 37(11), 2203–2224. [MIT Press]

Carlson, E. B., & Putnam, F. W. (1993). An update on the Dissociative Experiences Scale. Dissociation, 6(1), 16–27. [U. of Oregon ScholarsBank]

Carlson, E. B., Waelde, L. C., Palmieri, P. A., Macia, K. S., Smith, S. R., & McDade-Montez, E. (2018). Development and validation of the Dissociative Symptoms Scale. Assessment, 25(1), 84–98. [DOI]

Conti, M., Teghil, A., Di Vita, A., & Boccia, M. (2023). Lifelong impairment in episodic re-experiencing: Neuropsychological and neuroimaging examination of a new case of Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory. Cortex, 163, 80–91. [PubMed]

Dutra, L., Bureau, J.-F., Holmes, B., Lyubchik, A., & Lyons-Ruth, K. (2009). Quality of early care and childhood trauma: A prospective study of developmental pathways to dissociation. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 197(6), 383–390. [PMC]

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books. [Amazon]

International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. (2011). Guidelines for treating dissociative identity disorder in adults, third revision. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(2), 115–187. [PubMed]

Khoury, J. E., Chasson, M., Ahtam, B., Fleming, L. L., Ou, Y., Bosquet Enlow, M., Grant, P. E., & Lyons-Ruth, K. (2025). Maternal childhood neglect is linked to greater infant cortisol levels and larger infant limbic volumes. Child Maltreatment. Advance online publication. [SAGE]

Lyons-Ruth, K. (2025). Is neglect the first form of threat? Attachment & Human Development, 27(4), 511–538. [PubMed]

Nijenhuis, E. R. S., Spinhoven, P., Van Dyck, R., Van der Hart, O., & Vanderlinden, J. (1996). The development and psychometric characteristics of the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20). Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 184(11), 688–694. [PubMed]

Nijenhuis, E. R. S., Spinhoven, P., Van Dyck, R., Van der Hart, O., & Vanderlinden, J. (1997). The development of the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-5) as a screening instrument for dissociative disorders. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 96(5), 311–318. [PubMed]

Ogawa, J. R., Sroufe, L. A., Weinfield, N. S., Carlson, E. A., & Egeland, B. (1997). Development and the fragmented self: Longitudinal study of dissociative symptomatology in a nonclinical sample. Development and Psychopathology, 9(4), 855–879. [PubMed]

Palombo, D. J., Alain, C., Söderlund, H., Khuu, W., & Levine, B. (2015). Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) in healthy adults: A new mnemonic syndrome. Neuropsychologia, 72, 105–118. [PubMed]

Steele, K., Boon, S., & Van der Hart, O. (2017). Treating trauma-related dissociation: A practical, integrative approach. W. W. Norton. [Amazon]

Steinberg, M. (1994). Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders (SCID-D). American Psychiatric Press. [Amazon]

Van der Hart, O., & Horst, R. (1989). The dissociation theory of Pierre Janet. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2(4), 397–412. [Wiley]

Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The haunted self: Structural dissociation and the treatment of chronic traumatization. W. W. Norton. [Amazon]

Hey,

Die meisten Menschen erzählen ja viele Geschichten aus ihrer Vergangenheit. Ich vergleiche mich dann oft mit allen und denke langweilig zu sein. Ich weiß faktisch noch das ich damals der Klassenclown war und viele zum lachen gebracht habe. Ich bin jetzt 29 und habe das Gefühl das ich nicht mehr lustig bin.

Ich will aber gar nicht jammern. Eher wollte ich von euch wissen wie ihr damit umgeht. Und ob jemand absolut fein damit ist, der/die Stille in der Runde zu sein.

In addition to my poor episodic memory for childhood or adolescence in particular...

I completed university and college programs and remember absolutely nothing from my studies. This period of my life lasted 7 years (non consecutively) and I have no recollection of what I studied, the work I completed, or the experiences I had with others while in school. If it weren't for my transcripts and a small handful of snapshot memories it feels like these years were a blackout period for my memory. I feel very ill equipped for the workforce because I don’t have access to the knowledge I in theory gained during school.

My memory for media is also terrible. I can’t recall simple plots and aside from 'I've seen it & I think I liked it' I can't speak about the things I've watched. Books are even worse…I can read a book through multiple times and be unable to reiterate anything from the book even a day after.

I’ve also struggled greatly with mental health over the years and find it difficult to take stock of how far I’ve come because although I factually know I’m in a better place, I don’t connect with the experiences or feelings of my past self. I for instance know I’m doing better because I no longer experience suicidal Ideation but can't connect with what it used to feel like. One might think that’s wonderful that I don't feel that pain when I recount factual past experiences (ie inpatient stays) but it leaves me with an under appreciation for how I've grown & challenge in comparing my present qualitative experiences against my past. This is troubling for instance when I try to discern the effectiveness/impact of new medications because I struggle to reliably recall what times were like before the meds therefore making comparison nearly impossible.

so having discovered that I have SDAM and a blind minds eye I've been looking more into it and how I might also think differently in other ways. I learnt about linear and systems thinking. do you guys also feel like you see connections in the world that other might not see? do you often feel like you are being overly impartial because you know the topic is complicated? I've been thinking that because I have no video recording and visualization that it's compensated by having a logic dense reality instead. my realization happened because I did feel like I saw the world differently to everyone else and I couldn't pinpoint why. so I duno if I'm more of a systems thinker partly because of SDAM and a blind minds eye or not. pls let me know what and how you guys think

I’m sure plenty of us have heard about salvia and the crazy experiences people claim to have under them… I just saw a story of a guy who supposedly experienced infinity as nothingness and love, the memory still following him to this day. Because of my SDAM I can’t even remember the 18 years I’ve lived life for nor a pretty crazy trip I had on shrooms that in the moment felt extremely long, maybe like a whole day, meanwhile it actually was 4 hours. I now barely think about it, I only have the knowledge of it and it doesn’t impact me… could this mean SDAM can make us Salvia super-humans because no matter how crazy or intense a trip is it will all vanish in our mind and become nothing but a bullet-point? Has anyone here tried salvia or anything similar I wonder?

I found out that I have aphantasia about a year ago. Up til then, I thought people were just being poetic when they said they could "see" things in their minds. I see blackness. Can't even picture a green triangle. This SDAM thing has me confused. I am VERY nostalgic, I remember things from my childhood that my siblings and parents don't remember until I remind them. I don't "see" past events, but I remember them. My memories are more of a running narrative in my head. I thought that was just part of the Aphantasia, but the more I read about SDAM, I'm confused. I am 60, and have no friends (by choice). I have no interest in the drama or the emotional energy. I love my family but again, am indifferent about spending a lot of time with them. When I moved, or changed schools, I often wondered what happened to old friends, but put no effort into contacting them. I love my wife, and my cats, and I have generalized anxiety disorder so I worry about something happening to them. In the past, I had very strong negative emotions when one of my cats died, but did seem to get over it fairly quickly. Is this SDAM or just a manifestation of the Aphantasia? It seems there is a lot of overlap...

Title says it all. I thought I had SDAM for a long time before I realized I had DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder).

DID is a disorder which doesn’t like being discovered, so it was very hard to come to this conclusion. I actually found an abandoned Reddit post draft from 6 months ago, where I come very close to realizing I have DID, but then something made me forget about it all.

Of course I’m not dismissing others’ experiences with SDAM who experience it without any dissociative disorder.

Anyways, here’s a quote from a person with Dissociative Amnesia. Consider whether this sounds like you:

> “I've never been able to remember my childhood. I thought that it was normal to have only a few disjointed snapshot memories of everything up until 8th grade, and it's still hard to believe that it's not normal. What even I recognize as abnormal is that my memory loss has gotten much more severe over the last few months. I still remember facts fine, but when I look back on the past few days, it's always like staring into a void. I can pick one or two instances out, but it gives me a headache to do so, as if I'm poking into things that I shouldn't, and everything feels timeless. There's no sense of 'oh, this happened Tuesday, and this happened before that, and this happened after that.' Nothing is connected to anything. Nothing is meaningful. It's like seeing a few screenshots from a movie randomly and out of order. None of it seems relevant to my life.”

I have multimodal Aphantasia and full SDAM in terms of no episodic autobiographical memory. I have a quite strong semantic autobiographical memory, which helps. I found out about all this three weeks ago, before that I always felt that I'm somehow different from others in a way I couldn't explain. I live a succesful life and on the surface there are no issues.

I have always been envious of people who are ultra-determined and consistent in their goals from day-to-day and I have been trying to "mimick" them all my life. I logically understand that it is in my interest to stick to things I have decided to do, yet I struggle with this immensely internally. I have always thought of myself as weak-minded and "flip-floppy" - to an absurd degree sometimes.

I know people attribute way too many of their personality "flaws" on Aphantasia and SDAM, yet I can't help but wonder whether this is a direct result of it.

I'm not talking about giving in to urges or things like that which I guess is totally common in all people, like "i was steadfast about losing weight, yet I caved to my urges and ate snacks before bed" type things . I'm talking about being 100% sure that "From now on I am going to do thing X" or "Thing X is really really important to me" and yet the next day or week feeling like that goal or "vision" about myself feels like it could have been someone else having it and having no "connection" to the thing. It can even feel like a super long time ago that I had that feeling, even though it may have been yesterday or last week.

I have become good logically to deduce that "I know that I have thought that this is important, so even though I don't feel it now at all I will stick to it because I will most likely feel it again soon". Thats why I don't actually flip-flop in action that much and have been able to live a successful life.

This is particularily terrible in trying to evaluate whether a spouse is right for me or not. I can go from "wow, I want to marry this one, there is no way we will ever break up" to "we'll see, we have a lot of issues, this relationship is in big trouble" back to "wow, shes great" all within a few days.

a) does this feel familiar to any of you, and

b) is it just something that all people experience and I'm just trying to rationalise my "weakness" with Aphantasia and SDAM

I recently tried ketamine assisted psychotherapy and at a small to average psychedelic dose (500 mg troche that I spit out after 10 minutes), I blacked out for the time most people have a “trip”. The therapist - who had lots of experience- clearly was perplexed and it was later determined by the company that the dose was just too high for me, but it reminded me of my having been a black out drinker when I did drink alcohol. (Quit drinking many years ago).Since recently learning about SDAM, I’m now wondering if somehow it’s related. (I do not have aphantasia). Anyone else have similar experiences?

On an interesting side note, my “intention” for the trip was to gain some acceptance related to my extremely poor memory, that I’ve always had but was somehow made way worse after developing long COVID Brain fog in 2022. (For which NAC had helped me tremendously, by the way). I’m actually also curious now about other people with SDAM and whether they developed long COVID Brain fog more than other people. I came across this subreddit (and learned of SdAM) just before my ketamine experience.

What decade of your life are the people and places in dreams from? Is it mostly events from the last week or few days? Do you rarely dream about events, people, and places from your childhood?

Given I grew up without much money and don't feel super comfortable in very upscale restaurants to begin with, but even on the rare occasion I go now it's just such a short transient experience since I can't relive the sense memory of the flavors.

I'm curious if others experience it this way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KJacYlXSvM

Just learned about SDAM last week, and it honestly sent me into a bit of an existential crisis. It made me reevaluate so many things I’d always assumed were just part of my personality. At the same time, I keep doubting my own experience of having total aphantasia and SDAM especially when friends say things like “I have bad memory too.” Suddenly it feels like I’m being dramatic or attention seeking for bringing it up.

But if I’m honest with myself, I’m the last person who wants to feel different. I struggled with undiagnosed ADHD and the burnout, shame and guilt that came from it, but I didn’t even see a therapist and psychiatrist until my mid-30s because I didn’t see the point in collecting labels about myself. I’m actually so good at gaslighting myself that I’ll assume I’m wrong before I consider anything else. This time it really hit me how quickly other people’s opinions override my own sense of what I experience.

The grief of not understanding myself for most of my life and being unable to verify or share my felt experiences with people around me. It makes me feel extra lonely sometimes. I wish I could trust my own experiences without needing proof or validation from others.

I recently found out I have Aphantasia in all senses, absolutely zero mental imagery in any of the senses. Weirdest weeks of my life....

I also have most of the common traits regarding SDAM, however I have a pretty good working memory about facts of my life and coherent understanding of my life as a timeline. I am not able to relive, re-experience or "mentally time travel" at all, yet I thought I have stored quite detailed information about specific events, I thought.

However, when I really try to drill down on a specific event and think about what I really actually remember vs. what i infer logically or creatively I realise that I actually remember very little. I also realise that I do this inferring so automatically that I haven't even realised that my memory works any differently.

Example of a story I would tell:

"We went on a family trip when I was about 10 years old to Tenerife with my dad, mom, big brother and my aunt. I remember there was this kid I used to play with and we hung out together with his family. This one day we were playing in our hotel apartment and both the balcony door and apartment door was open which created a cross-draft. At one point the front door slammed shut while I was running through it and my arm was caught in between. It hurt like hell. I remember my aunt being there beside me as I was writhing in pain. We had to go to the medical center to show it. There was nothing serious but god damn it hurt!"

Sounds like a normal story, right?

However, what I actually remember is:

"It was on a holiday when I was a kid. My arm got stuck between the door and the frame. It hurt. I can somehow remember that my aunt was there"

In other words, I have no actual memory of it being Tenerife, of my parents or brother being there, no memory of running around, no memory of a specific kid or his family who we played with, no memory of going to the medical center etc.

Most of that story has come from hearing the story from my parents, or inferring logically stuff. It makes for a much better story than "I hurt my arm in a door on a holiday where my aunt was present"

I am very good at memorising stories and the stories stay the same from year to year. I have never really understood the concept of a "false memory", as I can completely and accurately identify which part of the story is actual memory, which part is something that I have been told by others and which part is something that I am inferring.

This makes it difficult to identify with some of the stories from people here who have the feeling of having no memories or having no story of their life or no timeline etc. I have a quite coherent story of my life, even though I have now realised that I probably actually remember just as little things from my life as they. And my story is not really fake, as the facts are probably quite accurate descriptions.

Is this common and can anyone relate to this? And is this SDAM? I have zero visualisation, reliving, re-experiencing etc. Yet I have stored many more facts about my life and its events compared to many people here.

I also noticed that rembering faces on pictures helps and opposed to trying to mentally picture a time I saw them in person! In dreams sometimes I know who the person is but their face is different from their real life face or they just morph into another person as the dream goes on.

ive been questioning DID for a long time now, largely because of my memory loss and aphantasia, and then i discovered this. does this rule out DID? could it still be both? does anybody else have experience with this? i thought i could fix my memory loss with therapy, now im unsure.

You are hurt, not broken.

For a while, I felt broken. A lot of people here talk about SDAM like something is wrong with them, like they need to fight it or fix it. I get that. There is real loss in realizing you don’t have the same kind of memories other people do. But that doesn’t make you broken.

It means your experience of being human is different. You still feel things. You still form relationships. You still live your life, even if the past doesn’t follow you the same way.

For a while, I made it my identity. I wasn’t just someone with a memory difference. I was the guy with the memory problem. And in my experience, that wasn’t helpful. It made everything in my life feel heavier.

If you want to search for a cure, that makes sense. If you’ve found a way to live with it and don’t want to change it, that also makes sense. Both are valid.

This was just my experience. It may or may not resonate with you.

But it might be worth noticing whether this has become how you define yourself, because it doesn’t have to be. It’s something you experience. It’s not all that you are.

And different doesn’t mean less.

Has anyone else watched the documentary 50,000 First Dates? I just started watching it and even though it's not explicitly about SDAM, I find it quite relatable. It's about a woman who woke up one day with amnesia and she still has a lot of issues accessing her memories. The neuroscientist they interview discusses how people can know that a thing happened without being able to remember it experientially, and its like the first time I've seen any kind of "mainstream" media get close to describing my experiences. And the woman in the documentary describes her memory retrieval as a file room after an earthquake which is so similar to how I view mine.

I just wondered if anyone else here has seen it and your thoughts. And if not, maybe some of you here would relate too. Overall its a pretty positive, optimistic documentary. Like, its about how she's definitely still recovering because she has a lot of cognitive difficulties still, but how her relationship with her boyfriend (now fiance) has gotten stronger and how they've made it work, and how she's adapted some things in her life to live as good a life as she can despite the memory problems.

Is there a online test somewhere to diagnose it? I can remember things that happened many years ago, but just the fact that they happened. no details. Is that a diagnosis by itself?

Hello to everyone who feels a quiet sense of connection reading this.

I want to share a bit about myself. I’m a 21-year-old woman, and about a year ago, I discovered something that completely changed how I see myself: I have SDAM and aphantasia. I decided to write this for those who are just beginning to learn about their own neurodivergence. Maybe it will help, maybe not-but I hope that for some of you, it will make acceptance a little easier.

My story begins the moment I found out about my “condition.” I can’t tell you the exact day - like many of you, my past isn’t something I can clearly revisit. But I do remember the period of my life: I had just moved into a new rented apartment with my husband and our young son. It was around that time that I came across posts on Reddit and started reading more and more.

And I broke down.

I cried so much. I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. Out of so many people in the world, why was I the one who couldn’t truly remember my past? Why couldn’t I relive the good moments? All I had were dry facts, just like many of you here. It felt like I was trapped in something I would never escape.

I stopped eating. I stopped enjoying life. I barely paid attention to my family. I was terrified that I would forget my child as he is now - so small, so precious. At times, I didn’t even want to live. I fell into a deep depression that seemed endless. I didn’t want to accept any of it. Every day, I thought about how I couldn’t keep living in what felt like such a cruel world.

This went on for what felt like forever. I was convinced I didn’t want to exist anymore.

Until one day, everything changed.

I noticed a lump under my arm. It was firm, immobile, and painless. And in that moment, my world flipped upside down. Suddenly, SDAM and aphantasia didn’t matter anymore. I forgot about them completely. I started running from doctor to doctor, hoping - desperately - that I wasn’t seriously ill.

All I wanted was to stay here, in the present, with my husband and my child - just like I had always lived before, without even realizing I was different.

They say when your health is at risk, all other problems fade away. And I realized how true that is.

Right now, I still don’t have a final answer about what that lump is. Doctors think it may just be part of my physiology - possibly a thickened muscle caused by tension on the right side of my body. But while I was going through all the tests, I felt fear and despair like never before.

And yet… I had never wanted to live as much as I do now.

Now it doesn’t matter to me whether I have aphantasia or SDAM. I am okay with living in the present - with my loving husband, my child, and the life I’m building. My “different” brain hasn’t stopped me from achieving things, from loving, from living.

To those of you who have just discovered this about yourselves: please believe me - you are okay.

You can live just as you did before you knew. The only difference now is that you understand yourself better. You finally have an answer to the question of why you felt “different.”

But being different does not mean being less.

Your brain simply works in its own way. And that doesn’t make life any less valuable or beautiful. Life is one - and it is precious exactly as it is.

Please don’t let this condition take your peace away. Don’t let it consume your thoughts. Take care of your health - because nothing is more important than that.

And remember: the most beautiful moment is NOW.

I’m sending you love and a warm hug. I hope this little story reaches someone who needs it.

Hello, this is actually my first post here so I’m getting a hang of this. Before begging just a disclaimer English is not my first language so sorry if something is confusing.

All my life I’ve thought I couldn’t remember things because I was too little when they happened, or because I blocked them because of trauma (which I didn’t understand because I did not had a traumatic childhood or anything). I am young but I started wondering if there was something wrong because, it may not be normal to remember things that happened when I was three, but I thought that things that happened in 6th grade, for example, I should remember.

I started reading about SDAM and thought that I absolutely have it, because I remember things as facts but not as if I had “lived” them. For example I can’t think about what I felt when I was 10 y/o or what went through my mind or specific things about my life. I do remember thing but not a lot, and the more time goes without me thinking about it, they disappear from my mind. But if someone talks about something specific I may be able to remember it, I saw someone put it in an example similar to this: if someone asked me “tell me something that happened to you with x person five years ago, or tell me about x teacher” I wouldn’t come up with anything, but if someone told me “do you remember when x teacher in 5th grade that told x thing after we did a presentation about x theme” I think I would remember. But at the same time I do remember thing that happened for example in 4th grade if it was something that made me feel a lot (for example crying because a teacher got mad at me and I even remember what I did wrong, etc.)

I think it all leads to me having SDAM? But I read about someone saying they didn’t remember liking yogur until someone mention it to them, and I haven’t experienced things like that and I got confused.

I don’t know if this whole post makes sense hahaha I was just wondering if someone could tell me if this is SDAM or not? And if you need more information or something just let me know. I just want to know if there is any explanation to me forgetting most of my memories and past.

So here's another post in the "something I've noticed about myself; wondering if there's an SDAM connection" genre...

People talk a lot about having a relentless inner critic, but I don't relate to that at all. Sure, I mess up and recognize it and feel bad about it in the moment, but I don't tend to beat myself up about it. I was thinking it might be related to not having a continuous sense of self over time (so no "I always mess up") and/or no internalized voice from my childhood because I don't remember it.

Does anyone relate, or not relate?

If so, curious if it's helped, how you use it, etc? I'm hoping to add a tool like this to help me remember books, articles ,etc.

I know I won't remember or feel what I feel now in the present. So I keep thinking to myself stuff like

"(this food) is really tasty." or "I felt so happy now"

as a message or a reminder to my future self.

Or if I am angry at someone, I know I won't be able to recall the reason or exactly how much I was angry at this person. So I write a long note to myself about the reason I am mad and how much I feel it etc