Structural Personality Fragmentation Under The Weight Of Chronic Trauma.
The adaptive function of dissociation, personality parts and amnesia.
Dissociative disorders involve problems with memory, identity, emotion, perception, behavior and sense of self. Dissociative symptoms can potentially disrupt every area of mental functioning.
Examples of dissociative symptoms include the experience of detachment or feeling as if one is outside one’s body, and loss of memory or amnesia. Dissociative disorders are frequently associated with previous experience of trauma. — www.psychiatry.org
Two and a half years ago I was sitting in front of my psychotherapist of one year when he uttered the words “Amelie, what you have experienced is a dissociative fugue”. “A what?” I mumbled with raised eyebrows. I don’t recall his response, as was characteristic of my state of mind back then. I had it seemed, lost four months of my life to a severe episode of dissociation. Save for intermittent and brief moments that I recollect, for the most part I barely remember those 120 days.
What precipitated this losing of myself as it were, was the recent abrupt termination of my eleven year marriage to my University love — who had just 6 months prior, been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder…
