edit: actually, not really. I wish I could forget tho

Same, and all the memories I do have of my childhood are all shitty.

cPTSD yay

Over the last 2 years I've started remembering my childhood! I have to say I was doing a pretty good job, because I remember that I was actively trying to suppress my memory.

Every person who leaves Alberta or Texas

you know, I'm not gonna do that unless I'm like prepared for the horrors. it's probably just like mundane horror, though, probably.

Mine is so bad I have multiple versions of myself that take control of me and speak in the back of my mind.

It's like I have the ability to time travel, but the kind where you only send your mind back and forward through time, like Steins; Gate rules. Except, it doesn't erase the mind it jumps into, but co-inhabits it. Like my boymoder self, jumps forward into me, their future self who discovered they were trans. (This is exaggerated and a bending of the truth. I could describe it in other ways, but I kinda just wanted to get an excuse to talk about that, because it's also a really cool story idea.) I'm a non-linear narrative.

Me too kind of, it's hard to quantify

I mean, I could think of it as different people, like most people like me seem to, but I fear in doing so it'd literally become so. I'm not sure I would like that, so I prefer to think of it as something like modes of the same person. Like brain electrical activity "waves" occupying the same medium, my frontal lobe, but doing so in distinct patterns at the same time, like electron orbitals.

the Western Plain

Maybe if you mask for long enough, the masks become real

eh, maayybe. I think they're more likely to stay masks in most people. They don't really feel like masks, but they don't feel like full people either, none of them, I do have behavior and elements of my personality that stays constant between them.

What I think it actually is, at least, I hypothesize, is caused by the same thing that causes lost memories, but on a much larger scale where so much of yourself is lost that you start to fragment into parts that stop making associations with other parts. That's why it's permanent once you reach the different people stage, because you have like partitioned your brain into these different states that struggle to interconnect well with each other, that can't recall the other parts of you, and start developing divergent personalities to work around the parts that they can't connect to. Also, your experiences stop affecting the whole cluster and start affecting the specific mode that is active more so than the ones that aren't, so that contributes to the drifting apart.

Also I think (despite having no knowledge of psychology and only myself to go off of, so don't agree with me) memories are lost because you dissociate while remembering them and that corrupts them, because whenever you remember something you kind of visualize / experience it again, but if you're out of it and don't re-live the experience when you access it, then it gets stored away as like a degraded version of itself with less clear details, and if you keep doing it, then all that's left are like the emotional reactions that seem to come from nowhere at all. I think that's also why in some people they distort into things totally different than what actually happened (I don't think you can create "false traumatic memories", though).

I think you're right, that makes a lot of sense

when you're dissociating your brain is kind of like in the "do not write information to disk, we're dealing with a threat that you can't escape, so remembering this isn't useful for your survival" state, so when you recall a memory when that's happening it fucks up at putting it back.

It really makes me wonder how bad the memories I forgot are if the ones I can remember are so bad.

Maybe not that bad. I forgot things that weren't that bad. I'm an expert at forgetting things.

Maybe some others feel similar... check out morethanone.info and pluralpedia.org − might be worth embracing as an identity

Despite how I described it, at worst it really feels more like a mental illness, that genuinely causes me problems and at best it's like a super advanced coping mechanism, and sometimes it really feels like I'm bullshititing people about it.

Although, it does have a weird connection with my gender I can't entirely explain.

memories are lost because you dissociate while remembering them and that corrupts them, because whenever you remember something you kind of visualize / experience it again, but if you're out of it and don't re-live the experience when you access it, then it gets stored away as like a degraded version of itself with less clear details, and if you keep doing it, then all that's left are like the emotional reactions that seem to come from nowhere at all.

This sounds plausible, although it might be more that the emotional reactions overtake the rest of the details in the memory as they're the only thing that gets recalled. It could also be that the brain just becomes less capable of retrieving certain details about the memory, effectively eliminating details from the memory by misfiling them as not a part of the memory. Those details might continue to have an effect on thought processes, but the brain no longer identifies where the details came from.

Then again, I don't know that much about cPTSD in particular, so this is mostly what I know about memory more generally. Psychology doesn't know how this sort of stuff works with any certainty. It also doesn't understand stuff like divergent personalities and plurality very well.

I don't think cPTSD is specifically people who dissociate. It's a bunch of different stuff.

I'm not denying the existence of dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) and if you find your condition causing serious difficulties, this is what you should seek treatment for.

Still, what you've said above about the gender conection is intriguing...

Nobody is gonna get this reference, are they?

I can remember the stress. Beyond that, nothing specific

I kinda have the same feeling. Brain threw out all the nice memories and is all like "damn, this event sucked, gotta make sure to never forget this"

So it goes

I don't know what you're talking about, I don't remember 45% of my life and my childhood was totally fine! I wasn't bullied for being a weirdo no sir

Correct, but issues with memory is one of the symptoms.

to delete memory, overwrite it with white noise

be careful with deleting structurally relevant memories though. you can fill in the hole with foam/wax until you get a better replacement. oil-based paraffine wax works best

i actually have the same thing, i've always felt like i got instruction from my future self when i was a teenager.

I have a span of about 4-5 years of my teenage years, that I have barely any memories of (tbf 2 of those years were covid). Its kind of worrying, but its not too bad to not remember very detail, since those years were absolutely fucking horrible.