I talked in a previous video about what dissociation is and how it is losing contact with the present moment in some way. It’s not always the case that dissociation leads to amnesia, such as when one part fronts for a couple of hours and leaves the host alter with no memory of what happened. In fact, it’s possible to have no loss of memory of an event yet still be dissociated. Let me explain.
I’ve had many clients who have one alter who, if asked to, could recount in detail horrific, traumatic events and yet they are untouched by this. They don’t experience any of the emotions of the event and so they are very matter of fact in their recollections. It’s like it happened to someone else. The alter may, in fact, report that they were merely an observer and that another part of the system was the part who actually experienced the event. Sometimes, therapists can witness a client talk unemotionally about such an event and conclude, incorrectly, that the client can talk unemotionally about an event because they’ve processed the trauma. Nothing could be further from the truth. In these situations, there is almost certainly one or more alters who are carrying all those horrific feelings in their full intensity but they may go overlooked because the individual appears undistressed when talking about it.
If you have any members of your system who have memories of traumatic events without the emotions of the events, this is a sign of dissociation. It’s also a target for eventual healing later in your recovery journey, after you are fully prepared to deal with the memory in its full intensity.