A psychiatrist once told me it's normal for people to have no memories from the first five or more years of their lives. Do you have anything specific in mind? Amnesia? General difficulty forming memories and/or recalling them? Difficulty functioning in specific types of classes because you're not retaining information? Problems with dates? Vocabulary issues? People acting confused about you apparently missing bits of conversations you just had? Provably false recall of events where strong feelings were involved? Inability to retain instructions long enough to carry them out? Um, other?
I think you're probably right about the anxiety thing. The therapy thing doesn't seem too strange to me, in that if you were doing EMDR you were probably working with very emotionally charged material. Memories around very strong emotions are often kinda weird. You can get a seemingly random mixture of fuzziness and clarity. Let's see. Problems orienting memories and possibly self in time and possibly space? Feeling like your thinking is sluggish or unresponsive, or it's just too hard to brain? (Like fighting against a strong resistance.) Feeling like your thoughts are locking up or just skittering uselessly, or sometimes when you reach your mind just blanks? (Like your thoughts are going at normal or accelerated speed but you just can't grasp anything.) Trouble focusing, which you may be able to overcome if you find the material interesting enough? Short memory gaps that, if you even realize they're there, don't feel difficult to access so much as just completely missing? (Just to be clear, I'm not building up towards some amazing revelation here. Just attempting to mentally sort pretty much everything I have ever heard of that could possibly cause memory issues. There's just so much stuff. Anything I can give you will definitely not be conclusive, not the least because I'm not a doctor. Also there's just really a lot of stuff. Maybe it will turn up something useful. If not, maybe someone else will be able to jump in with better info.)
Okay! I'm gonna let this turn over for a little bit. And no problem, this is the kind of topic I find very interesting.
ADHD here too, and ditto. The multi-step direction thing, the retaining information that's not a topic of interest, the 'i was going to do something but i forgot', the thoughts being hard to grasp and the missing large pieces of conversations are all things that I have trouble with and that were specifically mentioned when I was being diagnosed. The forgetting words thing is also something I do (once I meant to say something about cauliflower; in my quest to find a workaround to illustrate my meaning I said 'green broccoli'. also, 'spider-end-bit' for 'abdomen'. it's fun lmfao), and it's probably not anything out of the ordinary unless it happens very often. Most of the people I know do it to some extent; I'm an outlier because it happens to me with almost everything i try to say that's longer than, idk, ten words? I gather that it's often associated with anxiety, too. As far as 'normal memory' goes, I have a very good long-term memory but a shit working memory. I've got multiple memories from younger than five years old, including one where I can't have been more than two years old - they tend to be flashes of visuals and movement, nothing detailed, but enough to get a picture of the scene. I don't remember my entire childhood, but the vast majority of it, and from about age six there are more and more detailed, longer-duration memories. I can also remember bits of information for a very long time if I manage to attach some sort of emotional investment to them in my mind. So my interests stick, as do things that get said to me that elicit an emotional reaction. I can remember almost verbatim some things that were said to me over a decade ago. I often hold unreasonable grudges because of them, tbh. On the other hand, you can ask me to do a thing and I'll have forgotten what you wanted in a minute or so. I went to the supermarket to buy a short list of five items the other day, and came back with fifteen items, only two of which were on the original list - and the thing I needed most, that was the reason I went to the supermarket in the first place, was not among them. It was toilet paper. I about died. (Talking to other people, I get the feeling that both of these are heading on toward extremes.)
I thought out loud about this at my best friend, who points out that it makes a huge difference if you've always had these issues, or if some or all of them began after a certain point in time or event. I have a few more questions. You of course don't have to answer any particular question, or any at all, but they're all potentially relevant to memory issues. Have you ever had a head injury, or hit your head and seen stars? Have you ever suffered from PTSD or had a very traumatic event or period of time in your life? Are you aware of any regular sleep problems? If you are not aware of any, do you experience symptoms of one you might not be aware of, such as consistently having trouble getting up in the morning and frequently feeling fatigued? Are you taking or quitting any medications? Do you have anxiety, depression, or other long-term mental or physical health condition that you know of?
not sure how helpful my anecdata may be given my various disorders, but: - I struggle a lot with orienting my memories in time and space, and often say "that was when I was like ten right" only to be told "no you were ten" and similar things. I use "yesterday" to mean anything from "yesterday" to "two weeks ago". I have extreme difficulty keeping track of time in any sense. - I experience the 'reach for thought, thought is gone' thing a lot. - I have extreme trouble focusing, very often, and while it can be slightly better if I'm interested in the material, it's not better by much. - I have trouble remembering how to do things if I'm not doing them often--like, easy things, like how to make coffee, I'll forget how to do it in about two months. more complex things, like programming, I'll forget how to do most of it in a few days. I can retain skills that rely on muscle-memory in theory, but it always takes me a bit to remember how to actually do the thing, as even if my body remembers how to do it, my mind doesn't seem to. (and sometimes the finer points still escape me--like, if you plopped me on a bike right now, something I haven't ridden in two years, I could definitely tell you how to start the bike! but I don't remember what the gears mean, how to switch them, or which brake mechanism does what.) - I struggle to do multi-step directions, but sometimes I struggle to do even one-step directions if they seem to be only one step but require more than one in actuality--like, "take the trash out", for instance. to most people it's one step....but for me, by the time I've gotten downstairs and grabbed a tie for the trash bag, I've already forgotten what I'm doing and what step two is. - I have issues remembering what I did yesterday, or even a few hours ago. sometimes I know the gist of what happened, but I can't remember it with any clarity. - I often completely miss parts of conversations, directions, etc. - sometimes I forget words. other times I have the word, but not its meaning. - I have difficulty pulling up memories and facts and stuff I've learned as well--short term or long term. sometimes I have specific triggers to certain memories that seem totally unrelated to the actual memory, like for some reason I just remembered that octopus have three hearts. why? who knows. - I can never be properly confident in my memory on anything. if someone tells me something happened a certain way but I remember it happening differently, suddenly I have Doubt. sometimes I remember facts wrongly, like thinking a certain thing is true and it's not. - I have difficulty remembering specifics about my childhood as well, have blank spots in areas of my childhood, and while some things from childhood come to mind pretty quickly because I've called them up a lot, others take a while to come to mind and I really have to push to remember them. - I also get the 'going into somewhere and now I don't know what I was going to do' and the 'there was something I was going to do today BUT WHAT' things - I also get "I know a thing happened but idk when" basically all the time and "I know a thing happened but idk details" sometimes. I have ADHD, depression, PTSD, and dissociate like all the time, so I can't really say what comes from what, but. yeah. ??? I hope this helped somehow
It occurs to me that that may have not been the most helpful way to phrase things. Perhaps instead, here is a list of things that I personally know can cause memory problems: head injuries, PTSD/traumatic experience, sleep disorders, medication, discontinuation of a medication, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, physical illness. If you would like more information about any or all of those, or would not like information about certain ones, I would be happy to do that. Other people have already mentioned learning disability affecting concentration. I could probably go on about that as well if you like, though I don't know how much I'd be adding? Also none of the above is totally a reasonable answer. I won't be offended if you'd rather not answer at all, either. Not trying to prod you into a conversation you'd rather not have. Just trying to make things easier in case I accidentally made it difficult. ^_^
hmm. so the thing is i.. didn't actually intend for this thread to be around diagnosing/figuing out my brain stuff, i was mainly curious about normal memory and what it is like because i dont have a bunch of experience with people in general and i can't really tell the difference between "this is a normal person thing to forget" and "this is not a normal person thing to forget". inspired by the good parents thread. bbbuut i was admittedly kinda vauge and then people didn't interpret the thread as i intended and i got embarrassed and didn't know how to redirect it, and was Avoiding Things so. idk. i should probably have worded stuff better in the OP but idk what to do now?
That's totally cool! I'm not qualified to diagnose anything anyway. And I don't know if I'm really able to describe what a normal memory is like either, because I'm pretty sure I don't have one. XD I'll just let it be unless you decide to resurrect the thread and I think I have something to contribute to the new direction.
