[mdisraeli]

Disassociating doesn't always work like played out in films or TV, sadly. It's terrifying, and often find it hard to trust what's in front of you. Familiarity is needed, as it acts to ground you, and a key part of this is to feel safe on a number of different levels. Simply having photos alone may not be enough, unless those photos are something you regularly examine and experience.

Grounding is a common method of dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues. The idea of finding your place, finding familiarity, centring yourself. Something you are very used to doing normally and when safe is important, as is having that also associated very strongly with being safe.

For some people, photos will work well for this - they might capture moments with strong association with safety and happiness. Some people may be able to instead use an object, a talisman of sorts.

For others, or for when the disassociation is worse, a single grounding method may not be enough. It's about building the complete story - getting home and watching something familiar. The grounding only happens from weight of evidence.

Finally, there's something you don't hear talked about much. Coming back around from disassociating can be utterly terrifying in it's own right. Both as one tries to return, and after coming back. Having multiple entirely different means to ground helps with this.

[m_mueller]

Fascinating, thanks for your reply. I can imagine photos to not be enough. For me the association is strongest with scents and noises/music - this gets me back to a memory the fastest. I guess this is similar with this disorder?

What's hard for me to imagine is how this disorder works physically, at least with the primitive model I have on how the brain works. The synaptical connection are still there, otherwise the person would have a permanent memory loss, right? So my guess is it has to do with brain chemistry? If that's the case, couldn't it be medicated?

[pbz]

Everyone is different; scents, music, words, touch, observing the surroundings, listing the colors they see, focusing on breathing, holding a familiar object (like a rock), etc. can all be used -- whatever works.

You can use drugs to help with the symptoms, but you can't "fix" it with drugs. There's nothing physically wrong with a DID patient (although they do tend to suffer from various "side effects" that are linked with the disorder).

As far as how it works physically, we don't know for sure. Yes, the memories are stored and can later be accessed. Part of the problem is that these memories are stored without being processed or are "stored" with a part that is unable to make sense of what happened. So instead of dealing with what happened the patient relives the trauma over and over again. What's interesting is that one part can "share" a memory with another part. When this happens it's like "remembering" something you've never experienced.

[m_mueller]

Because I'm a computer engineer I naturally tend to look at the brain in terms of how computers work. I hope I'm not being disrespectful, but this thing sounds eerily like memory corruption. I mean like corrupted pointers that lead to a garbage addresses. If it's something like that I can well imagine why it's so difficult to deal with - after all you can't 'reinstall' a person's mind. Maybe in the future, if/when we get more precise model's of someone's thoughts, patients could be trained to not go to these corrupted places in their minds? Say, with some sort of neurological videogame that reassociates the paths towards these memories with something bad, and paths that branch off and don't lead to a corruption with something good? I'm most certainly a fish out of the water here, but I like to throw ideas around and keep sort of a childlike naivety about it, if you don't mind.

[pbz]

Like I said in a previous post, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like a kernel driver that monitors the currently running application. If it detects that the application would overheat the CPU it swaps it out to disk and runs another one that could handle the situation better. Now, this is a very bad analogy, but at least it should give you the sense that it is a coping mechanism, not a flaw. I'd suggest to avoid comparing the brain to a computer. That analogy would hold you back more than help you.

[mdisraeli]

For the record, I'm completely in agreement with "feature, not a bug". For myself and many people I know, mental health stuff makes more sense when looked at like that, and it also matches up with core concepts of Cogitative Behavioural Therapy. At some point your brain needed certain bits of code to survive, but unfortunately the brain can't be cleanly patched once those times have passed (which is also an awful analogy, but works enough for this).