When I was little I used to wonder what it would be like to have amnesia. I wondered how somebody could remember how to talk, how to eat, how to drive a car, but not know who they were. This went on until I was diagnosed with and began to understand Dissociative Identity Disorder and Complex PTSD.

I no longer need to wonder what amnesia is like because I realize I’ve been living with it for most of my life. As a child it sometimes got me into trouble. I would be advised of doing things I had no memory of doing, I would find myself in places and not know why I was there, and there would be blocks of time that would go missing. But when you grow up like this, you don’t recognize it as out of the ordinary, and when you see portrayals of amnesia on television, they are always seem as very distressing. I had no reason to believe what I was experiencing was anything out of the ordinary.

Our minds are extraordinary tools. For the most part, we all experience some amount of healthy amnesia; those rare individuals who can experience total recall can find it burdensome. The fact that we are able to relieve ourselves of the burden of hanging on to unnecessary memories and information makes our lives easier and makes it easier to access important information, it helps to keep our minds from being cluttered.

When I first came to understand my own amnesia, and to understand that with dissociative identity Disorder that I had been interacting with the world as more than one person, it was troubling. Therapists tried to help me by telling me that these ‘alters’, other aspects of myself, had formed to help me deal with traumatic events. But one day when I was looking through a box of old getting cards I found some things that hurt me. There were cards, addressed to me, from people whose weddings I had written music for, played at, people thanking me for my friendship, and I didn’t know who they were. I’ve had people tell me that I was known by a completely different name in a nearby city.

What I know today is that my childhood wonder about amnesia was perhaps naïvely prescient; I was curious about something that has been affecting me all along. And the interesting part with traumatic amnesia is that the memories aren’t really gone – they are just, to use computer lingo, in hidden folders, or inaccessible to certain users, or sometimes simply in the wrong folder.

When we have flashbacks, even if we don’t normally have access to those memories, something in our environment can trigger a link, open that folder, find that traumatic memory and hit “Run”, often with “repeat” enabled.

I think the word “triggered” is often overused lately. We hear it for anything that upsets someone. For those of us with PTSD, it’s something more than simply upsetting. When we trivialize the word ‘trigger’, we also trivialize the idea of trigger and content warnings. These aren’t there simply to prevent somebody from feeling bad; they exist so that people will be able to continue to function.

There was a time some years ago when I was triggered by an article I read. It affected me for days. It affected my ability te work, to sleep, to drive… I could be driving and see not the road, but the living room of an apartment in 1977 in Dover, NH, and I was just as much there as I was behind the wheel of my car driving to work.

Fortunately, we do have told to deal with trauma. There are therapists who deal with trauma, there are therapies that are effective. Nothing, of course, can erase the trauma; that’s effectively what amnesia tried to do for some of us. But we can learn to live with it. And one of the most important things I’ve been finding is to have good relationships, and to find a way to live a fulfilling life.

Sometimes finding people who love and accept you, especially if that was lacking in childhood, can be a double-edged sword. When you find these people, you begin to understand what you were missing. And it can hurt. Allot. But it matters so much. And it’s healing like nothing else can be. And healing is the point.

The best to of all, along with therapy, is to fill our present with good memories. They may not replace the bad ones, but perhaps we can overcome the bad ones with both quality and quantity.