Dissociative Identity Disorder: Treatment Perspective - Part 4

What are fragmented traumatic memories in a dissociative identity disorder (DID) individual? A brief orientation of human memory may be appropriate, and in this respect, Peter Levine’s SIBAM dissociation model will be used to conceptualize memory fragmentation. 

SIBAM is the acronym for the coding of certain elements of our memory; namely, sensation, image, behaviour, affect and meaning. When we experience an event, our memory begins to code our completed exposure to the incident and is stored in the brain, and we can recall it in all its SIBAM-related perspective. That would be considered a normal memory, excluding old age lapses and mental recall pathologies. Under traumatic stress, elements of SIBAM memories become disconnected from each other. For example, after a disturbing event, a child may exhibit repetitive play (behaviour), but does not display any emotion (affect) or appear to remember the event (image). Or, while watching a TV programme, a lady may be triggered by a disturbing visual scene (image) and strong emotions connected with it (affect), but unable to make any sense of it (meaning). So, it is quite normal for a DID person to recall incidents but have vague or no memories whether they had experienced the events or are unable to feel anything about it. 

​How do our brains fragment memories? Individuals who report dissociative phenomena during traumatic incidents would describe their experiences like: 

It was as though I had left my body.

Time slowed down at the time.

I felt dead.

I could not feel any pain.

All I saw was the knife, nothing else mattered.

And after the traumatic event, perhaps weeks, months, or years later, the dissociated individual identified their experiences by numbing, flashbacks, partial or complete amnesia, out-of-the-body experiences, inability to feel emotion, unexplained irrational behaviours, emotional reactions that seemingly have no basis, or depersonalization.

An individual may be able to relate, for example, how their life was threatened by a gunman after witnessing a parent being shot by him, but seemingly showing no emotions speaking about it, or perhaps unable to recall what time of the day that event took place, or who else was present with him.

Reasons have been advanced for the coding of traumatic memories in the brain, but one of the most plausible being the minds inability to cope with the trauma and the extreme emotion engendered that probably caused an individual to fragment the pain from the event. Usually, the earliest dissociative tendencies are seen in young children who had been traumatized. With an underdeveloped cognitive capacity, a child is unable to process what is happening mentally, and the safest way to handle traumatic pain, for some children, is to separate the memory on the incident from the memory system. Once, he learns to do that successfully, any further stressful experiences would be handled similarly.

​Hence, it would not be unusual once fragmented memories have been reconnected, the individual will feel an overwhelming sense of emotion tied to the trauma incident. This inevitably will result in an outpouring of tears, and anger at times.