Did You Know Moments of High Stress Can Cause Missing Passages of Time?

Have you ever experienced inexplicable gaps in your memory? It’s perfectly normal to forget moments of your life during times of high anxiety.

Mental stress can cause some people to experience missing passages of time, a phenomenon known as dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia is a mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity. Dissociation can be a normal coping mechanism that helps people deal with overwhelming situations or emotions, such as trauma, abuse, violence or grief.

Dissociative amnesia can manifest in different ways, such as localized amnesia (forgetting a specific event or period of time), selective amnesia (forgetting certain details of an event or period of time), generalized amnesia (forgetting one’s entire life history) or systematized amnesia (forgetting a category of information, such as all memories related to a person or topic). Dissociative amnesia can also cause identity confusion or identity alteration, which involves losing or changing one’s sense of who they are.

Some real-life examples of dissociative amnesia are:

• A person who survived a car accident.
• A person who was abused as a child but has no memory of the abuse.
• A person who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and loses track of time when they are triggered by something that reminds them of their trauma, such as a smell, a sound, a word or a scene.
• A person who has time anxiety and becomes stressed about being late.

Dissociative amnesia can have negative consequences for one’s personal, social and professional life. It can impair one’s ability to form and maintain relationships, perform well at school or work, cope with stress and enjoy life. It can also increase the risk of developing other mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse or suicidal thoughts.

Tony Brindell suffers from dissociative amnesia. It was Mitchell Felding who used a threat of violence to push Tony’s stress levels beyond their limits — to prove a point.

My protagonist believes that he also suffers from dissociative amnesia. He’s forgotten something important and needs Tony to help him remember. Once this is achieved, Tony is made to listen to Mitchell Felding’s strange tale about murder, sex, thunderstorms, and missing passages of time.

Dissociative amnesia is a serious but treatable condition that affects some people who experience mental stress. By seeking professional help and following a treatment plan, one can recover from memory loss and regain control over one’s life.

-Michael (Author of SEETHINGS. Downloadable and free for a limited time)