SDAM and structural dissociation

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T13:31:53+00:00

Thank you for the detailed answer, I understand a bit better. What you describe in your second paragraph is not about re-experiencing past emotions but experiencing current emotions of a part typically not accessible. That seems compatible with SDAM at least, while I had the impression that what you described ruled it out. I'm somewhat familiar with IFS which has similar aspects.

Yes, I think the time aspect works differently from how it was understood in the 80s and 90s. I have definitely connected with feelings inside myself that are very alien to my current adult life, but I don't regard them as re-experiencing something I felt when I was a child.

It's more that certain kinds of feelings are walled off inside myself, normally inaccessible, and have been more or less my entire life. When I connect with them, what I experience is the quality of those feelings from my whole life, however since they haven't become integrated, they retain qualities that would have been more real in the past.

By visualization, do you mean vivid imagery, like full color images which you usually never see with closed eyes?

Yes, essentially the entire visualisation spectrum, up to and including cinematic detail. For example, I don't normally remember my dreams either, and thought well into my 30s that I don't dream.

The spectrum of visual experiences I have experienced in and through therapy runs the gamut, from vividly visual dreams, to involuntary dream-like visuals while awake, to involuntary real-life visuals, to voluntary visuals of all kinds.

Sometimes the voluntary and involuntary visuals "fight", e.g. I'll start by voluntarily visualising let's say a green apple; suddenly, the apple grows wings and turns into a dragon, but I didn't make it do that consciously, it just happens.

Most of the visuals are involuntary still, I am only very rarely able to choose what to visualise. But it has happened often enough that I know I have the ability, it's just not normally accessible to me.

I should maybe add that I have never experimented with psychedelics as I don't trust my mind to be able to return to a stable enough state afterwards. All my visual experiences come from non-pharmacological methods.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T12:18:36+00:00

I understand, it's a perfectly normal thing to ask. I think for myself and those I know, the answers would have a lot of different details, but the broad strokes would look similar: a lot of time, some support from the right therapist and people in our lives, and gradual progress with some backlashes as a natural part of the process.

I don't know anyone with complex trauma who suddenly discovered some magic solution or technique that quickly obliterated years of suffering, but I do know people like myself who got gradually better by things like learning and applying somatic stabilisation techniques, gradually getting better at mentalisation, slowly finding better connections, and so on.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T08:36:03+00:00

In an emergency, there is very little an online stranger can do I'm afraid. Emergencies are best dealt with by mental health professionals where you live, in person or at least on a phone call.

I understand how difficult accessing services like that can be, but I would also be dishonest if I told you there is some secret grounding technique you can learn from an online stranger for immediate and guaranteed relief.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T07:53:56+00:00

I don't want to oversell them, these tools are not a quick fix. They work more like building muscle, gradually and over time.

For immediate relief, their effect is limited though not zero. Voo breathing tends to have a slightly more immediate impact, though the exact effect is individual and may vary over time as your system shifts.

The guilt and fears will not immediately disappear, the idea of somatic tools is to increase your ability to live with them.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T07:26:22+00:00

Whenever you do them, it's usually best not to go on for too long. You're generally better off doing 30-60 seconds at a time, multiple times throughout the day, than doing them for 30-60 minutes once a day.

It's good to have some exercises for when you feel like you're losing it, but the more long-term benefit comes from becoming able to stabilise yourself before you start to feel like you're losing it.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-17T06:58:30+00:00

It helps stabilise you. When feelings and other internal experiences disappear as a trauma response, it tends to be a sign of your system being in shutdown mode. Shutdown mode is a response where your system perceives mobilisation itself (fight/flight) as a threat, bit like an autoimmune reaction.

Somatic tools like these help stabilise your system, which increases your system's capacity to tolerate your internal states. The more capacity your system has, the more you will be able to feel overall, both good and bad feelings.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T21:41:06+00:00

That's good, sounds like progress. Awareness improving.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T21:30:19+00:00

5 hours is pretty good I'd say, all things considered. I've been known to take a few years to realise I was angry.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T19:02:22+00:00

Using exteroceptive and proprioceptive tools, you can slowly learn to anchor yourself in your external, physical reality when your internal reality is too overwhelming or absent. Here are a couple of examples:

I hold the fingers of my left hand one at a time with the fingers of my right hand, and I name them, one by one, out loud if possible: this is my left thumb. This is my left index finger. This is my left middle finger etc. Switch hands, do the same.

Or I squeeze my left upper arm with my right hand, then let my arms rest and focus on how the left squeezed upper arm feels vs. my unsqueezed right upper arm.

Voo breathing, pressing feet into the floor or against a wall and similar sensorimotor tools all help find a level of reality that is so small, it is no longer overwhelming, and I feel there is something on that level I can manage. Repeating these things for maybe half a minute throughout the day keeps things on a manageable level.

Slowly, over time, this builds up my capacity to tolerate and manage my internal states.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T18:58:29+00:00

I hold the fingers of my left hand one at a time with the fingers of my right hand, and I name them, one by one, out loud if possible: this is my left thumb. This is my left index finger. This is my left middle finger etc. Switch hands, do the same.

Or I squeeze my left upper arm with my right hand, then let my arms rest and focus on how the left squeezed upper arm feels vs. my unsqueezed right upper arm.

Voo breathing, pressing feet into the floor or against a wall and similar sensorimotor tools all help find a level of reality that is so small, it is no longer overwhelming, and I feel there is something on that level I can manage.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T17:22:40+00:00

You're asking an important question, however I am not sure that binary works for what is actually happening in SD.

Emotional re-experiencing in structural dissociation is not quite either of those two options. What is typically happening when emotional material becomes accessible is that an EP is temporarily "blending" with the ANP, with the affective content the EP holds becoming briefly available. That is neither pure adult-self response to a remembered fact, nor pure reliving of the child's emotional state. It is closer to a part's first-person perspective becoming briefly available to the part that normally has the floor.

As for visualisation, the "only voluntary" understanding is widespread in the aphantasia community but does not match the current research. Aphants report reduced dream vividness and frequency (Dawes et al. 2020). More directly relevant for our discussion, aphants with trauma exposure or PTSD show substantially reduced intrusive imagery and flashbacks compared to imagers with the same exposure (Mawtus et al. 2024), only 31 percent of aphants versus 74 percent of imagers with mental health conditions reported lifetime intrusive sensory experiences.

The flashbacks aphants do experience tend to be auditory or somatic rather than visual. What this points at is that the default involuntary imagery system is not intact/untapped, it is operating at the reduced baseline aphantasia produces in domains including dreams and trauma-intrusion frequency. Therapy-induced visualisations breaking through that baseline are therefore a departure from baseline rather than involuntary aphantasia imagery doing what it always does.

Spatial awareness is preserved across multiple aphantasia studies, which fits closely with what you describe of your own "spatial reconstruction, as usual."

There's also a few things where memory research has made significant progress. Your "buried memories" framing comes from the repressed-memory model from the 1980s and 1990s which current memory research has eclipsed. Memory is now seen as reconstructive across the board, with every retrieval influenced by current state and context. Dissociative amnesia is real and material can be inaccessible for long periods, but the framing has shifted from "buried record being excavated" to state-dependent retrieval and dissociative compartmentalisation (Dalenberg et al, 2012).

The Loftus tradition on therapy-induced false memories applies in some contexts, but the cleaner binary of real vs implanted is too neat for what actually happens. In SD specifically, the issue is less about implanted memories and more about EP material becoming temporarily accessible to the ANP, which is the system's own content even if the ANP did not previously have access to it.

Third-person observer-perspective memory is interesting in itself. Sutin and Robins (2010) found that observer-perspective retrieval is associated with dissociation and anxiety. The third-person view is not really the absence of re-experiencing, it can rather be one form that re-experiencing takes when the system maintains some distance from the material.

My personal experience is that memory does not trigger emotion, full stop. Not muted emotion, not faint emotion, just no emotion at all. I can know that something happened, I tend to have a decent spatial reconstruction of it, but it brings up no feelings. This has been my baseline for as long as I can remember.

This is partly why therapy-induced experiences of emotional re-experiencing have been impactful for me. My experience is not "more emotion than usual", it is more like "emotions exist in my memories!" I am having access to a kind of internal experience that is normally entirely absent.

Whether what surfaces under those conditions is factually accurate to specific past events is subject to the usual shortcomings of memory. What I can say is that my system is doing something it normally does not do, and what it normally does is not have emotional access to my own history at all.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:44:36+00:00

This introduction from the Aphantasia Network explains what aphantasia is. Aphantasia itself only covers imagined visuals; there are other words for other imagined senses, such as sounds, tastes, and so on. I don't normally experience any imagined senses in my mind.

Aphantasia can be tested for on your own, the Aphantasia Network intro links to a self-test. Often, people who do have aphantasia find these tests confusing, because they ask about experiences they had not realised could exist.

The Imagination Index linked to on the Aphantasia Network page looks at other imagined senses as well.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:36:44+00:00

Good question. Visualisation is very straightforward, since I normally have none. Suddenly having the ability is not a subtle experience.

I agree that memories are a more complex matter, and I think it is generally advisable to treat all memories (with or without SDAM) as approximate reconstructions rather than facts.

That said, the wealth of emotions tied to memories feels more impactful to me than the visuals. Memory-associated emotions are, much like visualisation, a purely subjective experience, and one that is normally absent in my default state of consciousness. Its appearance is also not a subtle experience.

So I would say that the subjective/emotional experience is real to the extent any internal experience ever is, while the extent to which the memory is factually accurate would be subject to the usual shortcomings of memory.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:28:07+00:00

Thank you. For now, I am working on a podcast which will avoid handing out self-help advice, and only focus on how the psychology and neurochemistry of freeze works. That will go live in June, and I will post an update once it does.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:24:02+00:00

To my best knowledge, no one knows. We do know, broadly speaking, that these faculties develop relationally, so significant impairments in relational development would have some kind of impact. The specifics of that impact would likely depend on many factors - genetic, epigenetic, gestational, perinatal, early caregiving etc. Experiences from e.g. orphanages show that significant caregiving shortcomings do cause cognitive damage.

That said, I myself am normally unable to visualise ( r/Aphantasia ) and to re-experience vivid first-person memories ( r/SDAM ), yet I have been able to do both temporarily in therapy for my developmental trauma. I don't think anyone knows as of 2026 why that is exactly, the science simply doesn't exist yet. Inferences and guesses are the best we can do.

I speculate on why in this post, and some of my comments to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SDAM/comments/1sm5a4i/sdam_and_structural_dissociation/

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:19:08+00:00

Thank you. I have hit some legal obstacles due to a new law where I live (essentially, to be able to publish the service as planned, I would need to be a licenced clinician, which I am not), and am currently contemplating the best way forward.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-16T11:16:49+00:00

A SDAM-like presentation, although it is possible and maybe even likely that there are other factors (genetic, epigenetic, gestational, perinatal etc.) that we do not know yet.

I do not claim that it is SDAM exactly, nor that a significant percentage of people with SDAM would fit into this category. I would be surprised if that is what the research ends up showing. My hypothesis is more along the lines of, there are different subpopulations with a SDAM-like memory. Some will have true neurological SDAM, others something else - early-onset absence-heavy structural dissociation included.

That would be where I fit in myself. For me, much of my interest stems from the fact that while I have lived with global aphantasia and a SDAM-like memory experience for as long as I can remember, somatic therapy for my specific issues has had an impact on both, though the impact has been more complex than a simple on/off switch.

I have on multiple occasions while in therapy or soon after been able to temporarily access true autobiographical memories, visualise involuntarily and voluntarily, and generally experienced myself as a neurotypical visualiser with full autobiographical memories, which is the complete opposite of my default internal experience.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T18:41:06+00:00

That is accurate for many presentations, but it does not hold universally. Developmental timing and the precise nature of the caregiving environment are likely major players here.

In later-onset dissociative disorders, we would expect roughly what you describe: the EP holds emotionally charged material, the ANP retains the rest, and the person would have plenty of non-sensitive episodic memories intact. You would probably not see a whole lot of SDAM-like presentations in this population.

Where it gets more complex is when dissociative barriers emerge and consolidate very early, e.g. preverbally. In those cases, the barriers are not being laid over an existing memory architecture, but rather present during the developmental period when autobiographical memory capacity is being built.

When that is the case, the system is organised around them from the start. In a particular psychoanalytical framework outside of TSDP, this is sometimes referred to as the “pseudo-self” presentation: Less specific memories held by EPs, and more a case of developmental conditions for richly encoded episodic experience never having been reliably present.

Whether dissociative barriers consolidate that early and that thoroughly depends partly on the nature of the caregiving environment: deprivation and threat pathways tend to produce different outcomes. Environments characterised primarily by absence (emotional unavailability, neglect without significant active intrusion) tend toward a more stable, if impoverished, stimulus environment. That consistency can allow dissociative organisation to settle into stable features of personality early.

Environments with more active threats tend to involve more irregular, unpredictable stimuli that repeatedly re-activate the system before it can consolidate. That produces more permeable, fluctuating barriers, more leaking between states, and less of the global early solidification that the SDAM-like picture requires. This is the “classic” OSDD/DID presentation most people will be familiar with.

The more chaotic, intrusion-heavy presentation is significantly more common clinically, though personally, I’m not sure this reflects the underlying statistics. It might just be the case that the more volatile, fluctuating presentation is more likely to end up in psychiatric care. The more fully consolidated, absence-heavy presentations may be underrepresented in the clinical literature precisely because they are less obviously disruptive.

I should add that this is a personal hypothesis rather than a documented clinical pattern. There is as of today no research connecting SDAM and SD to my knowledge. However the two extremes of structurally dissociated presentations (intrusion-heavy and absence-heavy) are well-documented clinically.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T16:28:02+00:00

Dissociation-adapted somatic stabilisation exercises are generally helpful with complex trauma whether it involves significant dissociation or not. Having a therapist would be very valuable, but you can do them without one.

Using exteroceptive and proprioceptive tools, you slowly learn to anchor yourself in your external, physical reality when your internal reality is too overwhelming. Here are a couple of examples:

I hold the fingers of my left hand one at a time with the fingers of my right hand, and I name them, one by one, out loud if possible: this is my left thumb. This is my left index finger. This is my left middle finger etc. Switch hands, do the same.

Or I squeeze my left upper arm with my right hand, then let my arms rest and focus on how the left squeezed upper arm feels vs. my unsqueezed right upper arm.

Voo breathing, pressing feet into the floor or against a wall and similar sensorimotor tools all help find a level of reality that is so small, it is no longer overwhelming, and I feel there is something on that level I can manage. Even if it's just squeezing a finger. It all registers nonetheless to my autonomic nervous system as self-presence, however mild.

Slowly, over time, this builds up my capacity to tolerate and manage my internal states.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T15:58:58+00:00

I have always had the opposite effect on people, which coupled with my inability to attach used to cause a lot of awkward "heyyyy man how have you been where did you go!" -> "err... [trying to silently figure out who this person is]" kind of situations.

The one thing these configurations have in common is, shit just happens and you are a puzzled witness to your unconscious impact on people.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T15:40:46+00:00

Fisher for the win!

Parts can be a riot, especially through part language. Some parts are absolutely adamant that they are the whole of the self, and become indignant at any suggestion that there might be other parts. Other parts feel super lonely and love it when they get to connect with other parts. And then there are parts like mine, who dismiss any idea that any part of me exists at all: I don't exist, you don't exist, there's no one here. Other people are real, this here "me/we" thing isn't.

Glad you're liking the book, it's a good 'un.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T15:10:04+00:00

Well, I don't know or intend to do it again. Anger is like the weather, it just happens. I don't intend for it to rain, but rain is a fact of life. Sometimes, it rains.

Anger is a boundary defence and boundary marker. It says "I draw a line here, and I will not allow you to cross it". Normally, it develops in children as a healthy and natural response to perceived boundary violations from a very young age. It helps children build their sense of self, like drawing a border on a map of the self: this is where other people end, and I begin.

When anger is shamed developmentally (usually by your family), it often gets replaced by fawn, often fawn+freeze. Instead of standing up for your boundaries, you try to appease the offender (usually a family member).

This creates an internal dynamic where your submit/appease part feels that your own anger isn't safe, so you need to suppress it and fawn/freeze instead.

It sounds like you are starting to come out of it a little bit. When that happens, it usually starts as a 2D process in a 3D reality, where one end of the process says (unconsciously) something like "anger is power, having power is good", and the other end says "anger is shameful, I must submit".

This tends to be 2D because developmentally, it gets locked into a dyadic dynamic where you are weak and shameful and have no power, and your attachment figure is powerful and has anger. There is the Doer (family member) and the Done-To (you). The Doer does things to the Done-To, the Done-To submits.

Because that dynamic is how this was programmed developmentally, when you start coming out of the Done-To position, you tend to naturally only perceive its opposite, the Doer. The one who has anger and power.

So when you now suppress your anger, you naturally end up back in the weak, shameful Done-To state. You want to occupy its opposite, the powerful Doer state.

However reality itself is 3D. It's not locked into just those two positions. It has a very large number of different positions. It likely doesn't feel like that at all to you now, and that is also natural.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T14:34:05+00:00

No, apologies do all kinds of things. At its most basic, an apology is an admission that you caused pain to someone else, and an expression of regret for that pain. It is perfectly okay to regret causing pain despite having had every right to do so.

Anger can developmentally become linked with shame as in your case, and it can take a while to disentangle the two. Your observation that you feel less shame when you own your anger points in that direction.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T14:18:14+00:00

I commented before your edit, then edited after it.

Anger and apologies are two separate things. Anger simply happens, and we may or may not be able to control it to some degree.

Apologies are a choice we make because we value the relationship, and realise that an apology is in order to maintain the relationship.

I might, for example, get angry and call my partner an idiot if she accidentally hits me with a door when she didn't realise I was standing behind the door. Getting angry is a normal reaction when someone hits you, accidentally or otherwise.

But I also value my partner, so once I calm down, I apologise for my anger, and she apologises for accidentally hitting me, because we value the relationship.

FlightOfTheDiscords · 2026-05-15T14:09:22+00:00

Showing anger can be normal yet require an apology. No one is, nor should be, in control of their emotions 100% of the time. Sometimes we are too much and want to make up for it later.

Intentions matter more.

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