What is your traumatic recovery experience? If it was physical, then yes, that can obviously injure your brain. But if you're talking about something mental, then no, that can not cause inflammation or physical harm. It certainly feels like it, though. I was in a tabloid with classmate Famous Actress when I had amnesia, forgot about it during a discussion when dozens of associations should have triggered that memory, freaked me out to the point of incapacitation, and ever since I've felt like Famous Actress is in a black hole in my brain, and may possibly try to eat me. Of course this is all nonsense, which is why I'm online looking for support, but my actual physical brain does not have a black hole. It does have a rotten feedback loop that is terrified of a girl whose face pops up everywhere, every day, so that sucks. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just think happy thoughts? I hope you're doing better than I am! Let me know if you have any more brain questions, I might be able to answer them, I have a PhD in the subject.

Amnesia is recent for me, a year. I had onslaught of serious drugs given by doctors for severe pinched nerve pain, then had 2 falls on concrete, with head impact.
Long term and short term amnesia. What is the hope? Future of my memory?
"Nobody knows" seems to be the answer.
I'd love to read or talk to people or explore my own brain functioning.
Linda M.

Hi there a246 (and everyone else). I wish I had discovered your question closer to the time you posted. I created an account just to write back! First, I am sorry to hear how you too have had to essentially renegotiate discovery of the world alone without memory, it is an astonishing undertaking and likely taken in the absence of medical support, which I personally found as astonishing as aggravating as that omission from care actually is.

I lost 36 years of memory approximately 8 years ago. I woke up without any personal history or identity of myself, family, friends or world. At this point, I put blame for the amnesia not for the scar sites or the "organic" neurotrauma, but to overuse of medical pharmacology while I was in coma and not in a position to object. I only know the experience amnesia is very real and you are right, there is little or no support for this (at least where I live in Europe).

It is very strange to be a fully cogent human being living in a society where a "handle" assigned to you is deemed by everyone to be your identity, when a handle is just a handle and is not who you actually are. I would likely break into writing pages of unmediated stream of consciousness accounts of experiencing life as a post amnesiac (i.e. direct access to original sensory memories formed since time of waking from coma, but still having access to emotional associations with events one cannot recall which took place prior to coma, which can be quite horrifying. Its like having had two lives in one from the first person perspective).

The only way I could navigate it was to essentially to practice shamatha, vipassana and sati on a constant basis, not for religious reasons, but because I needed to recondition myself to access direct sensory perception and to unlink associations and disassociations constantly being dredged up from whatever part of me still as those "original" memories (not that memories are "things" per se, more like psychophysical imprints?).

The mind is a skilled craftsperson at filling in gaps if you allow it to uncritically spout ad hoc/autocthonic interpretations of these memories into "meaning". The trick is to either personally acknowledge/admit when the mind is bullshitting history together (autonomic confabulation) and just drop that modality completely, or let it play out and allow what wants to arise to arise before assessing. I believe meditation is a good path to this because your are (a) in a sensorily secluded state of being thus lowering input from live "external" sensory streams and (b) developing attentional skills on a superfine level that helped me at least, to navigate this very peculiar and completely "gapful" pre-coma personal life. I would also vouch for yoga as I claim that the body remembers aspects that the mind does not. Sometimes body motion, tapping, unlocks intuitive emotional knowledge that can unlock the personal multimodal sensory memories somehow tucked away from direct access (hope that makes sense - there is not text book for this).

For what its worth, sometimes I actually regret getting memories back as it usually entails me having to reprocess entire milieus that had already been "sorted out" or "clearhoused" prior to the accident that led to the neurotrauma. Sorry to repeat, but I believe its important to note that my hypothesis is that while yes, amnesia can and does arise from natural cause, that the degree of amnesia that I have suffered was caused by pharmacology applied to me while I was in coma, and not solely a product of the injured parts of the brain (which at this point, I can more or less detect with peripheral attention before there is an "interrupt" from them).

Personally, I think we all have the right and socially need to authenticate the right to renunciate the past and start again as new, but automated western society and its screen time population just won't let you (email address, addresses, phone numbers, social service numbers, accounts, passports, insurance and so on and so on into so much unwanted noise!). Ok, I let out more there than I meant to!

Please let me know you are getting on a246, or anyone else who lives with amnesia, I would really appreciate understanding other peoples experiences of this. May you be safe, well, at your "here" and be happy a246, I thank you for posting and hope you've been keeping well.

I'm still searching (though not quite as urgently right now during spring emergence here in Wisconsin) for a person or people to talk with about this all-encompassing amnesia world I live in. My medical doctor suggested a psychiatrist -- which didn't alienate me, coming from a long ago background of psychology and education. I thought it might be a challenge and of interest to the MD. Meetings have been sporadic (and online only) and not very insightful. I do value so much talking regularly with a very close friend of many decades, who is a psychological counselor, and who offers some structure and direction to my search for meaning in all this, and compassion.
I am extraordinarily fortunate to be living (for 50 years) with a thoughtful, gentle, intelligent, outdoors loving partner, and we have switched gears many times, all with thought and all meaningful. So here we go again!

I must confess that I am afraid, often, though usually fairly brief. I often sleep when I need to drop out, but far more meaningful is to walk, which around here comes easiest in spring summer fall -- being that we live on a farm in the Driftless hills of Wisconsin, very snowy in winter. And community disappeared for a year, though everyone emerges now in the green world.

First diagnosis was Alzheimers, a year ago, 6 months after the drugs / blackout period / and falls with head impact. But the amnesia continued to sweep through my brain, and at the same time I continue complex reading, cooking, mapping trips. Just can't remember anything afterwards! Actually, that is not entirely true. I remember complex classical music often as soon as I hear it, often intimately, and music from many eras of jazz (all that we have listened to for 50 years).

I leave for a drive now, hauling some of our Devon cattle to an Amish farm in the hills. Many changes coming. Think I'll post this and continue another time. Thank you to those who are also posting ... your experiences and thoughts mean a great deal to me.