Concept of Time

1015 Views 5 Replies 3 Participants Last post by dakotajo, Dec 9, 2004

Matt210

Discussion Starter · Dec 9, 2004

Hey there,

Ive been suffering for about 4 months with "memory issues" (after a year and a half of Dp, and almost 3 years now of anxiety issues).

Although I know I do have memory problems (some severe such as I will walk across a room and not remember doing it. To explain this better.. I will do it and go.. oh my god did I just do that? In typical DP fashion.. then I will go... Okay, if I did it.. how did I do it? Where did I step.. did i lose my balance at all, did i walk around the left side of the room/ the right. All of a sudden i'll freak out and realize I dont remember anything about my walk across the room.. so those are the issues i have declared as memory issues)

What i'm posting about is the fact that I'm starting to feel I may have mislabeled a lot of my issues as "memory issues" when really it is a problem with my concept of time. I have NO idea when ANYTHING happened. My memory is (for the most part) intact. A comment like a "remember painting the house" "remember when I asked this, and you said this" .. "remember when the dog did this" ... of course I remember it.

Where I run into to trouble is with WHEN things happen. My memory completely jumbles things. I am able to put them into a basic time frame.. for example I don't think things that happened 3 years ago happened yesterday.. however basically today and 2 days before it seem to blend together. Then the next blending is the past 2 weeks before that.

If someone asks me "what did you do today", this is where I run into trouble. I panic a bit because my mind is blank and then memories start flooding back into my head.. but I have no idea if they are from today or the day before or yesterday. "What day did we do this" kills me.. i never have any clue.

As always with me it has become a complete obsession.. and memory that is brought up in my mind i desperately first try and remember exactly when it happened.. then I desperately try and remember what happened before and after it and so on so I am able to "piece together" the random puzzle pieces that make up my mind.

I actually sound somewhat calm now I think.. I am on tylenol 3's for mono and a bacterial throat infection which I'm sure has done both 1) calm me down and 2) depersonlized me more .. as well this sickness has given me way too much time to think and I feel my symptoms are getting worse.

I'm at the point where every day things stop making sense. The simplest comment that makes PERFECT sense seems out of place and I cant put my finger on why.

I don't really know if anyone will be able to relate to this symptom, but remember that a post with 30 replies of people saying "I can't really relate, but i think it sounds normal" and maybe a "here's why" is a lot more comforting than getting NOTHING. I sit here and overanalyze things like that too "oh my god, people think im just some crazy guy so they are completely ignoring my post because they are scared to tell me to go check into a mental hospital".

Any time I think im getting better I just relapse.. I know one day I can beat this, but I need your help one problem at a time.

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sebastian

· #3 · Dec 9, 2004

Matt,

I guess the question you should ask yourself is: Do you remember posting this thread? Are you coming back to this thread to check to see if there are replies? Because i suspect that this is the same thing as any other obsessive/compulsive anxiety disorder (or a derivation thereof), which convolutes perfectly logical temporal or spatial structures simply by the obsessive ruminations on them.

I mean, this sounds very similar to people who constantly forget if they turned off the stove or not, and so they check again and again. Logically,they know that they checked. But viscerally, they can't quite grasp that they did so. They need to feel like they checked. And it sounds the same with you.

Unless you're having blackouts and people are coming up to you saying, "Don't you remember when we did such and such...it was just yesterday..." and you can't recall what they're referring to (much like me on sunday mornings), i would think it was an anxiety case. If you also have dp along with this, it would just seem to support that theory.

You're just as crazy as the rest of us, don't worry...i mean, sane...just as sane. :wink:

s.

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sebastian

· #4 · Dec 9, 2004

I just reread your post there. You should also ask yourself whether, when people do ask you "What did you do today?" and you have to search furtively for the answer, whether your fear of having a fading memory isn't just triggering this miasma in your mind, and so the anxiety clouds your thinking in such a way that you can't come up with the answer right away...this perpetuates the fear, and so on ad infinitum.

The mind really is a wacky thing. The various obsessions that we dwell on are so individual it's amazing.

s.

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