Yes, I do. I don’t remember much of my childhood. I struggle to remember details of a lot of what I have experienced since.
This happens all the time… I’ll share some idea of something we should do together or I’ll say I’ve never seen a movie or gone to a certain restaurant and my wife will tell me about the time we did exactly that and I have no recollection of it at all.
And sometimes what I do remember experiencing feels like it was someone else. And I think that’s because in a way, it kind of was. One of the things about BPD is the way our personality can fragment… not so much into distinct personalities as it is with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but overlapping personas. At least in my experience, it’s like that.
I don’t think these personas have their own memories and individual personalities. The analogy I would use is someone with DID lives in a mental neighborhood with each personality having its own house, separate from the others. Some of the neighbors might know each other but most of them don’t. While people with BPD who have fragmented a personality is like living in a house where it’s all still one house, but each fragment or persona is a different room with a different purpose in that same house. The family knows each other but there is still some uniqueness to each.
I theorize that when I’m in my intellect fragment that does the heavy lifting for my processing and thinking, and I remember back to say something the protector fragment experienced, I know it was me that experienced yet it feels like it was someone else at the same time. Because that fragment was just unique enough that the perspective felt while in it is different than the perspective of the one remembering.