The APA statement continues with the claim that experienced clinical psychologists view the phenomenon of a recovered memory as being rare. In support of that claim, it notes that one experienced practitioner reporting having a recovered memory arise only once in 20 years of practice. Again, such a statement needs to be put in context: In my 40 years of practice as a psychiatrist, I received many referrals, from other psychiatrists as well as from family doctors, of patients with noted dissociative symptoms including alters. None of those referrals included a dissociative diagnosis despite their identification of dissociative symptoms!
Why would a referral that included dissociative symptoms fail to include a primary or even a secondary diagnosis of dissociation? I think that the referring physicians didn’t want to give such a diagnosis as there was no medication to prescribe for treatment. They didn’t want to run the risk of having a long term patient with a difficult prognosis. More importantly, they didn’t want, or they did not know how, to engage in proper psychotherapy.
As the article continues, it notes that memory researchers do not subject people to a traumatic event in order to test their memory of it. I understand that memory research usually takes place either in a laboratory or some everyday setting and harming participants is not part of any acceptable protocol. Further, DID arises when there is ongoing early childhood trauma, not just a one-time event. One time events can result in PTSD but I am unaware of any information indicating that one-time events can result in DID. So, how to research these questions?
While I cannot advise traumatizing animals as a test model, there are plenty of traumatized animals that can be examined. If you go to any animal shelter, you will likely find traumatized cats, dogs and birds that get triggered by certain input. In fact, many of them experienced trauma on an ongoing basis from infancy. One might do a behavioral analysis of those animals and extrapolate from there.
I am aware of a rescue dog that wouldn’t come out from under a bed for three weeks after he was adopted by a family. He gradually became a loving and positive addition to the household. Several years later, a grandparent visited. The dog had met this elderly man many times before without incident. But at this point in his life, something changed: the man now needed to use a cane to walk.
The moment the dog saw the old man with a cane, he ran under the bed and refused to come out while the man was there. One can assume with some confidence that somewhere the dog retained the memory of a man with a stick beating him. The cane triggered memories that overwhelmed memories of this specific grandparent he had been unafraid of until triggered by seeing the cane.
