Question:
Two months ago I was in a car accident where I sustained what is refered to as a Mild Brain Injury. What they mean by that is that there is no obvious damage, no broken or fractured bones, no cut, etc., but there was enough injury to cause damage to brain cells and nerve transmissions.

The "normal" effects from this can be memory loss, cognative functioning problems, headaches, being very emotional, being short-tempered and stressing out easily, etc. Interestingly, dissociation is also a side-effect from a brain injury. Immediately after the accident I told my therapist that I felt "shattered" inside. I was not being able to communicate with the other parts and yet I would get fleeting feelings from others. It was like someone put us in a blender and we came out all mixed up. We decided that I needed to give my brain some time to heal and see what happened before I got too concerned. Maybe what I was experiencing was the dissociation associated with the brain injury.

Since then, things on a cognative level have gotten much better, and I have open communications with some parts, but I am still missing a whole lot of other parts. I can only find 6 out of about 2 dozen parts that were there before the accident.

I am working with a cognative therapist to get back the mental functioning. She knows a lot about brain injuries and what they do to the brain, but she doesn't know a lot about MPD. She has looked into her sources and has not been able to find anything in the literature as to what happens to someone who is MPD when they have had a head injury. My regular therapist is pretty much up on the current MPD literature, but she doesn't know a lot about brain injuries, and she can't find anything in the litereature from the MPD side as to what happens when you combine the two. Is there anyone in this group who has had any experience with any of this or who knows anything about it?

Answer: Dissociation is a sort of state-dependant learning with extreem amnesiac barriers. Sorry for sounding clinical here. For example, most people might "remember" grandmothers house through all kinds of "memory aides" eg: smell of baking cookies, a certain radio station she always had on, the smell of a certain scented candle, the texture of a particular fabric etc etc. If a brain injury causes them to loos their ability to remember "smells" then cookies and candles wont remind them of grandmother anymore, but they can still access the memory of grandmother through auditory reminders (eg: radio station) or sensory ones etc etc. But if the memory of grandmother's house is contained in one alter, and the amnesia barriers are still partially there (which they would have to be otherwise you would have already been integrated)... then you already are cut off from several possible memory routes. Maybe instead of 12 or 30 memory routes to "granmother" you have only 3 or 4 because the existance of the alter "bottlenecks" the possible routes. Hense, a brain injury impairing 2 memory routes is going to make remembering grandmother much more difficult if you have the alter vs. without. I know this might be simplified, and maybe more to our experiences since sensory issues were big for us, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what I mean, you can change the sensory memories for any kind of memory