I've been learning how to navigate it - for example "tell me about a time that..." is extremely difficult for me. But if I change the prompt to "think of a time when I was living at my grandparents house in the winter" or similar, I can begin to recall things, specificity is key. I also have difficulty when people are like "remember X time", and nothing will come up, and I'll have to ask further questions to try and trigger the memory, often when it triggers the whole thing can flood in.
I also find that my mind doesn't typically rehash old things, the mind isn't stewing in memories, it's usually in futurescapes or random thought lines on topics. I actually think this is one of the reasons for me not being able to pull it up quickly and needing specific ways to trigger the memory, it's like the memories are in cold storage.
Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) is that name for the condition.
Interviews I've read with exemplars who've been the means for researchers discovering that it exists (I think some are in the article's references?) puts them about one notch worse than I am, but most of what they describe rings extremely true.
In particular, remembering that things happened but having very little of what I gather are ordinary memories of the events, not having an idea of where those events fit into any kind of chronology without painstakingly working through some kind of dependency reasoning like "well we got X there and we had that at time Y so it must have been before that..." I'll be like that for stuff that happened last year, or ten years ago, but also last month, or even last week. Ask me when some notable thing I recently did happened and I'm likely not to be able to place it more precisely than "I think it was this quarter, at least? Maybe?" but even that I get wrong pretty often ("um, no, that was Spring of last year") Like I don't get that stuff wrong 100% of the time, but it's definitely most of the time. Maybe 80%, and often comically wrong.
As described by those interviewees, this has surprisingly little effect on, say, work or school life. I remember facts and processes and such just fine. Maybe better than most, even.
I've gone to therapy after it was suggested that this might be childhood trauma, but the therapist seems to be focusing on different things.
Can I ask what the disorder is (perhaps I'm misunderstanding and called autobiographical memory?), and how you found out that it is one?
I've had trouble falling asleep since I was a very young kid (mind racing with questions and thoughts, ruminating on times I've done things wrong which are the only events I've ever been able to form strong memories of—and as an adult, add anxiety to the mix) and wouldn't be surprised to find out it's a consequence of only getting enough sleep one or two nights a week for practically all of one's life. But, the cause could be something else entirely, I have no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Indivi...
Yes, there are of course medical cases and disorders. But I'd guess a lot of variance just comes from differing individual "training intensity".
There must be quite some variance in the average number of times that individual people are triggered/challenged to recall some memories (and process them) in their everyday lives. Some people don't communicate with others - generally, and also more specifically about what happens/happened in their life - as much as others do.
And some people are more inclined to subconsciously cultivate their own memories, than others. Those for example, who enjoy storytelling. Their mind probably creates stories (which apparently are an essential mental feature) around their memories more easily, which facilitates recalling these memories.
I also barely have what they call an "autobiographical memory"—I remember that things happened, but any kind of timeline and about 90% of the specific images or details a normal person recalls, I don't, as in, I can know "we went to the beach last Summer, it was at city X, we went to such-and-such attractions" but barely any of what normal people would call memories. What month was it? No clue. Specific memories of what happened? Not really, a few disconnected images and all I can do is fill in the rest with guesswork that often ends up being a smear of all the times I did anything similar.
But that part's always been the case. You'd think it'd make it hard to live life but I made it to almost 30 before I learned that wasn't normal, and learned somewhat later that it's an actual disorder of some kind that's just barely starting to be understood.
It does make "tell me about a time that..." questions in interviews absolute hell. I either have to take extensive notes all the time and then study them before interviews, or basically make something up. I cannot come up with that kind of thing on the spot, from my actual memory. And "write about what you did this Summer" was always the very hardest assignment all year, through grade school. Hated those. And now I know why! Hahaha.