Detached of one's Self (I)

We like to think that memory is our ultimate store - be it conscious or unconsciously activated. And when it comes to a self, we like to think we own this self, we have it mostly under control, it is us, it can never go away or do mad things. So how do things like "losing one's self", "self-detached", "my younger self", "my bad self" can happen? More, how can one feel locked outside of one's self, so detached that one can't possibly imagine how to get back in?
Sometimes a part of us might be severed from us to the point that we cannot even imagine how that part used to be us, how we used to behave when it was active. We might remember our younger selves and think of them as impersonators. We might have a recollection of what that self did, but we might not identify with it at all - be unable to imagine ourselves having those impulses or making the decisions of doing those things.
There are proofs of this happening to people in relationship to their bodies. Oliver Sacks describes in A Leg to Stand on how the experience of having a paralyzed leg involved losing an entire arsenal of phenomenology relating to having and using his leg in the past:
"The leg has vanished, taking its "place" with it. Thus there seemed no possibility of recovering it - and this irrespective of the pathology involved. Could memory help, where looking forward could not? No! The leg had vanished, taking its "past" away from it! I could no longer remember having a leg. I could no longer remember how I have ever walked and climbed. I felt inconceivably cut off from the person who had walked and run and climbed just five days before. There was only a "formal" continuity between us. "
I think of phenomenology as kind of a user interface through which one controls in a user-friendly manner all the muscle spindles, neuron action potentials and other things one has conscious access to. If such a detachment, such a cut can occur between the "main" self and one's physical body, including one's entire phenomenology pertaining to it; maybe a similar mechanism applies to the cases when one feels cut off from psychological parts of one's self.
We build and change our persona throughout our life. The characteristics pertaining to our self must be encoded in a variety of neural networks. So what keeps the entire machinery of the self together? Is there an index-like network? A loop that activates most important personal characteristics when booting up the system? (when waking up) How do we know when we lost something from the chain of networks? Do we even notice a difference?
There must be incremental differences, as well as definite important moments which imply us making a choice about our life, which reflects back on a choice of whom we will be next.
We tend to identify with who we are in the present - the neural networks connected to our current workspace. We mostly have memories about who we've been and how that felt like. We try to keep in line, achieve a continuity with certain aspects of ourselves (be true to ourselves), and run away like mad from others, that we don't like or consider "an experimental mistake".
One could argue that we get to know whom we are and whom we like being through interaction with our environment, through instantiating various aspects of ourselves.
An informational overload would happen if we would have more than a certain number of characteristics readily available, preloaded in our accessible personality space. In the same time, we base our social interactions on people holding responsibility to who they are, and trying to
keep a personality as coherent as possible.
Of course, personalities are not always that coherent. As good news we have some knowledge about where personality might be neurologically influenced in one's brain. But on those on a future post.