When my daughter was doing IOP for opiates I attended family day every Saturday and learned quite a bit. The speakers were phenomenal. I know that it was stated that blackouts are short term memory loss. You know what you're doing while you're doing it you just don't retain the memory. This explains why sometimes later we can recall portions of the blackout. For instance, I knew when I got up in the morning if I had a blackout because my husband wasn't speaking to me. Then I'd tiptoe around for a while and then ask what I did. He'd give me a recant of the evening and things that I said and some of it would enter back into my brain. It was odd, like I was recalling portions of a movie but I had fallen asleep at different points.