Authors: Dr. Abbie Maroño
Published: February 9, 2026
One of the most unsettling experiences for many people navigating mental health challenges is the sense that their memory has holes in it. They know something happened, or they know a period of their life existed, but details feel blurry, fragmented, or completely absent. This can create fear, self-doubt, and a quiet panic that something is wrong. People often ask whether their mind is hiding something from them, whether memories are buried somewhere waiting to resurface, or whether the forgetting itself means they are damaged.
In reality, memory loss in the context of stress and trauma is far more common, and far more purposeful, than most people realize.
Memory Is Not a Recording Device
The brain does not store experiences like a camera. Memory is constructed, not archived. It is shaped by attention, emotional intensity, physiological state, and meaning. When someone is calm and present, memory encoding tends to be richer and more coherent. When someone is overwhelmed, frightened, or emotionally overloaded, memory works very differently.
During high stress or trauma, the brain prioritizes survival over storytelling. The goal is to get through the moment, not to create a detailed narrative that can be recalled later. This means that experiences may be stored in fragments, sensations, emotional tones, or bodily states rather than as a clear sequence of events. When people later try to remember what happened, they may find gaps, distortions, or a sense of emptiness where memory should be.
This does not mean the experience did not occur. It means it was never encoded in the way people expect memory to work.
Trauma and the Myth of Repressed Memory
Popular culture often suggests that traumatic memories are repressed, buried deep in the unconscious, waiting to be recovered. This idea is compelling, but the scientific evidence supporting repression as a reliable memory mechanism is weak and highly contested. Research has not shown strong support for the idea that the brain routinely hides entire memories intact and inaccessible, only to release them later.
What the research does support is something more subtle and more protective. Under extreme stress, memory encoding can be disrupted. Rather than being repressed after the fact, certain details are never fully stored in the first place. The brain does not lock memories away, it simply does not prioritize their formation.
This distinction matters. It reduces fear and removes the expectation that forgotten memories must be recovered in order to heal. Many people worry that if they cannot remember, they cannot move forward. In reality, healing does not require full memory retrieval, it requires understanding how the mind adapted at the time.
Purposeful Forgetting and Cognitive Suppression
Forgetting is not always a failure of memory, in many cases, it is an active process. The brain has mechanisms that reduce access to information that is emotionally costly or destabilizing. This can happen through attentional avoidance, suppression, or reduced retrieval, especially when recalling the information would overwhelm the system.
This is sometimes referred to as motivated forgetting, it does not mean memories are erased. It means the brain limits access to them to preserve emotional stability. When life demands ongoing functioning, such as work, caregiving, or survival in unsafe environments, the mind may prioritize forward movement over reflection. Over time, this can lead to a sense of emotional amnesia, people may remember facts but feel disconnected from emotion, or remember emotions without clear context. Others may lose access to entire periods of life, not because those memories are hidden, but because the system learned that not thinking about them was the safest option available.
Under Chronic Stress
Chronic stress does not just affect mood, it affects cognition. Prolonged activation of the stress response can impair attention, working memory, and consolidation. When stress hormones remain elevated for long periods, the brain becomes less efficient at forming and retrieving memories. This can make people feel foggy, scattered, or unreliable in their recall. They may forget conversations, struggle to remember recent events, or feel as though their mind is always slightly out of reach. This is not laziness or decline. It is the cost of carrying too much for too long without recovery.
Emotional exhaustion compounds this effect. When emotional resources are depleted, the brain reduces non essential processing. Memory becomes narrower, more selective, and less accessible. Forgetting, in this context, is not a flaw, it is a sign that the system is overloaded.
In truth, memory loss often reflects how hard the brain worked to protect the person at the time, and not remembering does not mean not being affected. Emotional patterns, bodily responses, and relational habits often carry the imprint of past experiences even when explicit memory is limited.
Sometimes the most compassionate response to the question “Why can’t I remember?” is recognizing that the brain did exactly what it needed to do to survive. Mental health struggles do not mean the mind is broken, they often mean the mind has been carrying too much for too long. Forgetting can be part of that burden. Understanding this helps replace fear with context, and self blame with compassion.
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