Why Does Trauma Make You Forget? A Look at Memory, and the Brain’s Kindest Escape
I’m not a medical professional, just someone who cares deeply about the mind and all the ways it tries to protect us. Everything here is meant to offer comfort, perspective, and curiosity, not clinical advice. If your heart feels heavy or your thoughts are slipping into darker places, please reach out to someone trained to help. You deserve support, softness, and safety, and if you’re in immediate crisis, you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, anytime.
Sometimes you don’t forget because it wasn’t important, you forget because it was too much to carry.
The memory was sharp and blinding at the same time, while pieces of your soul shattered around you.
And so your brain…brilliant primal and deeply kind in its own strange way…folded it up and hid it away from you.
Not to erase it, but to keep you breathing.
After my severe trauma in 2021, something odd happened. The memories from that night were sharpened, but the final act was blurred. I lost weeks after as my mind did what it could to shield me from everything, but I still couldn’t remember Christmas that year besides throwing up in my sister’s bathroom after eating ham.
What Happens to the Brain During Trauma?
Trauma, of course, floods the brain with stress hormones, especially cortisol and adrenaline. In that state, your amygdala (the brain’s fear center) goes into hyperdrive, while the hippocampus (your memory-maker) shuts down.
It’s like trying to write a poem while someone screams fire in your face. Kinda hard to focus on anything beautiful while the loudness seems to be everywhere.
The strange result is fragmented memories, time distortions (minutes feel like hours…or vanish completely), gaps or blackouts, or sensory imprints without context (smells, sounds, body memories).
They call this dissociative amnesia, and it’s not rare, not at all. It’s protective, an evolutionary strategy our brains have picked up to try to hide us from the horror of life. Our brains are just trying to be more humane.
One of my doctors used the analogy that your brain is like a librarian during a thunderstorm. Books (memories) come flying off the shelves as the wind blows and the walls shave. The librarian has to choose between saving everything, or running for cover. They can’t do both at the same time, so picking is really the only way to go.
Trauma shuts down the full memory encoding process, so you might later remember a sound or a smell, but not the full scene.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means your brain was trying to preserve the person you still needed to be.
For me, that whole night was seared into my memory and I wrote everything down the day or two days later. Then, as the weeks went by, that final scene vanished from my mind. I would think back and try to see the details, but the bloody scene itself was oddly blank. I even would wonder if I had somehow made up the whole thing in my head somehow, and maybe he was still alive. I would still see it in my nightmares though, but whenever I was awake it would fade.
The Strange Return of Memory
Sometimes it does comes back in dreams or in fragments or even in therapy. EMDR helped to unlock some things for me, but after, honestly, I wish I had just left the blankness alone. For me, there were splatters that really messed with my head. One day I was just going to throw out the spaghetti sauce and suddenly my heart dropped and my stomach turned over.
And suddenly…there it was.
A flash or some sort of wave, and a moment I had buried in the basement of your mind would wake up again.
The interwebs says that this is known as delayed recall, and it’s not “making it up.”
It’s your nervous system finally feeling safe enough to peek and open the box just a tiny bit to check on whatever it was it threw in there.
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You Aren’t Broken
In those first months after my trauma I felt like I was shattered in every possible way. I would tell people my mind and spirit had broken and there was no way it would ever heal.
But, years later, I’m here to reassure you that memory gaps do not invalidate your pain.
You don’t need a full timeline to be believed or the horrible gory details to be legitimate. You aren’t unreliable and your brain is actually doing you a kindness that you deserve.
You’re a survivor.
Memory is a survival tool that we sculpted with the help of our parents, and sometimes, forgetting is how the body keeps going when it feels like it can’t carry the weight of everything anymore.
Not all forgetting is the same either.
Dissociative Amnesia is complete loss of memory surrounding a traumatic event. You could remember everything leading up to and after it, but the event itself is a blank slate.
Emotional Blocking is when you know what happened, but it feels fuzzy, distant, or unreal. The emotion is numb, like it happened to someone else.
Fragmented Recall is when only certain pieces surface…often in flashes or even body memories. You might remember the carpet pattern, the smell of bleach, the way a doorknob felt, but not the chronology or context.
Delayed Retrieval is when some trauma memories surface decades later. This isn’t false memory, it’s your brain choosing a safer time to reveal what it couldn’t handle back then.
It’s super easy to confuse trauma-related forgetting with other kinds of memory loss, but the root cause is emotional, not neurological.
Trauma-related memory disruption doesn’t follow logical timelines, can be situational, triggered by external cues, and/or often coexists with flashbulb memories (certain aspects are hyper-clear while others vanish).
Brain damage (from injury or illness) typically affects broader regions of memory, and is more consistent and static (it doesn’t “come and go”). This sort of thing can often be mapped by imaging like MRIs, whereas trauma cannot.
Knowing the difference is key to understanding why trauma survivors often doubt themselves. Their memory loss doesn’t behave in predictable ways, because trauma doesn’t either.
Children are especially vulnerable to trauma-linked amnesia.
Their brains are still forming…particularly the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, and they may not have the language to process or narrate the experience. If the abuser is a caregiver, the child’s mind will split reality just to survive.
These children sadly often grow up with strange fears, body flashbacks, or emotional responses they don’t understand, until, one day, the memory returns. And more often than not, it’s not the event they remember first, it’s the feeling.
Historical & Cultural Views
In ancient cultures, forgetting wasn’t seen as weakness, it was a kind of spiritual survival.
The Greeks believed in Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which allowed souls to cleanse before reincarnation.
In Indigenous traditions, stories were told communally, so if someone couldn’t remember, the village remembered for them. Carrying trauma is one of the most painful but rewarding way to share someone’s burden. One of my doctors told me trauma is like walking on thin ice, and it’s better to spread the weight around than stand upright on one foot. Having others help carry things makes it feel lighter.
Psychoanalysis introduced the concept of repression, not as failure, but as psychological necessity.
We forget because we’re wired to live, it has nothing to do with failure or our brains being glitchy.
Trauma makes you forget…and it also makes you remember too much. The internet calls this hyperthymesia or intrusive recall.
It’s why survivors can remember the scent of the room but not the event. Gunpowder and iodine for me.
A sound can sometimes send someone into panic, even without context and a survivor could say “I don’t remember what happened. But I remember what it felt like.”
While it feels like it could be, it’s actually not a contradiction.
It’s the fractured reality of living through something your brain wasn’t built to hold.
Meeting Your Own Gaps
If you’re ready to touch those memories again, these prompts may help.
“If my body could speak, it would say…”
“A smell I can’t explain makes me feel ________.”
“What I do remember clearly is…”
“I forgive myself for forgetting because…”
“If the memory never returns, what would healing still look like?”
Writing has helped me more than I could ever tell you, which is why I like to encourage others to write as much as I can. I asked ChatGPT about it once and it told me that even if I’m not writing about my trauma, the actual process of writing helps your brain. When you write, you’re moving experiences from the emotional centers of the brain into the language centers. You create structure where there was once chaos and order where there was overwhelm. Writing literally teaches your brain to make sense of the world again.
But, just a word of caution before you try this. I’d implore you to discuss it with a trained professional before attempting on your own. This is my own experience with trauma, but all of our experiences are different. Also, your brain might be hiding the worst from you for a reason.
You don’t have to find every missing piece to build a whole life.
Sensory Fidget Stone by MindPanda
A tactile grounding tool that helps bring focus during flashbacks or anxious spirals. Smooth, discreet, and deeply calming.
Anxiety Relief Coloring Book for Adults
Creative expression is one of the safest ways to reconnect with blocked memory. This gentle, art-driven practice helps lower cortisol and provide non-verbal access to emotion.
Your story doesn’t have to be told perfectly to be real.
Even if you can’t remember every word, every date, every hour, you can remember the truth:
It changed you.
And that is memory enough.
