Unlocking the vault: Why your brain hides certain memories.

Did you know your body can block out memories? Your brain plays a key role in protecting you from events that have happened in your life that might be too hard to deal with. Even though it can be healthy to cope with your trauma this way, your body can also disagree with you. There could be certain points in your life where you’re trying to search for memories that then feel too difficult to think about or searching for memories you can’t even recall. How does that happen? In this article I’ll explain all of that, so if you ever try to find lost memories you’ll know what’s going on.

Psychology Defense Mechanism

Your brain protects you by using mental strategies like denial, projection and repression. These strategies help shelter our minds from anxiety, stress, and unacceptable thoughts and feelings. The mind unconsciously blocks memories from overwhelming emotions and trauma creating gaps in conscious recall to maintain a psychological stability in our mind. Repression is how our unconscious buries painful memories, thoughts, or feelings, to prevent intense guilt, shame, or other harmful emotions. Blocking out memories that are traumatic and difficult to deal with can help protect you from immediate emotions, but it can also be negative because it forces your brain to continue to deal with your trauma unconsciously. Your body can still react to things you don’t remember. The negative effects can be chronic stress, unexplained panic, and emotional numbness.

Blocking out memories can also lead to a disruption of the brain’s ability to accurately think about events, leading to fragmented, incomplete, or inaccurate recollections of all memories, not just what is traumatic. You might not realize your unconscious blocking your memories, so a symptom of this can be intense anxiety and other negative feelings. Distortion can also happen, that’s when you remember bits and pieces of a memory, which sometimes aren’t accurate.

Cognitive and Neurological Factors

Memory loss can also come from mental health conditions like PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which all intensify emotions. These can lead to memory suppression and make memory fragmentation more likely. The primary driver of memory loss can still be self-preservation from unbearable emotional pain, anxiety, or distress caused by severe events like abuse or accidents, but a pre-existing condition can worsen the memory loss. Sometimes memory loss can be a symptom of these conditions, meaning these conditions can cause memory loss because the brain is working overtime.

Physical trauma to the brain, like a concussion, can also cause memory loss. With this you can have a hard time focusing on a task, or using your executive function to decide to do tasks, because your brain is trying to suppress memories, or is trying to piece together fragmented memories. Physical trauma can lead to reduced mental flexibility. It can affect the part of your brain that stores memories, your hippocampus, which is located in the prefrontal cortex, and make your ability to find or ‘trace’ memories weaker.

Help for Memory Loss

For some with memory loss, learning and understanding what your trauma is and finding a healthy way to deal with that trauma instead of shutting out the memories can be super helpful. For example if you’re dealing with a distortion of memories you can journal about it and uncover that. With others, it’s better not to try recovering any memories and just focus on feeling better emotionally. If you’re feeling lost with your memories and feelings, you can and should seek outside help and not deal with it alone! You can talk to a therapist, a friend or a parent if you’re comfortable. You should speak with someone you’re close with and trust if you are dealing with anything like memory loss.