Is it possible to heal if you are unable to remember traumatic events?
When it comes to trauma and PTSD, many people think that there are always vivid flashbacks, lots of painful memories, or disturbing images from the past. But for some people, trauma symptoms are linked to events that you have no clear memory of.
This might be the case if you were told that you were an unwanted pregnancy, if you suffered medical complications at the time of your birth, or if you grew up neglected or experienced abuse.
Even if you cannot consciously remember the distressing event, you can still feel the impact of it in your body and emotions. Maybe you flinch when you hear shouting, or your heart races when you go anywhere near a hospital, or you feel a sudden sense of dread even when you can’t explain why.
When you go through something traumatic, your brain doesn’t always record the event like a film that you can replay later. Instead, the experience often gets stored in your body with a strong emotional charge – fear, panic, shame, helplessness – but without the full context of what actually happened. This means you might carry all of the feelings of the trauma without being able to recall the time, place, or other details around it.
Trauma and the brain
You may have had a gut feeling that something just doesn’t feel right, even though you can’t explain why. It may be triggered by a person, place, sound, smell, texture, or taste.
It’s really helpful to know that traumatic stress can also physically affect your brain and impair brain structures involved with memory.
Large bursts of adrenaline stimulate areas like the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
In situations where trauma is ongoing, the functioning of the prefrontal cortex may be changed by continual stress hormones. This is the part of your brain that helps you to make sense of things rationally, as it involves your ability to think, reason, plan, and make decisions.
When your emotions and somatic (physical) experiences are very activated, it disrupts the functioning of the hippocampus (a part of your brain that’s responsible for your memory and learning), so it impairs your ability to recall all of the details or know the sequence or timing of events. You might only have bits of sensory information such as visual pictures, smells, sounds, or felt experiences.
And the Broca’s area in your brain (which supports your capacity for language) is also impacted, so it becomes much harder for you to speak about your experience and make sense of it, whether it’s immediately after the event or later on in life.
This is why trauma survivors may have gaps in their memory, hazy timelines, or only remember fragments of events.
And something else that is fascinating about memory, is that it isn’t like pressing “play” on a recording. Each time you remember something, your brain reconstructs the memory, blending the old fragments with whatever is going on in your present state of mind. So if you’re feeling anxious or sad, or safe and supported, your emotions can influence the way a memory resurfaces.
Your traumatic experiences are stored with emotional information that is cut off from context – so you may not actually know the circumstances or factors surrounding an event.
This is especially true for preverbal (when you were a baby before you had language) and nonverbal memories (stored in the body as physical sensations). What gets stored instead are the sensations you felt: fear, anxiety, panic, or uncomfortable physical sensations with no known cause.
As human beings we try to make sense of those early experiences and because the original experience is missing important details, we will tend to fill in the gaps as part of our basic need to have a beginning, middle, and end that makes sense. Our brain tries to piece things together, but what you fill in will almost always include new information that relates to your present state of mind, beliefs, experiences and environment.
Trying to drag up memories that the brain has tucked away for safety can really re-traumatise you, especially if you’re pressured to come up with details you can’t accurately access. This is why it’s so important to mention that making someone remember or recall events as the focus of therapy and healing their trauma can be very harmful.
Traumatic experiences are stored in both our implicit and explicit memory systems
Implicit memories (also known as preverbal memories) are deeply connected to your body’s autonomic nervous system responses, particularly the vagus nerve. They aren’t about facts and stories, but about sensations, emotions, and habits.
They involve your reptilian and limbic brain centres (a group of brain structures that regulate your smells, emotions, memories and autonomic behaviours such as heart rate, breathing, sweating, etc.) and specifically the amygdala (the part of your brain that processes emotions such as fear and anxiety).
Your body or non-verbal memories are formed when you are very young before language develops. They are unconscious and they are stored as bodily sensations, emotions, and motor patterns rather than verbal memories.
Traumatic experiences are often associated with strong implicit memories, which can show up as physical sensations, emotional reactions, or behavioural patterns. For example, you may suddenly feel a racing heart, nauseous, tensed up, or frozen when you hear or see something, or come across a specific object or place. You may not have a clear understanding of why it is happening now, or be able to connect that feeling to a specific memory, but your body has remembered something from the past.
Explicit memories are long-term memories that you can consciously describe and recall, like specific facts and the details of events, including the time and place.
Your explicit memories rely upon the hippocampus (a part of the brain that is essential for recalling past experiences, especially those related to places) and the Broca’s area (a language area of your brain that helps you to express yourself in words).
Some tasks that require the use of explicit memory include remembering important dates such as birthdays, and names and locations of different places.
Parts of a traumatic memory may be unclear or missing completely
Long-term stress and traumatic experiences can affect the way memories are stored and remembered. This means that parts of a traumatic memory may be unclear or missing completely, but fragments of images or intense and highly upsetting physical sensations can remain and be very vivid.
When it comes to memories of physical or sexual abuse, these are often stored in areas of the brain that are especially sensitive to stress hormones. Because of this, someone may feel very strong emotions or physical reactions, even if they struggle to put their experience into words.
Some people may have very clear, painful flashbacks (too much explicit memory) and others may not be able to consciously recall anything at all, but still feel anxious, unsafe, or triggered (trauma living mostly as implicit memory).
Neither response is “wrong” – it’s simply your brain’s survival system doing its best to protect you at the time.
So in conclusion yes – even if you struggle with gaps in your memory, you can absolutely heal. Healing is not about remembering the past perfectly, it’s about creating safety in the present.
With the right support, you can find ways to feel calmer, safer, and more whole again.
As a body-centred Psychotherapist I use Polyvagal therapy to work somatically with your body responses, alongside trauma-informed talking therapy to help you make sense of the feelings and patterns that show up in your life, without needing to speak in great detail about your trauma or trying to force forgotten memories to surface.
I will help you to recover your sense of safety, learn how to be resourced in the present, and gain awareness of your body’s responses to trauma, so that you are able to make informed choices and regain your sense of control in your life, now.
Please feel welcome to contact me for more information on how I can help you: www.caroline-king.co.uk