The Gap

The Fog Gap Between Memory & Survival

There was a time, well over two+ decades ago now, when I became aware of the gap.

A gap. Ok, a rather wide one. In my memory.

A growing awareness that large parts of my childhood felt inaccessible to me. I knew my past had shaped me. I knew my nervous system carried something significant.

I knew my relationships reflected it.
My self-worth reflected it.
My hypervigilance reflected it.
My life reflected it.

Yet whenever I tried to look backward, I found fog.

There were memories, of course.
Fragments.
Scenes.
Moments in time.

But there were also entire stretches of childhood/teenage years that felt strangely out of reach. At the time, I didn’t understand why. The years directly after a significant emotional and traumatic event in my life were the memories were gone, and I knew it wasn’t a good thing.

How could I know I had been profoundly impacted by my childhood while simultaneously struggling to access so much of it?

I eventually brought those questions into therapy, where a trauma-informed therapist helped me understand and changed the way I viewed traumatic memories.

Trauma does not always disappear.
It fragments.

Let me explain,

When we experience chronic stress, emotional neglect, scapegoating, fear, criticism, unpredictability, or other overwhelming experiences, the brain is not focused on creating a perfect historical record.

It is focused on survival.
A nervous system isn’t asking: “How do I remember this thirty years from now?”
It’s asking: “How do I make it through today?”

So experiences that are overwhelming, too painful, too confusing, or too unsupported can become compartmentalized.

The memories don’t necessarily vanish.
They become disconnected.
The emotions may remain while the details fade.
The details may remain while the emotions disappear.

Sometimes, only a vague sense that something wasn’t right survives.
My memories were not lost; they were fragmented, protected, softened, and held at a distance.

Stored in a way that allowed me to continue functioning while carrying experiences that were undeniably psychologically fracturing.

Because we don’t get to pause life while trauma is happening.

We still have to go to school or work.
We still have to adapt
We still have to survive.

So the mind does what it can.

It separates what cannot yet be carried consciously from what is required to keep moving forward.

We suppress it, move on too quickly without resolving the emotional/somatic impact.

That is why traumatic memories stay hidden.

It isn’t because these experiences weren’t real.
And you aren’t making things up.

Please know, this is completely normal, and the protective brain/nervous system functions more than any conscious decision you made. This wasn’t presented as an option for you. It was decided for you.

But because the experiences were never fully processed, understood, witnessed, validated, or supported when they occurred.

The memories remained.
The story remained.
But the connections between the pieces became harder to access.

And then, over time, something began to happen.
The pieces started finding each other.

Not all at once. It’s a slow neural process of memory defragmenting.
There wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough moment where everything suddenly came rushing back. It was slow.

Painfully slow.

More like a gradual reopening of doors that had been closed for a very long time.
A memory.
A feeling.
A conversation.
A journal entry.
A pattern that suddenly made sense.

It was a slow, methodical, experiential reopening.
It was a gradual reconstruction of a story that had always been there.

A surprising part of that process was realizing that as my own memories became clearer, many of the family members around me seemed to have access to fewer and fewer of theirs.

I started understanding experiences that had shaped my life, I found myself sitting across from family members who genuinely seemed disconnected from those same events. Conversations that felt significant to me appeared insignificant to them.

Experiences that altered the course of my development were remembered as minor incidents or not remembered at all.

I’ll admit now, I believed then it was possibly intentional denial. Now I think something more complicated was happening. I’m certain of it. Trauma affects memory differently for different people. Every child occupies a different role within a family system.

The scapegoat experiences the family differently from the golden child.
The lost child experiences it differently from the hero. The child absorbing blame experiences the family differently from the child receiving protection.

Even siblings raised under the same roof can walk away carrying entirely different versions of reality. This is very normal for there to be two truths of very different lived experiences within the same household and parent relationship.

One remembers the criticism. Another remembers the vacations. One remembers fear. Another remembers belonging. One remembers surviving. Another remembers feeling safe.

Neither experience necessarily invalidates the other. Both can be true.
But they are not the same experience.

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If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well, I don’t remember much of my childhood either,” I’d encourage you to get curious.

Not alarmed.
Just curious.

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about trauma is that if something significant happened, they should remember all of it.

Unfortunately, the brain did not consult us before implementing its survival strategies.

Many people who experienced chronic emotional neglect, family dysfunction, bullying, scapegoating, emotional abuse, or relational trauma remember surprisingly little. Not simply because difficult things happened, but because nobody helped them process, understand, validate, or make sense of those experiences afterward.

In Therapy, I learned to ask myself:

“Why does my nervous system react as though something happened?”

For years, I didn’t find dramatic, pivotal memories. I was finding clues.

• Why did criticism hit me like a freight train?

• Why did I automatically assume problems were my fault?

• Why did I feel responsible for managing everyone else’s emotions?

• Why did certain family interactions leave me emotionally wrecked for days?

• Why did I struggle to trust my own perceptions?

• Why did my body seem to know things my conscious mind couldn’t fully explain?

Research on trauma consistently shows that experiences that are not processed, witnessed, validated, understood, or repaired don’t simply disappear.

They remain stored in the nervous system. They influence our relationship patterns, emotional reactions, and the beliefs we develop about ourselves.

So if parts of your childhood feel foggy, I wouldn’t immediately assume nothing happened.

I’d get curious.
What do you know?
What do you not know?
What stories were you told about your childhood?
Do those stories match how you actually felt?

Think about your younger self, what emotions show up first?

• Fear?

• Loneliness?

• Confusion?

• Responsibility?

• Shame?

• What happened when you were hurt?

• Who comforted you?

• Who helped you make sense of difficult experiences?

• Who repaired the relationship after the conflict?

• Who helped restore a sense of safety?

And if the answer is “nobody,”
Don’t rush past this.

Because, from an attachment and trauma perspective, that answer matters.
A lot.

The truth is, healing isn’t about recovering every memory. It’s about understanding why your nervous system adapted the way it did.

The memories may come, or they may not.
But the patterns are usually sitting right in front of us.

Quietly waiting for us to ask better questions.

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Thanks for reading!

Marie O,
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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