[] How does the brain repress memories and not let people remember entire parts of their lives?
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Just to make clear “repressed memories” isn’t a medically sound diagnosis. There are known issues related to people struggling with memories around a traumatic event or time.
The two more common issues are:
Denial- Something really traumatic happens and as a protective measure, your brain won’t allow a solid memory to form the way a pleasant memory would. Your brain is literally denying an event ever happened.
Diassociation- During a traumatic event your brain refuses to accept it/checks out. You kinda start experiencing the event like someone watching a movie, it’s not really happening to you. At it’s most extreme you can lose time all together and your understanding of what happened can differ extremely from the reality of it.
ETA:
The idea of “repressed memories” is hotly debated within professional circles, and people should be wary of “memory retrieval” therapies as they haven’t been proven 100% sound and false memories are a known phenomenon.
In disassociation and denial, your brain is still forming memories, they just don’t look 100% right. Sort of the difference between a photograph of something and a stick figure drawing you are trying to do with your non-dominant hand.
There are certain cameras that constantly record, much like your brain, however because of storage issues, it wipes if an event doesn’t occur in a certain amount of time. You basically remember certain events that for some reason you found notable, and forgot the other nonessential parts. There are select few who can remember everything but I can’t explain that one.
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Memories aren’t like video recordings that you can rewatch, with the file being exactly representative of what you recorded every time you open it.
A memory is more like 1000s of little Christmas lights that activate into a recognisable ‘image’ when you push the button.
Following that analogy, the brain can ‘disconnect’ the lights from the electricity so it doesn’t form the lightshow when you push the button. Or the brain didn’t write down how the lights were arranged at the time so it doesn’t know how to put them back together. Or it messed up the arrangement or wiring so it either looks like something else or only part of it lights up giving an incomplete image.
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I’ve never had a good memory and I’ve always been stressed that something happened to me when I was little that’s making me suppress all these memories. I don’t THINK that’s what happened and I have no reason to other than I just have a horrible memory. I have a pretty bad phobia that’s affected me most of my life, is it possible that could be a cause of my inability to remember my life a lot? Or possibly I just never focused enough to ever make a memory in the first place?
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It’d also be interesting to know why some traumatic events are forgotten/repressed but others burn with fiery detail many years later.
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Think of it like how the body works. If you get a splinter, your body will push it out. If you have something that can’t be pushed out, the body will calcify it, covering that object to protect itself from it and separate the object from the body. Your brain does that with trauma sometimes. It will push that memory out so you only really have an impression that it was ever there, or it will cover it and make it hazy/cloudy and feel like it’s not yours. Denial is pushing it out. Dissociation is covering it up and making it feel like it’s not yours.
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