[] How does the brain repress memories and not let people remember entire parts of their lives?
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You have to remember (LOL) the body is a finely tuned machine wired for survival.
Memories are connections made in the brain. During a normal memory making experience, everything is running smoothly … all your chemical reactions are good, your synapses are firing normally etc.
In a trauma situation, your body is programmed to shut down unnecessary reactions and processes. Fight or flight and all that. Now, the way your brain processes information has changed.
Every time you access a memory, even the first time, it’s a highly subjective look at what happened. If you see a red car but you think to yourself that it’s a blue car and even say no red … the next time you might remember it as a blue car because a connection has been made in your brain about a blue car. The next time you access that memory, you’re pretty sure it was blue and the time after that… it WAS blue.
Now, add in chemicals the body throws at your brain to insure your survival during trauma. Your synapses are not functioning normally. The body doesn’t care about your feelings … it cares about survival. It doesn’t care that you need to remember bad things so you can report them. It cares that it got a fight or flight request and it’s flooded your brain with whatever it needed to survive the trauma.
Later, you might sense something with one of your senses that sparks a reaction in one of the connections that was made while your body had basically roofied you to carry out the task of survival. You struggle to make that connection stronger. Remember every memory is a copy of that same memory so even if it seems stronger … the quality actually degrades, just like a copy of a copy of a copy made on a copier. It may not be faulty … it might be close but it will never be exactly as it happened.
People who are depressed suffer from memory loss, probably because the brain’s anxiety response is constantly activated. Add in low-quality sleep and boom … hello forgetfulness, goodbye memories. Of course, they always talk about short-term memory loss as a depression symptom but I’m here to tell you it can cause the loss of old memories too. This is going to be the same response the brain gives you from a trauma … or something that was wonderful (because chemicals flood your brain when good things happen too).
It’s hard to accept that what we KNOW to be true probably isn’t exactly true. Our memories of good times … probably not exactly correct. Our memories of ordering lunch … probably not perfect. And that’s during every day autopilot living. Once you add in stress, anxiety, trauma and other people’s inputs (no matter how much or how little), your brain has made connections so fast and sometimes kind of in the background of our consciousness.
It’s also hard to accept that we’re not the masters of our destiny 24/7/365. Your body and brain especially makes decisions for you all the time, in order to give itself the best chances of survival. When we start fucking with it (chemically mostly) is when it gets confused and things go wonky. I’m not just talking drugs and booze … I’m talking about whatever your personal addiction is that gives you a thrill … food, sex, roller coasters LOL … whatever.
So basically, your body wants to survive, drugs you with chemicals it makes in our body and doesn’t care about non-essential synaptic connections we might find useful later on because it’s busy keeping us alive.
Edit: fat finger mistake
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