can abuse cause memory loss

The human brain during abuse

Being in an abusive situation is highly stressful to the human brain.  Abuse in and of itself is a dysfunctional style of relating.  Abusive relationships usually occur because the abuser learned to relate to others in an abusive style and is likely disconnected from themselves.  And, to endure the pain that abuse causes, the person being abused also needs to disconnect from their emotional and sometimes physical selves.  This need to disconnect helps us survive the abuse. However, it shuts down our sense of aliveness. 

Abuse is traumatic

Whenever we as humans are faced with dysfunctional or life-threatening situations (or situations that cause us to disconnect from our aliveness), we are experiencing trauma.  Our brains have automatic ways of responding to trauma and respond very quickly, whichever way will most likely help us survive the situation.  Those responses to trauma are fight, flight, freeze, flop, and fawn.  When the brain goes into survival mode with one of these responses, only the most imperative things that the body needs to survive to happen, all other things halt so that we can make it out in one piece.  We stop digesting, we have adrenaline surges if we need to move quickly, our heart rate increases, and we don’t usually feel hunger. Activity in the frontal lobes of our brains also changes, so that the way that we record memory is also different during a traumatic event.

Chronic abuse can cause us to store memories differently.

Traumatic events are often stored in the area of our brains that stores “short-term memory.”  Because brain functioning changes when we are in distress, it can seem like we aren’t storing things in our long-term memory, and that’s because we aren’t.  If we survive by “freezing,” we are actually dissociating to endure what is happening in the present moment.  If we survive by “fleeing,” we might move quickly to get away from the abusive situation literally.  Our brain operates with tunnel vision, paying attention to only what is necessary to ensure our survival.  And if abuse is chronic, that can impact our long-term memory. If we are constantly dissociating to survive, we won’t be present enough to record long-term memories.

But that doesn’t mean that we are suffering from memory loss. It isn’t until we are safe enough to process through a traumatic event that we can begin to recover things we might have needed to repress to survive.

With therapies like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, we can regain access to memories we may have repressed to survive abuse.  With Somatic Experiencing, we can learn ways to go back to traumatic events and slow everything down enough to feel what wasn’t safe enough to feel while the event was happening.