Episode 30.5: Memory, Interrupted (The Bonus Episode Where Michelle Talks About The Memory Loss Caused By Depression and Trauma)

You ever look back on the worst months of your life and realize they’re basically… missing? Like your brain just rage-quit mid-season and refused to film the episodes? That’s the thing about deep depression and trauma—they can turn your memory into a drunk intern who lost the filing cabinet, shredded half the files, and then went on vacation. Whole days vanish, conversations get replaced with static, and time turns into one long, blurry ‘previously on’ montage.

Today, we’re talking about why your brain sometimes acts like a shady narrator in your own life story—and why that missing footage isn’t you being broken, it’s your mind trying to keep you alive.

Email your questions and stories to [e-mail] be featured on a bonus episode

Join us on the O'Neil Counseling app here: ⁠https://www.oneilcounseling.com/app-landing-page

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You ever look back on the worst months of your life and realize
they're basically missing? Like your brain just rage quit
mid season and refused to film the episodes?
That's the thing about deep depression and trauma.
They can turn your memory into adrunk intern who lost the filing

(00:22):
cabinet, shredded half the files, and then went on
vacation. Whole days vanish, conversations
get replaced with static, and time turns into one long, blurry
previously on montage. Today we're talking about why

(00:44):
your brain sometimes act like a shady narrator in your own life
story, and why that missing footage isn't you being broken,
it's your mind trying to keep you alive.
Let's get into it. Deep depression and trauma can

(01:09):
scramble your memory in a way that feels like your brain's
hard drive is just forgot to save.
And it's not just the big cinematic moments that
disappear. It's the everyday stuff, too.
The text you swear you replied to but apparently never sent.

(01:29):
The lunch you apparently ate buthave 0 recollection of choosing,
preparing, or chewing. The week that somehow skipped
from Monday to Friday without asking for your permission,
leaving you wondering if you slept through a time warp.
This isn't you being careless, lazy, or bad with details.

(01:54):
It's your brain hitting survivalmode, rerouting all it's
available energy toward keeping you breathing upright and
minimally functional. The problem is, survival mode
isn't optimized for record keeping.
It's optimized for getting you through the day, which means

(02:16):
things like neatly filing your memories get shoved to the
bottom of the priority list, right under Find snacks and
don't completely lose it in public.
On this bonus episode, we're pulling back the curtain on
what's actually happening in your brain when depression and
trauma pull the plug on your memory.

(02:37):
We'll dig into the science, the way stress hormones, overactive
alarm systems, and foggy motivation can team up to short
circuit your ability to remember.
We'll talk about the real life ways this can show up,
everything from the frustratingly small gaps to the
unnerving wait was I Even there blackouts.

(03:01):
And most importantly, we'll talkabout what you can do about it.
Not to magically restore every lost moment, but to work with
your brain instead of beating yourself up for something it's
doing to protect you. Because if you've ever felt like
someone tore whole chapters out of your life story, you're not

(03:25):
imagining it. And you're definitely not alone.
Because I've been there too, andI'm happy to.
OK, well, maybe not exactly happy to, but I'm going to share
how this has affected my life. Your brain might have hit pause
on the scrapbook, but there's still a way to make sense of

(03:46):
what's left and even start filling in the pages again.
When you're in the thick of deepdepression or fresh off a
trauma. Your brain's stress symptom
systems cranked up like a smoke alarm with a dying battery.
Loud, relentless, and impossibleto ignore.

(04:07):
One of the first casualties? Your memory.
So let's get into the brain castof characters in your memory
drama. First up, the hippocampus,
otherwise known as the frazzled archivist.
Normally, this little structure in your temporal lobe is your

(04:28):
personal librarian, quietly filing away new experiences into
long term storage. But under chronic depression or
trauma, it gets cortisol burnout, shrinks in size, and
starts misplacing everything. Imagine a librarian who's been
awake for 72 hours filing books in random sections and

(04:52):
muttering. I'll fix it later.
Spoiler, it never gets fixed. Then we've got the amygdala,
otherwise known as the overdramatic alarm bell.
This is your brain's threat detector.
In a calm state, it's like a guard dog who only barks when
there's a reason. During trauma or depression,

(05:16):
it's more like a Chihuahua on triple espresso, constantly
sounding the alarm. That flood of emotion Yanks your
focus to danger signals instead of normal signal normal details,
which means fewer memories even make it to the archivist.

(05:36):
Then we've got the prefrontal cortex, otherwise known as the
overworked project manager. This part of your brain handles
working memory, decision making and keeping you on task, but
when stress is high it goes intoenergy conservation mode,

(05:58):
cutting non essential functions.It's the project manager who
walks out of the meeting halfwaythrough and says figure it out
yourselves. Without it, your short term
memory suffers and your attention gets spotty.
When these three start miscommunicating or stop talking

(06:19):
altogether, you get the perfect storm.
Fewer memories stored, more fragmented recall, and a whole
lot of wait. Did that actually happen, or did
I dream it? That's because you're
hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for encoding

(06:40):
and organizing memories, takes abeating under chronic stress.
Research shows that prolonged exposure to stress hormones,
especially cortisol, can actually shrink the hippocampus
and slow down the growth of new neurons.
Translation Your brains save file button starts moving in

(07:01):
slow motion like a filing cabinet where the drawers are
jammed, mislabeled and maybe also full of dead spiders.
Meanwhile, your amygdala, the brains emotional alarm bell,
gets louder and more reactive, hijacking attention and shoving
your focus toward threats, real or imagined, instead of everyday

(07:24):
details you might want to remember later.
Chronic stress keeps flooding your system with cortisol, which
disrupts the consolidation of memories.
It's like trying to write in a journal while the room's shaking
from an earthquake. You're too busy bracing yourself
to make anything legible. And on top of that, the

(07:46):
prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that handles working
memory and executive function, goes partially offline when
stress is high, leaving you withless capacity to focus and store
new information. Depression, FOG, trauma, hyper
vigilance both hijack your mental bandwidth so thoroughly

(08:07):
that there's barely any room to encode memories in the 1st
place. And when trauma is involved, the
memories you do manage to store often bypass the usual the usual
logical storyline route and get filed in more primitive sensory
driven systems. That's why you might be left

(08:29):
with random flashes of smell, sound, or body sensation without
the full context. It's less orderly scrapbook and
more shoebox of loose Polaroids someone spilled coffee on and
your brains just hoping you never have to organize them.

(08:51):
Living with depression or traumainduced memory loss is like
trying to watch your own life with half the footage missing
and the rest recorded on a shakycamcorder someone borrowed from
the 90s. The narration is spotty at best,
like it's been done by someone who only caught every 3rd

(09:12):
sentence, got distracted halfwaythrough, and occasionally
wandered out of the room. What you're left with is what I
like to call a Swiss cheese recall, except the holes are way
bigger than the solid bits. The stuff that does make it
through tends to be weirdly specific and often useless.

(09:34):
Like the way fluorescent lights hummed and flickered in a
waiting room, the bitter smell of burnt coffee lingering in a
break room, or the exact scratchy feel of your skin
sticking to a vinyl chair on a hot day.
But entire conversations, errands you definitely ran, even

(09:55):
whole weeks of your life wiped clean as though your brain took
one look and decided Nope, not worth the shelf space.
It's disorienting in the most everyday ways you can find
yourself arguing with your own mind.

(10:18):
I know I've replied to that text.
Or didn't I already tell that story, only to realize the
memory isn't just fuzzy, it's completely gone?
And the strangest part is how casual the brain is about it.
Like a board editor cutting scenes from a film without

(10:41):
caring whether the plot still makes sense.
You get snippets, fragments, sensory snapshots, but the
through line, the storyline thathelps you feel like you were
there for your own life, is missing in action.

(11:01):
Time itself starts to lose shape.
Days don't line up neatly, they smear together like wet ink on a
page. Weeks stretch endlessly, only to
collapse suddenly, leaving you blinking at the calendar and
wondering how the hell it's already next month.

(11:25):
It can feel like you've been trapped on the world's slowest
carousel, everything dragging incircles, or other times like
someone's been jabbing the Fast forward button without telling
you, skipping whole chunks of your life while you weren't
looking. And then there are the autopilot

(11:46):
gaps, which are somehow both convenient and terrifying.
The moments when you come back online mid task and realize your
body has been going through the motions without you.
You've driven halfway across town with no memory of the
streets in between. You've polished off an entire

(12:06):
meal and only vaguely remember the first bite.
You've nodded through it, a conversation, even laughed in
the right places, but later couldn't repeat a single word
that was said. It's like your body clocked in,
did the shift, and clocked out again while your brain snuck out

(12:29):
the back door for a smoke break in the alley.
The eerie part is how normal it can feel in the moment.
You only realize you've been running on empty after the fact.
Like waking up in the passenger seat and realizing you've been
the one driving the whole time. That's the unsettling reality of

(12:53):
depression and trauma on memory.Your life continues, but your
awareness only shows up for fragments, leaving you piercing
together things after the fact, like a detective at your own
crime scene. Trauma takes us a step further
by creating what I call spotlight memories.

(13:17):
These aren't just vivid, they'researed into your brain like a
tattoo. You never agreed to.
Every sight, every sound, every sensation is preserved in such
excruciating detail that just brushing against it can make you
flinch. You can smell the Cologne

(13:40):
someone was wearing, hear the exact tone of their voice, or
feel the texture of the carpet under your hands.
It's like your brain hit record during the worst possible moment
and then never, ever stopped replaying it.
The catch is that while those traumatic snapshots are clear,

(14:05):
the surrounding hours, days, or even whole years fade in the
static. Everything beyond the spotlight
vanishes into total darkness. Your personal timeline starts to
look less like a continuous filmand more like a patchwork of

(14:28):
intense flashbulb images with long stretches of nothing in
between. It's as if your brain decided
we'll keep the fire alarm going off forever, but toss the rest
of the house blueprints into theshredder.
And even when you can retrieve amemory, it's rarely instant or

(14:50):
convenient. The recall process feels like
trying to load a web page on ancient dial up, complete with
the screeching tones and endlessbuffering.
Your brain cheerfully reassures you we're working on it.
Maybe eventually, sometimes after you've stopped thinking

(15:13):
about it, the memory will finally pop up hours later,
usually while you're in the shower or trying to fall asleep.
Other times, the page just timesout entirely, leaving you
staring at the blank screen of your own mind where a piece of

(15:33):
your life should be. That unpredictable.
That, excuse me, that unpredictability can be madding.
You can remember what song was playing during a traumatic event
20 years ago, but not what you had for breakfast yesterday.

(15:53):
You can recall the way the air felt on your skin during a
specific moment of danger, but not whether you locked the door
this morning. Trauma memories don't just mess
with recall, they distort the balance, giving disproportionate
weight to the pain while erasingmundane, deep details that make

(16:17):
life feel cohesive and real. Depression and trauma both mess
with your memory, but they do itin two very different both both
equally frustrating flavors of chaos.
Depression is the generalized fog variety, where everything

(16:41):
gets stalled down to beige. It's the mental equivalent of
trying to take notes in a lecture you didn't even want to
attend, delivered by a professorwho sounds like they're
narrating white noise at 8:00 AMin a freezing classroom with
flickering fluorescent lights. Your motivation is already in
the gutter. Your attention span has been

(17:04):
replaced by static and your interest level is somewhere
below watching paint dry on a rainy day.
With all of that dialed down, your brain isn't even bothering
to hit record button most of thetime.
It's like someone muted the camera and wandered off.

(17:24):
Life just slides by without muchintention to save it.
And This is why so many people with depression look back on
certain months or even years andrealize there's very little
stored there. The memory gaps don't always
feel dramatic. It's more like looking back

(17:46):
through a photo album only to realize half the pages are
blank. Instead of colorful moments and
details, you just get a vague Gray haze.
The sense of I know I existed, but I can't tell you what I was
doing. The upside is that this fog is

(18:09):
often reversible. When the depression starts to
lift, so does the haze. It's like wiping down a fogged
up bathroom mirror after a hot shower.
Suddenly the outlines of your life start to sharpen.
Details come back into focus andyou can actually recognize
yourself again. Memories may not all return, but

(18:34):
new ones start sticking in a waythey couldn't when your brain
was in survival mode. Trauma.
Though? Trauma is sneakier.
It doesn't just blur everything out into one uniform haze.
Place favorites. Some moments get burned into

(18:56):
your brain in painfully sharp high definition, every sensory
detail so vivid it might as wellbe happening right now.
You can smell the air, feel the texture of the floor, hear the
exact tone of someone's voice. Those memories don't fade.

(19:17):
They hang around like neon signsyou never asked for flashing.
Remember Me at the worst possible time?
But then there's the flip side. Entire chunks of time that are
completely blacked out or scrambled.
It's like watching an old TV with rabbit ears catching a

(19:40):
flicker of the picture before itdissolves into static.
You might get flashes, half a conversation, a smell, a sound,
but not enough to make a coherent story.
That's your brain stepping in with its protection detail,
filtering out the pieces it thinks will overwhelm you and

(20:01):
locking them away until you're ready.
Of course, your brain is maddeningly vague about when
that magical ready date is. Spoiler.
It never sends you a calendar invite.
The problem with this system. Is that while it might keep you
afloat in the short term, those missing or jumbled chunks make

(20:26):
it so much harder to process what actually happened.
You're essentially working with an incomplete puzzle, some
pieces hyper detailed, others missing entirely, and a few from
a totally different box that don't seem to fit anywhere.
You know the picture is supposedto make sense, but your brain

(20:50):
has redacted whole junctions with a fat black sharpie.
So when some people say trauma makes you forget, it's not
apathy or carelessness. It's not I forgot because I
didn't care. It's more like I forgot because
my brain decided this is a file.This file is sealed in the

(21:13):
evidence locker until further notice and we're not opening it
without a hazmat suit, a fire extinguisher, and probably a
therapist with snacks. But long term trauma like years
of abuse, chronic neglect, or growing up in a high stress,

(21:35):
unsafe environment that works differently still.
It's not just one jarring event that your brain scrambles
around. It's living in a constant state
of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn with no real off switch.
Over time, your nervous system stops treating this as an

(21:59):
emergency and starts treating itas normal, like your internal
smoke alarm decides that blaring24/7 is just part of the decor,
this constant stress state reshapes your brain.

(22:20):
The hippocampus, the part responsible for memory storage,
stays under functioning, which means fewer experiences get
properly recorded and organized in the first place.
Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortexthat that helps you focus, plan,
and make decisions, that gets worn down too.

(22:43):
So even the memories that are stored can feel foggy,
fragmented, or stripped of context.
Instead of a few missing files, you end up with entire archives
that are spotty, distorted, or mislabeled in ways that don't
make sense later. The result?
You might look back on whole periods of your life and find

(23:06):
them emotionally thin. Like watching events through
frosted glass, the details are either fuzzy or absent, and the
memories you do have are often tangled up with the survival
responses you were locked in at the time.
Fear, hyper vigilance, people pleasing or emotional numbing.

(23:28):
It becomes nearly impossible to separate what actually happened
from the stress chemicals and the coping strategies that
framed it. This isn't just selective
forgetting or temporary fog, it's cumulative.
Long term trauma wires your brain to prioritize survival

(23:51):
over record keeping for years ata time, and shapes the way that
memories are formed, stored, andrecalled.
Even when you finally feel safer, your memory can still
feel untrustworthy because it was built under constant
cortisol pressure. It's not just missing chunks of

(24:12):
the story, it's like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle
where half the pieces are bent, cut wrong, or from a totally
different box and the picture onthe cover doesn't match what you
actually lived. And here's the kicker, people
with long term trauma often doubt their own experiences

(24:33):
because of this. Whether your recollections feel
hazy, muted, or disorganized, it's easy to gaslight yourself
into wondering if it really happened or if you're just
making it up. But the truth is, those
distortions are the trauma. They're not evidence against

(24:55):
you. They're evidence of what you
survived. This isn't you being flaky,
careless, or the human version of a lost phone charger.
It's your brain running a full scale survival protocol.
When you're in the thick of deepdepression or not navigating

(25:17):
trauma, your mind has one priority keep you alive and
functioning just enough to make it through the day.
It's not worried about whether you'll remember what you had for
lunch on Tuesday or if you'll beable to recall the details of a
conversation a week from now. It's focused on the basics.

(25:38):
Breathe, move, don't collapse. The thing is, memory takes
energy, and coding, storing and later retrieving an event isn't
passive. It's a resource heavy process
involving your hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and a finely

(26:00):
tuned balance of neurotransmitters.
And when you're depressed or traumatized, your brain simply
doesn't have the bandwidth to spare.
It's like being trapped in low power mode.
Your phone will still send texts, maybe check an e-mail or
two, but forget about running video, GPS and 10 apps all at

(26:21):
once. In survival mode, the brain
shuts down non essentials like making a polished highlight reel
of your life, and diverts that energy to keeping you standing
upright. That's why you can remember the
bare minimum, the essentials forsurvival, but everything else

(26:43):
gets hazy or goes missing. It's not laziness.
It's definitely not a personal failing.
It's your nervous system rationing resources the same way
you'd ration food and water in an emergency.
Spend them only where they matter the most in the moment.
So no, you're not broken. You're not forgetful in the

(27:07):
casual, scatterbrained way people mean when they say it.
You're a person whose brain has been forced to triage what
matters. And right now, survival beats
scrapbooking every single time. Think of it like being on a
sinking ship. You're not pausing to jot down

(27:28):
the precise Pantone shade of thewater for your scrapbook.
You're scanning for the life best, avoiding falling debris,
and praying you don't swallow too much seawater.
Recording events accurately getsbumped to the bottom of the
priority list because every available ounce of mental
bandwidth is being used to handle the immediate emotional

(27:52):
or physical overload. Now, biologically, when you're
under the weight of deep depression or trauma stress,
your brain starts reallocating its resources like a panic
manager in a crisis, grabbing coffee, yelling it in turns, and
shoving paperwork off the desk just to keep the lights on.

(28:13):
The hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for
taking daily experiences and converting them into neatly
filed long term memories, gets shoved to the sidelines.
Memory making isn't urgent, so it's put on the back burner.
Instead, the brain throws everything it has into survival

(28:34):
systems. At the amygdala, your threat
detection center climbs into thedriver's seat, revving like an
over caffeinated security guard who sees danger in every shadow.
Meanwhile, the hypothalamus flips on that HPA axis that's
short for hypothalamic pituitaryadrenal, the stress response

(28:56):
chain that tells your body, uh oh, crisis incoming.
And this unleashes a flood of cortisol and adrenaline into
your system, chemicals that are great for escaping predators but
absolute trash for calmly cataloguing the details of your
Tuesday afternoon. And once that cascade kicks in,

(29:18):
your whole Physiology shifts. Heart rate up, digestion down,
muscles primed, tension narrowed.
Your body is basically screamingRun, fight, hide, or please
someone until the danger passes.Not let's make sure we've record

(29:41):
this day in high def for future reminiscing.
In other words, survival takes the front seat and memory gets
tossed into the trunk. In this mode your brain isn't
prioritizing memory making, it'sprioritizing keeping you alive.

(30:02):
Think of it like your internal power grid.
During a blackout, the system shuts down everything non
essential so it can keep the emergency lights on.
It's not that your brain can't record memories, it's that it's
making an active trade off. Survival now details later, and

(30:23):
coding and organizing experiences takes energy, and
when you're in crisis, that energy gets rerouted toward
immediate safety. That's why your body doesn't
politely sit down to journal what's happening.
It flips into the one of the bigsurvival responses.
Instead of filing the moment away neatly in the hippocampus,

(30:46):
your brain fires up the amygdalaand the hypothalamus to manage
the threat. Blood pressure spikes.
Hormones flood your system. Muscle tightens.
Muscles tighten. Awareness narrows.
Everything you've got is pointedtoward not dying, not toward
building a tidy scrapbook you can flip through later.
And this is where the four FS come in.

(31:10):
Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Each one is a different
strategy. Your nervous system can deploy
under stress, and each comes with its own quirks when it
comes to memory. Some leave you with sharp,
painful fragments, others leave you with blank spaces where

(31:33):
whole scenes should be. Now fight is when your body
flips into fight mode. It's like your entire system
gets an adrenaline IV, Your heart rate spikes, blood
pressure rises, and your musclestense as if you're about to
Sprint into The Hunger Games. The amygdala.

(31:55):
The brain's alarm bell decides OK, gloves off, we're throwing
down and funnels all of your resources toward confrontation.
Your focus narrows toward the perceived threat with laser
precision and everything else, conversations, surroundings, and
even basic memory encoding dropsout of awareness.

(32:16):
It's not about preserving the details for later.
You're not thinking, wow, I'll really want to remember the
color of the wallpaper during this crisis.
You're thinking, how do I not get destroyed right now?
Your hippocampus, which would normally be filing away what's
happening, gets shoved into the backseat while your survival

(32:36):
systems take the wheel. Later, you may remember the
pounding in your chest or the exact words that trigger you,
but the rest of the scene often dissolves into the static.
Now flight is when your body basically screams, Nope, we're

(32:57):
out of here. Blood flow gets rerouted to your
legs and arms, priming you to run like you're auditioning for
the Olympics. Adrenaline surges through your
system, giving you bursts of speed and energy that aren't
meant for marathon training. They're meant for getting you
away from whatever your brain has labeled as a threat.

(33:18):
Tunnel vision kicks in hard. Your awareness shrinks down to
escape routes, exits in the sound of footsteps behind you.
In this state, anything not tieddirectly to survival becomes
irrelevant. You're not cataloguing faces,
dates, or conversations. You're locked on catalog,

(33:39):
calculating where's the nearest way out.
Meanwhile, your hippocampus, thepart of your brain that should
be making sense of the moment, is basically on lunch break,
muttering yeah, I'll catch up later.
The result? You might clearly remember the
door you bolted through, or the pounding of your feet on the

(34:00):
pavement, but the rest of the scene often vanishes into the
fog. Survival details stick.
Context doesn't now freeze is your nervous system slamming the
brakes. Heart rate drops, muscles lock

(34:21):
up, and it feels like someone hit the pause button on your
body without asking. Your brain narrows in on the
danger but doesn't push you toward action.
It's like your system is thinking if I stay really still,
maybe this will pass. This can feel like numbness,

(34:43):
dissociation, or being trapped in your own skin.
From a memory standpoint, freezeis a nightmare because you're in
shutdown mode. Your hippocampus barely logs
anything. What does slip through often
comes as disconnected fragments.Maybe a smell, a sound, or the

(35:07):
look on someone's face without the full storyline around it.
Later, it can feel like those memories don't belong to you,
like you watch them happen from outside your body.
Freeze keeps you safe in the moment by conserving energy and
avoiding detection, but it oftenleaves you with the patchiest,

(35:29):
most disjointed recall of all the responses.
And fawn is survival by appeasement.
Instead of fighting, running, orshutting down, your system goes.
Maybe if I keep them happy, I'llstay safe.

(35:51):
Your body floods with stress hormones, but instead of fueling
confrontation or escape, the energy gets channeled into
people blazing. You might even find yourself
agreeing, smoothing things over,saying what you think the other
person wants to hear, sometimes without even realizing you're
doing it. In fawn mode, your focus is on

(36:14):
the threats, mood, tone, or reaction, not on your own
thoughts or needs. Memory gets warped because your
hippocampus is too busy monitoring someone else's
signals to record what's happening inside of you.
Later, you may vividly remember their expression, their words,
or the way you felt braced to keep them calm, but your own

(36:36):
perspective in the moment gone. It's like your brain outsourced
awareness of yourself in order to survive the situation.
When fight flight freezer fawn stops being a temporary reaction
and becomes your baseline, your nervous system rewires itself to

(36:57):
treat high alert as the default setting.
Instead of dipping in and out ofsurvival mode like it's supposed
to, you end up living there fulltime like your body built a
permanent campsite in the middleof a battlefield.
This is especially common in situations of long term abuse,

(37:18):
chronic neglect, or years of growing up in an unpredictable,
unsafe environment. When the rules keep changing,
when danger feels random, or when safety never fully arrives,
your brain adapts by assuming threat is always just around the
corner. The smoke alarm never gets
turned off, it just becomes background noise.

(37:42):
Over time, this constant activation reshapes how your
mind and body function. Your stress hormones hover at a
simmer instead of spiking only in emergencies.
Your amygdala, the brains panic button, gets hypersensitive,
firing off alarms at even small triggers.

(38:02):
Meanwhile, your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex struggled to
keep up, meaning memory storage,decision making, and clear focus
all take a hit. You're not just bracing for the
occasional danger, you're livinglike danger is inevitable.
The result? Exhaustion, patchy memory, and a

(38:28):
life that feels like it's being lived in fragments instead of
flow. You adapt, you survive, but you
don't get the downtime needed toactually process your
experiences. Survival mode becomes the water
you swim in and eventually you forget what it feels like to

(38:49):
come up for air. Now let's talk about what
happens to your your delightful little brain hippocampus.
This seahorse shaped structure is like we talked about your
brains archivist in charge of turning daily experiences into

(39:12):
organized long term memories. But under chronic stress, it
gets hammered with cortisol overand over again, like someone
constantly yelling in its ear while it's trying to alphabetize
files. Over time, that constant
exposure literally shrinks its volume and slows down the birth

(39:34):
of new neurons, which means it'sfiling system goes from
efficient librarian to overwhelmed raccoon sorting
papers in the dark. The result?
Even neutral everyday events don't get recorded cleanly.
A random Tuesday might leave youwith only a few scattered

(39:55):
impressions. What you ate may be a sound you
heard, but the overall storylineis missing.
Instead of a continuous record, you end up with gaps.
Smudges and half filled pages. That's why whole swaths of time
can feel like they never even happened.

(40:17):
People will ask, remember what we did that summer?
And your brain responds with static because the hippocampus
never logged it in the first place.
And here's the kicker, the hippocampus is also involved in
giving memories a timeline. When it's under functioning, not
only do you forget things, you also lose the sense of when

(40:42):
something happened. Events blur together, months
collapse, and you're left feeling like your personal
history is out of order or missing whole chapters.
It's not that your life didn't happen, it's that your
hippocampus didn't have the resources to write it down
properly. Then we've got the amygdala.

(41:08):
And like we've talked about, if the hippocampus is your
archivist, the amygdala is your smoke alarm.
Its whole job is scanning for danger and screaming fire,
whether there's actual smoke or just burnt toast.
But under chronic depression or trauma, the amygdala doesn't
calm down after the threat pass it.

(41:29):
It gets hypersensitive. It starts firing its shadows,
convinced every Creek of the floorboard is an intruder.
That heightened vigilance pulls your attention toward threat
cues at the expense of everything else.
Then here's the kicker. The amygdala is really good at

(41:52):
emotional memory. That's why you might vividly
recall the fear you felt in a certain memory in a certain
moment, but have no memory of what day it was, who else was
there, or how the scene started or ended.
The alarm system encoded the feeling and tossed the context

(42:12):
out the window. So later you're stuck with the
raw emotional charge, panic, dread, anger, without the
narrative that helps it make sense.
It's like your brain saved the soundtrack of the horror movie
but forgot to record the actual plot.

(42:35):
And of course we've got to talk about the prefrontal cortex
because again, this is your brains project manager.
It handles planning, focus, working memory, and keeping
everyone else in line. But under prolonged stress, the
prefrontal cortex gets shoved out of the meeting room by the

(42:56):
amygdala and the HPA axis, whichis the stress response chain.
Instead of calmly weighing options and making rational
choices, the prefrontal cortex goes quiet, like a manager who
just walked out mid project and left the interns in charge.
Without the prefrontal cortex steering, your ability to

(43:18):
regulate emotions, prioritize tasks, and encode memories all
take a hit. You might find yourself
scattered, unable to concentrate, or forgetting
things almost immediately after they happen.
Working memory, the mental post it notes you rely on for
day-to-day functioning, fills upfast and falls off even faster.

(43:44):
Add trauma to the mix, and the prefrontal cortex can go nearly
offline, leaving you stuck in reactive mode.
That's why decisions feel impossible.
Focus evaporates, and your memory feels less like a filing
cabinet and more like a messy desk with paper sliding onto the
floor. Put them all together and you've

(44:08):
got a system that's operating like a very dysfunctional
workplace. The hippocampus, normally your
diligent archivist. It's too burned out to file
things properly. Half the folders are missing,
and the ones that does manage toshelf are crooked, mislabeled,
or shoved in the wrong drawer. Meanwhile, the amygdala has

(44:31):
taken over the office intercom, shrieking about every possible
threat like an overzealous security guard who thinks a
squeaky chair is a sign of imminent danger.
And the prefrontal cortex, the project manager who's supposed
to keep everything running smoothly.
It has basically walked out of the meeting and left the interns

(44:51):
in charge, leaving decision making and organization to fend
for themselves. The end result is a brain that's
fantastic at survival in the moment, reacting quickly,
keeping you on guard, making sure you don't get destroyed,
But terrible at preserving your lived experience in a way that
feels coherent or trustworthy. Instead of a neat timeline of

(45:15):
your life, you get scraps, fragments, and emotional
snapshots stitched together intosomething that often feels
incomplete, distorted, or unreliable over time.
This rewiring doesn't just mess with memory, it reshapes your

(45:37):
entire experience of reality. The past can feel hazy, patchy,
or disjointed, not because thosemoments weren't important, but
because your brain never had thebandwidth, downtime, or sense of
safety to record them in the first place.
It's like your mind kept hittingauto save in the middle of

(45:59):
chaos, leaving you with fragments instead of full
chapters. Think of it like trying to keep
a diary while standing in a war zone.
Sure, you might jot down a few words here and there, who was
there, what you felt like in themoment, a sharp sensory detail.

(46:20):
But the entries are out of order, written with shaky
handwriting, smudged with adrenaline, and often missing
entire sections. Later, when you flip back
through the pages, the diary doesn't read like a story.
It reads like scattered notes from someone trying to survive.

(46:40):
That's the reality of long term stress.
Your brain learns to prioritize immediacy over continuity.
You remember the door slamming, the tone of someone's voice, the
pit in your stomach. Because those details might mean
survival. But birthdays?

(47:03):
Milestones or even whole seasonsof your life blur into fog over
time. This can warp not only how you
remember the past, but how you experience the present.
If your nervous system has been wired to assume danger at all

(47:24):
times, you're not really living in your life.
You're scanning, bracing, and logging fragments while the
bigger picture slips away. And when you do finally look
back, it can feel less like remembering your own history and
more like piercing together someone else's puzzle.

(47:46):
With missing and mismatched pieces, the continuity that
makes a life story feel whole gets fractured, leaving you with
an uneven mix of hyper detailed moments and long stretches of
blank space. The frustrating part is later

(48:07):
doesn't always come because yourbrain makes this bargain with
itself. Survivor survival first,
memories later. But once the crisis has passed,
those missing pieces don't magically reappear like bonus
footage on a DVD. You might eventually feel safer,
more stable, and more present, but the moments that went

(48:29):
unrecorded under survival mode are often gone for good.
Or if they do exist somewhere, they're stored in a fragmented,
scrambled way that trying to retrieve them feels like
rummaging through a junk drawer blindfolded.
And every so often, you find something sharp and it hurts.

(48:55):
And those fragments aren't neutral.
Some come with a full sensory payload.
The smell, the sound, the heart racing, panic of the moment
without the context that makes them make sense.
So instead of playing back like a movie you can watch from start
to finish, your memory feels more like a handful of

(49:19):
disordered screenshots. A slam door here, a flash of
someone's face there. And every once in a while, one
of those screenshots just comes with an emotional sucker punch
that leaves you winded. That's why this isn't just
forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is misplacing your

(49:40):
keys or blanking on someone's name at a party.
This is your brain running a triage system, choosing in real
time to sacrifice accuracy and continuity in favor of sheer
survival. It's your nervous system leaning
back in its chair, exhaling through gritted teeth, and
saying we'll scrapbook later. Assuming there even is a later.

(50:06):
Right now, we're busy not dying.The kicker is, by the time
you're finally in a place where you could process those
memories, the files are already corrupted or locked in a
cabinet. Your brain refuses to open
without sirens going off, which means you're left not only with

(50:27):
missing time, but also with the unsettling sense that your own
history isn't fully yours to access.
That's not laziness, and it's not a character flaw.
It's biology making an impossible trade.
Long term trauma is like living in a smoke filled room where the

(50:50):
fire alarm never shuts off. At first the shrieking siren and
the haze of smoke are unbearable.
You jump at every sound. Your body is tense, your heart
races. But after a while you just
adapt. You start eating dinner to the

(51:12):
sound of the alarm. Sleep with it blaring in your
ear and carry on conversations while the smoke burns your eyes.
It becomes background noise, notbecause it's harmless, but
because your body has decided that functioning and chaos is
safer than shutting down completely.

(51:35):
The problem? While you're busy adjusting to
the noise and smoke, you stop paying attention to anything
else. You're not savoring a good meal,
remembering what someone said inpassing, or tucking away joyful
details for later. You're constantly scanning for

(51:55):
flames, checking exits, making sure the door isn't blocked.
Your brain, especially the hippocampus, amygdala, and
prefrontal cortex, gets rewired to focus only on survival cues.
The hippocampus, which should befiling away your memories, slows

(52:17):
down and misfiles entire chapters.
The amygdala, your built in alarm bell, becomes hyperactive
and won't let you relax long enough to store normal
experiences. And the prefrontal cortex, that
project manager of your brain, gets worn down to the point

(52:38):
where decision making and focus takes a nosedive.
That means the little stuff thatmakes a life story coherent.
The birthdays, the jokes, the random Wednesday afternoons.
They never even make it to the memory bank.

(52:58):
Instead, you're left with a running log of danger scans,
adrenaline spikes, and stress responses.
And when the smoke finally clears, if it ever does, you
look back and realize whole chunks of your life are missing.
Not because they weren't important, not because you

(53:21):
didn't care, but because your brain was too busy making sure
you didn't burn to the ground. What's left often feels like a
warped record, flashes of panic and vivid detail with long
stretches of static in between. The continuity that makes a

(53:42):
story feel whole gets lost in the haze, leaving you with
fragments of survival but not the full narrative of living.
And here's the thing, just because your brains been living
in that smoke filled room doesn't mean it's doomed to stay
there forever. The fire alarm can quiet down.

(54:04):
The smoke can clear. The nervous system is remarkably
elastic, which means it can learn new patterns when the
conditions are right. But here's the catch.
It doesn't happen by accident. Healing doesn't just show up 1
morning like a surprise Amazon delivery on your doorstep.

(54:28):
It happens slowly, intentionally, when you start
giving your brain the space and safety it needs to stop scanning
for danger every second and start noticing the small,
ordinary details of your life again.
That's where the real work begins.
And by work, I don't mean forcing yourself to recall every

(54:50):
blank space or trying to hammer missing memories into place.
That's not how this goes. Some of those chapters are gone
for good, and that's OK. The goal isn't perfect recall of
the past. The goal is to strengthen your
capacity to be present now so that today's memories don't slip

(55:13):
away too. It's about creating enough calm
in your system that the hippocampus can do its job
again, recording, organizing, and letting you hold on to new
experiences instead of constantly running on survival
mode. And there's another piece here.

(55:35):
Sometimes when the nervous system is supported, even old
fragments can be stitched together into something that
feels more coherent. No, it won't be a flawless movie
reel of your past, but with the right tools, therapy, and self
compassion, those scraps can become part of a larger story
you can understand and live with.

(55:59):
So that's where we're headed next.
Not a magic cure, but the practical tools and habits that
can help your brain record new memories more clearly.
That can give you back a sense of continuity.
Because you deserve more than survival notes scribbled in the
margins. You deserve to remember the

(56:20):
parts of your life worth holdingon to.
Now, if your brains decided to half ass the whole remembering
your life thing, the trick is tooutsource some of the work to
systems that don't get brain fog.
Think of it as hiring an external assistant, except this
one doesn't call in sick or accidentally delete your files.

(56:42):
External memory supports like journaling, voice memos, photos,
sticky notes, or setting alarms for literally everything can act
as your spare hippocampus, quietly keeping track of the
stuff your actual hippocampus yielded into the void.
The point isn't to turn your whole life into a conspiracy

(57:04):
theorist crime scene corkboard strings connecting every
reminder and post it like you'retrying to solve your own
disappearance. The point is to create a trail
of bread crumbs that future you can follow when your memory
decides to Nope out. That could look like flipping
back through a journal and realizing, oh right, that's when

(57:26):
that conversation happened. Or scrolling through your camera
roll and piercing together. That's the weekend I visited so
and so. It's not glamorous, but it's
functional. And honestly, giving your brain
this kind of backup system takesthe pressure off.

(57:47):
Instead of panicking about why you can't recall what you did
yesterday or beating yourself upfor forgetting, you can lean on
the receipts. It's less about perfect recall
and more about building scaffolding that helps you
reconstruct your days when your own internal filing system has
gone on strike. Future you will be grateful for

(58:09):
the trail of notes, reminders, and little digital bread crumbs.
Even if present, you rolls your eyes at how many alarms you had
to set to survive. Therapy can be a real game
changer here, especially approaches like EMDR which is
eye movement desensitization, desensitization and

(58:31):
reprocessing. Trauma focused CBT or somatic
work with these methods do is essentially help you pull
scattered memory fragments out of the mental junk drawer, the
one full of loose batteries, half broken pens and receipts
from 2014, and actually sort them into something resembling A

(58:55):
coherent timeline. With trauma, the memories
usually are there, but they're not filed in the normal places.
Instead of being stored neatly as narrative memories, this
happened, then that happened. They often end up lodged in

(59:15):
sensory fragments or body sensations.
That's why you might not be ableto recall the story of an event,
but you can feel the panic in your chest when you hear a
certain tone of voice or smell something that suddenly makes
you want to bolt. The memory isn't gone, it's just

(59:36):
been filed under random sensory chaos instead of Tuesday age 12.
Therapeutic approaches like EMDRwork by helping your brain
reprocess those stuck memories so they can move from raw,
sensory heavy sensory heavy fragments into integrated
narrative memories. It doesn't erase what happened,

(59:59):
but it takes the charge down a few notches.
Turning the mental bland mines into something you can walk past
without blowing up. Trauma focused CBT helps by
reframing the thoughts and beliefs that got tangled up with
those memories, reducing the grip they have on your
day-to-day life. Somatic therapies, on the other

(01:00:23):
hand, go straight to the body, working with the way trauma
often gets stored as muscle tension, posture, or nervous
system pattern. When you start to integrate
those memories, pulling them outof the sensory junk drawer and
into a cohesive story, the mental static they create begins

(01:00:45):
to quiet down. You stop being hijacked by
flashbacks or body responses youcan't explain, and instead gain
context. This happened, this is how it
affected me and this is how I carry it now.
It doesn't make the memories pretty, but it makes them
livable and that shift can be life changing.

(01:01:11):
Now on a day-to-day level, thinkof your brain like a muscle.
It needs steady, low impact exercise to stay functional.
When you've been through depression or trauma, the
instinct is often to either pushtoo hard and burn out, or give
up altogether. Why bother?
I'll just forget anyway. But memory, like muscle,

(01:01:36):
responds best to consistent, gentle training.
That's where small cognitive workouts come in.
Things like crosswords, word searches, Sudoku, or memory
games aren't just passing times,they're keeping your neural
pathways limber. Reading a book and challenging

(01:01:58):
yourself to recall the plot later.
Telling a story to a friend or learning something new, a skill,
a recipe, a song lyric can act like stretching for your brain.
You're not running marathons here, you're taking it for a
brisk walk around the block to remind it what it can do.
And here's the key. Even tiny wins matter.

(01:02:22):
Remembering a random fact you skimmed on your phone, recalling
the name of a character in a show, or realizing you did keep
track of where you left your keys.
All of that rebuilds confidence.Instead of assuming your memory
can't be trusted, you slowly collect proof that it's still in

(01:02:42):
there, still working, even if itneeds encouragement.
It's less about building a supercomputer brain and more
about reminding yourself that the system hasn't shut down
completely, it just needs gentlerebooting.
Over time, those little stretches and workouts add up,

(01:03:06):
just like physical rehab. You may not see dramatic results
overnight, but consistency helpsyour memory get stronger,
steadier, and more reliable. And then there's the most
underrated piece, lightening your stress load.

(01:03:27):
It sounds simple, but it's the foundation everything else rests
on. Take sleep, for example.
Your brain literally uses those hours to consolidate memories,
shuffling short term experiencesinto long term storage like a
night shift librarian. When you skimp on rest, it's

(01:03:48):
basically like leaving the library doors locked and the
books piled up in a heap. Nothing gets filed, nothing gets
saved, and you wake up with a mental backlog that just keeps
growing. Movement is another sneaky
player here. Not punishment style exercise
you hate, but movement that helps regulate your nervous

(01:04:12):
system. A walk, some stretches, dancing
in your kitchen, these all shiftyour body out of red alert mode
and remind your brain it's safe enough to spend energy on
something other than crisis management.
Think of it as shaking the snow globe so all the static settles.

(01:04:35):
And then there are emotional regulation skills.
Breathing, grounding, mindfulness, or even something
as simple as talking yourself down from the ledge of panic,
these practices give your nervous system a chance to reset

(01:04:57):
when your body isn't braced for the next disaster.
Your brain can finally use its resources for things like
encoding new memories instead ofconstantly scanning the horizon
for danger. Basically, if you want your mind
to stop running on Please Don't Crash mode, you got to give it
the conditions to reboot. Think of it like an overworked

(01:05:19):
computer. If you never close the tabs,
never let it cool down, and keepdemanding it run ten programs at
once, of course it's going to glitch.
But give it enough support, rest, movement, calm, and
suddenly the system starts working the way it was meant to.

(01:05:40):
The more you support your brain from the outside, the more
likely it is to show up for you on the inside.
Now, have you figured out a pattern to these bonus episodes
yet, dear listener? Because if you haven't, let me
let you in on the secret. These are the spots where I get

(01:06:05):
a little more personal, a littleless polished, and tell you some
of the messy stuff from my own life.
Call it the behind the scenes footage you didn't know you
needed. Because whatever your version
looks like, you're not the only one living it.
None of us are. And here's my confession for

(01:06:27):
this one. My memory is basically a block
of Swiss cheese full of holes, unpredictable and occasionally
embarrassing when I realized I've lost track of entire
stretches of time. I can remember the tiniest,
weirdest details, like what someone was wearing or the exact

(01:06:51):
smell of a hospital waiting room.
But ask me what year something happened or who said what in a
conversation, and sometimes it'slike watching ATV screen
flickered a static. So if your brain ever feels like
it's missing whole chapters of your own story, you're in good

(01:07:11):
company. I've lived it too.
We've already dug into why memory loss shows up with
depression and trauma, so now it's time to get into what it
feels like in real time, and howI've learned to work with a
brain that sometimes acts more like a glitchy hard drive than a
reliable record keeper. Sometimes navigating my memory

(01:07:35):
is like navigating Backcountry roads.
There's a lot of approximation on distances, a lot of just keep
going till you see the old oak tree and plenty of wild guesses
based on half remembered landmarks.
You're not following a clean GPSroute, you're squinting at faded
signs and hoping for the best. Inevitably, you're going to miss

(01:07:58):
the turn and end up rattling down a gravel Rd. you definitely
didn't mean to take. Some memories are like familiar
crossroads. You know you've been there
before, but can't remember if you should have turned left in
2009 or right in 2015. Others are like ghost towns.

(01:08:20):
You know something important happened there, but the
buildings are collapsed, the signposts are missing, and you
can't piece together what the place used to look like.
And then then there are the weirdly clear landmarks, like
the exact smell of diesel at a gas station or the sound of

(01:08:42):
gravel crunching under your tires that stick out even when
the rest of the journey is a blur.
So instead of a smooth, predictable Hwy. of memories,
it's more like wandering back roads with a sketchy map
scribbled on a napkin. You'll eventually get somewhere,
but probably not without a few wrong turns, dead ends, and

(01:09:06):
moments of wait Have I been herebefore?
Now I recognize with the knowledge I've gained over the
years that the gaps in my memoryaren't because I'm careless or
broken, it's because my brain isbasically saying, Nah, BAE,
let's not go there, let me just keep you warm and safe over here

(01:09:30):
instead. It's like a bouncer at a
nightclub redirecting me somewhere else before I even get
close, deciding that what's behind that rope is off limits
in its own way. My brain thinks it's doing me a
favor. It reroutes me towards safer
mental territory, away from the heavy stuff that doesn't think I

(01:09:50):
can handle in the moment. And that redirection isn't
gentle. Sometimes it's like being
dropped off in the middle of a random memory cul-de-sac with no
context for how I got there. I'll be trying to recall a
conversation or a whole stretch of time, and instead my mind
plops me down in some irreverent, irrelevant detail,

(01:10:13):
like the color of a wall or the sound of someone's shoes
clicking on tile. The frustrating part is that
those gaps aren't really gaps atall, they're more like locked
rooms. The memory exists, but the
access hallway is barricaded by my nervous system saying Nope
you're not ready, don't even tryuntil I've built tools or the

(01:10:39):
sense of safety to actually peekinside.
My brain would rather keep me inthe waiting room flipping
through old magazines then risk me opening a door it thinks will
set off alarms. It's embarrassing.
Sometimes someone will casually ask me about my childhood, you
know, Oh, what was your favoritetoy or what were birthdays like
when you were little? And I'll go digging in my brain

(01:11:03):
for an answer, only to come up completely empty handed.
It's like opening the fridge andswearing there's food in there
and being greeted by nothing buta lonely jar of mustard.
And I don't even like mustard and I just end up sitting there
slack jawed trying to play it off while inside I'm screaming

(01:11:28):
sorry, memory not found, please try again later.
And it's not that the memories never existed, it's that my
brain has done its best impression of a block of Swiss
cheese and those particular slices are full of holes.
Sometimes I get a random crumb, like the smell of the school

(01:11:51):
cafeteria or the color of one ofmy childhood bedroom walls.
But the actual story? The thing people are asking
about? Gone.
Deleted scene left on the cutting room floor.
And that's the weird double punch of it.

(01:12:11):
The moment itself isn't painful,but the gap is.
It makes you feel like a stranger in your own history,
like everyone else got handed the extended director's cut of
your life and you're stuck watching the chopped up version
with missing reels and all you can really say is yeah, sorry,

(01:12:36):
Swiss cheese strikes again. And there's a soul crushing this
to it too, though to not remember much of your childhood.
It's not just an inconvenience, it's an ache.
When everyone else is gathered around trading misty eyed
stories about the good old days,you're left with blankness they

(01:13:02):
get to toss around. Remember when, like confetti,
weaving shared memories into warmth and connection while
you're stuck on the outside of that circle, trying to smile
along but secretly scrambling for scraps you don't have?
And it's not just about the conversations you can't join in.
It's about the longing underneath.

(01:13:26):
Longing for the missing bits. Longing for the version of
childhood that maybe could have been if your brain hadn't been
forced to turn down the lights just to get you through.
Because the gaps aren't random, and you know that on some level,

(01:13:46):
you know that those blanks existfor a reason, that they're
covering over things that you weren't ready or safe enough to
hold. And yet, even with that
knowledge, there's still a hollow kind of grief.
You miss not only what you can'trecall, but what you never

(01:14:07):
actually had in the 1st place. It's a double layered loss, the
absence of memory and the absence of the experiences those
memories might have been made from.
And that's a hard thing to sit with, because the people around
you are reminiscing about birthday parties and 1st pets

(01:14:30):
and summer vacations, while you're sitting there carrying a
silence that feels heavier than any story you could tell.
And that longing doesn't stay neatly tucked in the past,
either. It seeps forward, shaping how
you move through the present. Sometimes it looks like an

(01:14:53):
obsession with nostalgia, clinging to old cartoons, songs,
or trinkets from decades ago. Because even if they weren't
your exact memories, they feel like they could have been.
It's a way of borrowing someone else's scrapbook when yours is
missing half its pages. Other times it shows up as over

(01:15:17):
documenting. Maybe you're the friend.
Not saying I am. I'm not saying I'm not.
Who takes too many photos? Who saves every receipt?
Who journals every little thing?Not because you're sentimental
in the stereotypical sense, but because some part of you is

(01:15:40):
terrified of losing more. If your childhood is a blank,
then adulthood becomes a desperate attempt to make sure
the same thing doesn't happen again.
And sometimes it's quieter but no less powerful.
Maybe you find yourself craving the safety and stability with an

(01:16:01):
intensity that feels out of proportion because part of you
is still trying to retroactivelygive your younger self the
consistency she didn't get. Or maybe you lean hard into
rituals, making the same breakfast every morning,
clinging to holiday traditions, insisting on routines because

(01:16:21):
those anchors provide the continuity your memory can't.
In all these ways, the absence becomes its own kind of
presence. The missingness echoes through
your adulthood, shaping the way you try to hold on to what is
happening now and coloring the things you long for with a

(01:16:42):
deeper hunger than most people ever realize.
So what do you do with a brain that trapdoors itself?
The second realizes something just might hurt you.
A brain that Yanks you off stagemid scene and refuses to hand
over the script. The first thing is you accept

(01:17:05):
it. Not in a passive well guess I'm
doomed kind of way, but in the radical acceptance sense.
Acknowledging that this is how your brain has been trying to
protect you. Fighting the mechanism only
makes you feel broken. Recognizing it for what it is

(01:17:31):
reframes it as survival, not failure.
That acceptance doesn't magically fix the gaps, but it
shifts your relationship to them.
Instead of demanding why can't Iremember you start asking what
is my brain keeping me safe from?

(01:17:53):
You begin to understand that thetrapdoor isn't punishment, it's
a security system. And while yes, it's frustrating
and sometimes downright humiliating, it's also proof
that your body has been working overtime to keep you alive
through things that were not easy to live through.

(01:18:14):
From that place of acceptance you can move into curiosity and
care, learning tools to gently approach those locked rooms in
your memory without battering the door down.
But it starts with recognizing that the trapdoor itself isn't
weakness, it's your brains way of saying not yet.

(01:18:37):
You're still breathing and that's enough.
And that's the thing of it, isn't it?
At the end of the day, you can'tstrong arm your way into perfect
recall. You can't brute force your brain
into coughing up what it's decided to hide.
All you can really do is move through the memory loss.

(01:19:01):
You learn to accept the bits andpieces you do have, the odd
flashes, the random details, thelittle fragments that slip
through the cracks, and trust that sometimes, as you lean into
that acceptance, your brain may surprise you by handing over a

(01:19:21):
little more. Not all at once, not neatly, but
enough to remind you that healing isn't static.
By treating your brain with patience instead of punishment,
by choosing gentleness over selfblame, you create the conditions
for it to soften. The same goes for treating

(01:19:43):
yourself with compassion. When you approach those gaps
with curiosity instead of judgment, you shift the story
from I'm broken, I can't remember to my brain did what it
had to to get me through. That reframe isn't just feel
good fluff, it's a doorway into healing.

(01:20:06):
Because here's the quiet truth, your brain isn't hoarding those
memories to spite you, it's beenguarding them.
And when you meet it with grace,When you show yourself the care
you truly deserve. You're telling your nervous
system it doesn't have to stay in red alert mode forever.

(01:20:29):
That's when healing has a chanceto take root.
Not in force, but in the space you make for safety, compassion,
and repair. At the end of the day,
depression and trauma don't justmess with your memory, they mess
with your sense of self. They warp time, scramble

(01:20:53):
details, leave holes where chapters should be, and
sometimes stitch pain into your recollection so tightly it feels
impossible to separate the two. Whether it's the fog of
depression making life slide by in muted tones, or the spotlight
and blackout chaos of trauma, orthe long term corrosion of

(01:21:18):
living in survival mode for years, the result is the same.
Your past feels unreliable, fragmented, or sometimes
completely blank, and that can be devastating.
It can leave you aching for the memories you don't have, for the

(01:21:39):
nostalgia you can't join in on, for the continuity that seems to
come so easily to everyone else.It can feel lonely,
embarrassing, even soul crushingat times.
But here's what I hope you can take away from this episode.

(01:21:59):
None of this is a reflection of your worth, your effort, or your
ability to care. It's your brains way of keeping
you alive when life demanded survival over scrapbooking.
The good news? Brains are elastic.
They can change. They can heal.

(01:22:23):
We may not get back every lost file, but we can create new
ones. We can lean on external
supports, journals, photos, voice memos, friends who remind
us of what we did last week. We can rebuild trust in our
memory with gentle cognitive exercise.

(01:22:46):
We can integrate fragments through therapy, through
movement, through giving our nervous system permission to
rest. And we can cultivate compassion
for ourselves when memory loss shows up.
Because it's not failure, it's evidence of survival.
So maybe your life story doesn'tcome in one clean, unbroken

(01:23:07):
reel. Maybe it looks more like a
mosaic. Fragmented pieces, blurry
sections, missing tiles, and a few burned it.
Few parts burned at the edges. But even mosaics are art.
Even broken pieces can be arranged into something whole,
something beautiful, something that tells the truth about what

(01:23:29):
you've lived through and who youare.
And if there's one through line I want to leave you with, it's
this. Your worth has never been
dependent on perfect recall. You are not less whole because
parts of your story went unrecorded.
You're here, you survived, and you're still adding chapters.

(01:23:54):
And that in itself is worth remembering.
So here's where we land Memory loss in the wake of depression
and trauma isn't laziness. It's not a perfect personal
flaw. It's survival logic, plain and
simple. Your brain, in all its messy
brilliance, made the call. Focus on breathing.

(01:24:17):
Focus on getting through this moment.
Focus on that breaking apart. And while that trade off can
leave you with foggy timelines, Swiss cheese recall, or entire
chapters missing, it also means you're still here.
You survived what your nervous system told you was unbearable.
That's not failure. That's proof of endurance.

(01:24:39):
And yet I know how heavy that feels.
I know the ache of sitting silent when friends swap
childhood stories, of sitting and staring at the blank spaces
where your own memory should be,of longing for details you may
never get back. There's grief in that.

(01:25:02):
There's loneliness, and there's a very real temptation to blame
yourself. But here's the thing.
You didn't choose this. Your brain chose survival, and
that choice, while imperfect, iswhat carried you through.

(01:25:24):
What you can choose now, though,is how you meet yourself in the
aftermath. You can offer yourself
compassion instead of shame. You can use external tools,
journals, photos, conversations to lay down new bread crumbs for
future you to follow. You can strengthen the muscle of

(01:25:46):
recall through gentle practice, one small win at a time.
And when you're ready, you can sit with a therapist or a
trusted guide and start weaving the fragments into a story that
feels less jagged, less chaotic,and more your own.
Will you recover every lost moment?

(01:26:09):
No, some memories are gone, and grieving that loss is valid.
But you can reclaim your narrative in other ways.
You can create new memories withintention, new chapters that
belong fully to you. You can learn to hold both the

(01:26:30):
holes and the solid ground with grace, because your story is not
just what you remember, it's also what you lived and what
you're still living now. So if your life feels less like
a straight line and more like a mosaic of broken glass and
blurry photographs, remember, mosaics are still art.

(01:26:56):
They are beautiful because of their fragments, not in spite of
them. Your mind might not have
recorded every moment, but your existence is proof that those
moments happened. And the life you're building
now, the clarity, the connections, the healing, that's
a memory in the making. And maybe that's the most

(01:27:20):
important thing to carry forward.
You're not defined by what you can't remember.
You're defined by the fact that you're here, breathing, moving,
choosing, creating new pieces for your story every single day.

(01:27:41):
And that, dear listener, is worth remembering if today's
episode at home for you. Whether you saw your own memory
gaps in what I shared or you just learned something new about
how depression and trauma shapedthe brain, remember, you don't

(01:28:03):
have to hold it all alone. Talk about it with someone you
trust. Jot a note to yourself.
Sit with a reminder that what you're experiencing has a
reason. Or shoot.
You can e-mail me at [e-mail].
There is nothing broken about you.

(01:28:25):
You've just been surviving. If you found this episode
helpful, please make sure you follow Shrink Wrapped wherever
you listen. Leave a review if you can, and
share it with someone else who might need to hear it.
Your support really does help keep this conversation going.
And of course, don't forget to join me next week.

(01:28:46):
Until then, be gentle with your mind, be kind to yourself, and
I'll see you back here soon.