Your Mental Health: Trauma and Memory

It isn't uncommon for memory to fade as you age, but trauma could be playing a role in your inability to recollect.

Psychologists have confirmed that memory loss is a direct result of trauma. Let’s dive into what that can mean.

Good morning!

I hope you had a great weekend. Today I want to cover an essential topic on mental health that was illuminated by one of my new favorite podcasters, Mel Robbins. Mel isn’t your typical “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” motivator. She’s a highly sought-after speaker who has one of the most listened-to voices in the world, and I shudder at the fact that I only just found her.

She had on Dr. Nicole LePera —The Holistic Pscyhologist, on social media — who is one of the foremost voices on mental health, trauma, and relationship with self. LePera and Robbins discuss the prospect of forgetfulness as a result of trauma and how we humans trick ourselves into blocking out specific periods of our lives because of events that have negatively impacted us.

You might be reading this and thinking, “well yeah, of course, you would. Who wants to remember the bad things?” But the interesting part is this: Robbins discusses “Big T and Small T” traumas, with Big T symbolizing the events we suppress but still remember. Small T traumas are the traumas that happen in passing and get normalized while growing up but negatively impact our mental health before we become more self-aware as adults.

A Reflection on Small T Trauma

If someone grew up in an abusive household, without a parent, impoverished, or with limited resources, experiences that might Big T traumatize more privileged children become Small T trauma for those bred in a stressful environment. A parent coming home drunk at 7 pm is still trauma. A parent not coming home at all is still trauma. But to the increasingly desensitized children who were spoonfed Big T from a young age, the realization that they’re still accepting doses of Small T doesn’t register.

That is, until the child ages, works through the trauma and finds an outlet for the stress. Becoming a high-achiever, LePera notes, is often a hallmark of these types of children to block out the most stressful and mentally taxing moments of these childhoods. But the associated cost of this swapping of Small T trauma for success is memory loss.

“Everyone’s really stressed out. If I don’t share what happened at school, if I don’t bring her the thing that I’m worried about [in my teenage years], I know my mom, that’s only going to upset her.”

Dr. Nicole LePera, The Holistic Psychologist

As the listener in this podcast conversation, I began to understand the suppression of Small T trauma as a means of reinforcing a mental behavior that doesn’t compartmentalize anything. It’s no longer excluding the memories that we don’t want to remember, but even some of the more mundane or enjoyable memories that we would want to remember and don’t become reawakened to even with someone else’s jumpstarting.

I took it as a challenge, but also a warning, to try and reflect on my memory of Small T that I may have experienced but didn’t categorize. Instances of bullying or negative self-talk, cuts from sports teams, missed events…each one registered as something unpleasant in isolation. But I found it harder and harder to remember pieces of my life around those moments, because I know all of them weren’t bad.

Senior year of high school, 2012

The Luxury Of The Post-1990’s Era and Their Memory

One thing dawned on me as I relistened to this hour-long podcast in an effort to fact-check my writing and quotes: I was not as old as either of these speakers, even though I shared some of the memory woes they did.

The extent to which they were missing pieces of their lives was much greater than mine. Still, they had more right to be concerned at their ages (in their 40’s and 50’s). Their primary concerns about memory were linked to early onset Alzheimer’s and other crippling diseases that come with old age and are the byproduct of increased exposure to stress. They also lamented on their childhood as being digitally unequipped, something I think millennials and zoomers should take a hard look at.