One familiar explanation of trauma goes like this: overwhelming fear disrupts the brain’s ability to store an experience, leaving scattered images, sensations, and emotions instead of an organized memory. It sounds plausible. But how well does the evidence support it?
In a recent article in The Conversation, psychologist Michele Patterson Ford describes traumatic memories as frequently fragmented. She explains that intense stress can overwhelm the hippocampus, disrupting memory storage, while heightened emotional activity contributes to vivid sensory recollections. Her practical message is compassionate: people should not dismiss survivors because their accounts seem disorganized or their behavior seems unexpected.
That message deserves attention. However, the proposed explanation of memory is more contested than her article suggests. Harvard psychologist Richard McNally’s review, Are Memories of Sexual Trauma Fragmented?, challenges the idea that trauma typically breaks memories into disconnected pieces. His question is straightforward: fragmented compared with what?
All autobiographical memories are incomplete. We remember some details and forget others. We reconstruct experiences when describing them, rather than replaying an internal recording. We only encode information that we attend to. Finding gaps in someone’s account therefore does not establish that trauma caused a special disruption of memory.
What do comparisons reveal?
McNally highlights a study by David Rubin and colleagues involving 60 trauma-exposed adults, half with PTSD. Participants described traumatic, positive, and important experiences. Researchers evaluated their accounts using 28 measures, including participants’ judgments, independent raters, and computerized analyses.
Overall, traumatic memories were no less coherent than the other memories. Nor were the trauma accounts of participants with PTSD less coherent than those of participants without PTSD.
This does not mean everyone remembers trauma clearly. It means the study did not support a general rule that trauma produces unusually fragmented memories. McNally’s review presents evidence against broad fragmentation claims, rather than proving that fragmentation never occurs.
Remembering an experience and describing it are different tasks
Someone may struggle to describe an experience because discussing it is distressing. That difficulty does not, by itself, reveal how the experience was originally stored.
McNally describes experiments showing that questioning methods can influence how coherent people judge their own memories to be. Answering difficult questions about specific details can make a memory seem less coherent than simply telling the story.
Likewise, a vivid image or sudden emotional recollection does not establish that the broader memory exists only as disconnected fragments. The experience of remembering and the organization of the remembered event are related questions, but they are not interchangeable.
McNally also reviews a treatment study in which improvement in PTSD was not reliably associated with changes in narrative fragmentation. That finding challenges the assumption that recovery necessarily depends on assembling scattered memories into an orderly story.
Why might evolution favor remembering trauma?
Psychologist Lawrence Patihis approaches the issue from another direction. In Did Dissociative Amnesia Evolve?, he asks why natural selection would favor a mechanism that blocks access to memories of dangerous experiences.
Remembering an attack could help an individual recognize a threat, avoid a dangerous place, or warn others. Forgetting the event could remove information useful for survival. Patihis therefore argues that we should generally expect threatening experiences—particularly their central, survival-relevant features—to be well retained.
Consider someone who survives an animal attack. Remembering the animal, its behavior, and where the attack occurred could offer future protection. Similar benefits could apply to remembering violence by another person.
Patihis’s argument specifically concerns dissociative amnesia: the proposed psychological blocking of a stored autobiographical memory that may later become accessible. His paper therefore adds a challenge to theories of protective forgetting, rather than directly disproving memory fragmentation. Patihis offers a theoretical challenge, not experimental proof, that memories of traumatic experiences should not be of lower quality or accuracy, compared to other memories.
Compassion does not require a universal memory story
McNally acknowledges that intense fear may strengthen memory for central features while leaving peripheral details poorly remembered. He also distinguishes trauma itself from other causes of memory disruption, including alcohol blackouts. Being unable to move during an assault does not necessarily mean being unable to remember it.
The practical implication is to avoid prescribing how a survivor’s memory should look. A disorganized account does not establish dishonesty. A coherent account does not establish that an experience was harmless. Neither coherence nor fragmentation, by itself, establishes accuracy, nor does either characteristic establish that an event was in fact traumatic.
Traumatic experiences can leave memories that are vivid, incomplete, distressing or difficult to discuss. The evidence McNally reviews challenges the broader claim that trauma generally shatters memory into disconnected pieces. We can listen patiently, take suffering seriously and evaluate evidence carefully without assuming that every survivor’s brain follows the same script.
