Complex Trauma: Codependency and Memory Problems
Mar 24, 2025
Why You Struggle to Remember and Trust Yourself
When you grow up in an emotionally chaotic or neglectful environment, your brain adapts to survive. If you’ve ever felt like you lose pieces of time, struggle with memory lapses, or find yourself stuck in unhealthy relationships, you’re not crazy—your brain is trying to protect you.
Complex trauma, the kind that comes from prolonged emotional stress—like being raised in a home where you had to walk on eggshells—can deeply impact the way you think, feel, and even remember things. Many people who’ve experienced this type of trauma develop codependent tendencies and struggle with memory problems, and it’s not because they’re weak or broken. It all comes down to the way stress hormones like cortisol affect the brain—especially a part called the corpus callosum, which helps the left and right sides of your brain communicate.
Why Complex Trauma Leads to Codependency
If you grew up in a home where love felt conditional, or where your emotional needs were ignored, you probably learned early on that making others happy was the safest way to survive. Codependency is a survival response—it happens when we learn to prioritize other people’s needs over our own because, deep down, we fear rejection or abandonment.
Codependents often:
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Struggle to set boundaries
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Feel responsible for other people’s emotions
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Need external validation to feel worthy
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Fear disappointing others
These patterns learned behaviors that helped you cope when you were little. The good news? They can be unlearned.
Why Trauma Messes with Your Memory
Trauma lives in your body, memories, neurological pathways, and brain. When you experience chronic stress, your body produces high levels of cortisol, the hormone that helps you handle danger. In small doses, cortisol is helpful, but when it floods your system for years, it starts to damage areas of the brain, especially the hippocampus (which controls memory) and the corpus callosum (which helps process emotions and logic together).
This is why many trauma survivors experience:
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Memory gaps
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Feeling disconnected from their past
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Struggling to recall details of traumatic events
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Emotional numbness or dissociation
Your brain protects you by fragmenting or burying painful memories. But when you start healing, those memories may resurface—sometimes in bits and pieces, in waves of emotions you don’t understand. This is entirely normal and part of the healing journey.
The Role of the Corpus Callosum: Why You Feel Stuck
The corpus callosum is like a bridge connecting your brain's left and right sides. When this part of the brain is impacted by prolonged stress, it can make it harder to integrate emotions and logic. This is why trauma survivors often feel:
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Confused about their feelings
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Like they can’t trust their own perception of reality
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Stuck in a cycle of overthinking and self-doubt
- Think there is something wrong with them because they simply can't remember yet; they have such painful emotional memories.
It can be so hard to be someone who feels like something went terribly wrong in their childhood, yet, they have no solid memory to validate those feelings. It's not you, Dear One; it's literally your programming and a damaged communication center, otherwise understood as the corpus callosum.
When we grow up in dysfunctional environments, we are often gaslit and love withheld as a form of punishment. We can also be told that what we feel isn’t real, dumb, or irrelevant. Over time, this trains us to ignore our instincts and look to others to tell us what’s true. Healing involves rebuilding that lost trust in yourself over time, and as you do, cortisol lowers, and the corpus callosum can begin to heal.
How Healing Helps Memories Return
The beautiful thing about the brain is that it can heal. When you start feeling emotionally safe—whether in therapy, meditation, or with a supportive community—your brain starts to come out of survival mode. As cortisol levels drop, memory function improves, and previously buried emotions and memories may surface.
This process can feel overwhelming, but it’s a sign that you’re healing. As you work through old wounds, you reclaim your identity, intuition, and power.
Breaking Free from Trauma and Codependency
Healing is about learning to trust yourself again. When you stop looking outside yourself for validation and start honoring your emotions, you slowly break free from codependency. When you understand how trauma has impacted your brain, you can stop blaming yourself for not remembering, not healing fast enough, or for falling prey to another narcissistic relationship. Feeling safe within your own skin is essential and fostering that confidence in the self is key.
To heal, our goal is to heal, integrate, and reclaim the life that trauma tried to steal from us due to being forced to live in a state of survival as children when we were dependent upon the very people who neglected, exploited, and or abused us. And that journey starts with self-awareness, self-compassion, and the courage to prioritize our healing.
I have created an inner child kickstart to help you start this sacred process of self trust.
Download the Inner Child Kickstart to help you begin prioritizing self care.
Lisa A. Romano is a certified Life Coach and award-winning author who specializes in codependency and narcissistic abuse recovery. She is the author of The Road Back to Me, and 7 additional titles, and the creator of the psychologist-approved 12 Week Breakthrough Coaching Program. Lisa is also a popular YouTube Content Creator with over 700K subscribers and one of the most listened-to meditation teachers on Insight Timer. Her mission is to teach wounded adult children from dysfunctional homes how to heal their inner child, and become confident autonomous, self-actualized beings through her proven processes that deliver predictable results and provide opportunities for awakening and transformations. You can find more about Lisa's work at https://www.lisaaromano.com
