How does your body store childhood trauma when the mind forgets? Explore how implicit memories shape emotions, behavior and health — and ways to heal from buried childhood wounds.
You’ve done years of talk therapy. You understand why you have trust issues—your father left when you were five. You can intellectually grasp how your mother’s anxiety affected you. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, and can articulate your attachment wounds with psychological precision. Yet somehow, when your partner comes home late or seems distant, you still find yourself flooded with panic, lashing out in anger, or shutting down completely. What’s happening?
The answer, according to psychotherapist Jessica Baum in her book SAFE, lies in a type of memory most people don’t know exists: implicit memory. While you’ve been working diligently to understand your past through narrative—the stories you tell about what happened—your most impactful memories aren’t stored as stories at all. They’re stored as sensations in your belly, tensions in your muscles, and patterns in your nervous system. These bodily memories don’t just influence your present—they actively shape it, generating automatic responses faster than conscious thought can intervene.
The Two Memory Systems That Run Your Life
Most of us think of memory as the ability to recall events: your fifth birthday party, your first day of school, the conversation you had with your partner this morning. These are explicit memories—narrative stories with a beginning, middle, and end, marked clearly as “past.”
But there’s another memory system that’s far more powerful and far less understood: implicit memory. These are the memories encoded in your body from birth through your first two to three years of life, before you had the neural equipment to form narrative memories. They continue being formed throughout your life whenever you’re not paying conscious attention or when experiences are too overwhelming to process explicitly.
“Our memories are held in multiple systems in our bodies,” Baum writes. “With each new experience in our lives, we sometimes encode the narrative memory of ‘what happened,’ but we always encode the sensations we felt in our bellies, hearts, muscles, skin, autonomic nervous systems, and more when we first had the experience.”
These implicit memories have a crucial characteristic: they have no time stamp. When they wake up in your body, they feel like they’re happening right now. Baum calls these “the eternally present past”—a beautifully precise phrase for how a forty-year-old can suddenly feel like a terrified three-year-old when their partner’s tone of voice shifts.
Where Trauma Actually Lives
This distinction between explicit and implicit memory revolutionizes our understanding of trauma and healing. When you talk about traumatic events in therapy—describing what happened, analyzing the impact—you’re working with explicit memory. This is valuable work, but it often leaves people frustrated because their symptoms don’t improve proportionally to their understanding.
The reason is simple: the trauma isn’t primarily stored in the story. It’s stored in your body.
Baum shares a powerful example from her clinical work with a client named Dan, who came to group therapy reporting he couldn’t feel anything in his body. As the group created safety together, something shifted: “His face flushed as I said the words. ‘My belly gets into a knot immediately when you say that. And my biceps and thighs tighten.’ I quietly asked, ‘I wonder if there is a time earlier in life when your body felt just like this?’ He closed his eyes and then he said, ‘I’m seeing the thousands of times my mother got furious when we dragged mud in the house.'”
Dan hadn’t consciously remembered these moments. But his body had encoded every instance: the muscle tension preparing to run, the belly knotting with fear, the whole-body sense of danger. Decades later, when his wife asked him to wipe his feet, these implicit memories erupted, generating an instantaneous defensive reaction that made no sense given the current benign situation.
The Science Behind Body Memory
Neuroscience research reveals why body-based memories are so powerful. Your heart contains approximately 40,000 neurons—effectively a “heart brain” dedicated to remembering experiences of connection and disconnection. Your gut houses between 100 and 500 million neurons, often called the “second brain,” intimately connected with processing relationship safety and danger.
These neural networks encode every emotionally meaningful interaction you’ve ever had. When your mother held you with warmth and ease, your heart and gut encoded “safety.” When your father’s face showed disappointment, your body encoded “I’ve done something wrong.” When you reached out as a child and no one came, your muscles, heart, and belly encoded “I am alone and helpless.”
As researcher Andreas Riener’s work suggests, we process approximately eleven million bits of implicit information per second while only processing forty to fifty bits explicitly. In other words, your body is taking in and responding to an ocean of information that never reaches your conscious awareness—and building memories from all of it.
Why Thinking Differently Doesn’t Change How You Feel
This explains one of the most frustrating aspects of personal growth work: cognitive understanding rarely translates into emotional or behavioral change. You can know your partner isn’t actually abandoning you when they need alone time, but your body still floods with panic. You can intellectually recognize that your boss’s feedback isn’t a personal attack, but shame still overwhelms you.
“What we can’t consciously feel, we tend to act out,” Baum writes. “And what we don’t feel safe to act out, we try to suppress. In the end, though, our wounds must go somewhere.”
When implicit memories can’t be felt and healed, they often manifest as physical symptoms: chronic digestive issues, tension headaches, autoimmune conditions, or unexplained pain. The body literally keeps the score, as trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk famously titled his groundbreaking book. Suppressed trauma creates inflammation—the root of most chronic illness.
But here’s the challenge: you can’t heal implicit memories through thinking about them. You have to feel them. And for most people with significant attachment wounds, feeling these memories is precisely what they’ve spent their entire lives learning not to do.
The Path to Body-Based Healing: Interoception
The first step in healing implicit memories is developing interoception—the ability to sense what’s happening inside your body moment to moment. This might sound simple, but for people who’ve lived in their heads to avoid pain, it’s revolutionary.
Baum guides readers through practices of placing hands on different parts of the body—heart, belly, muscles—and simply noticing sensations. Not trying to change anything, just listening. What does your heart feel like when you recall a nourishing relationship? What happens in your belly when you think of someone who hurt you?
“As we turn our attention to them now, they become arrows pointing us toward the sea of our implicit memories,” Baum explains. “Some of them offer foundational support and others can become the starting point for healing our developmental wounds.”
One client, Jeremy, came to therapy with chronic stomach issues. As he developed interoception, he began to notice: “I couldn’t remember the last time my stomach felt settled for a whole day. Even in childhood. I never ate breakfast before going to school because I always felt like I would throw up.”
Through their work together, Jeremy discovered his belly was responding to the daily reality of his parents’ explosive fights. Even decades later, any uncertainty or unpredictability awakened those implicit memories, and his stomach responded as if those fights were happening right now.
Meeting Your “Little Me”
Once you can sense what’s happening in your body, the next step is meeting what Baum calls your “Little Me”—the younger versions of yourself who carry these implicit wounds. This isn’t a metaphor or visualization exercise. These young parts of you genuinely live on in your neurobiology, still waiting for the care they needed but didn’t receive.
When you feel a sensation in your body connected to an old wound—that knot in your belly, that tightness in your chest—you can ask gently: “I wonder when my body felt just like this before?” Then wait. Not digging, not forcing, just listening.
What often happens is remarkable: an image, a felt sense, or a knowing emerges. You see yourself at five years old, alone in your room while your parents fought downstairs. You feel the shame of being yelled at for normal childhood exuberance. You sense the terror of reaching out and finding no one there.
These aren’t just memories—they’re parts of you that are still experiencing that moment because it was never fully processed. “The moment we extend this invitation, we are creating space for our inner world to share with us,” Baum writes. “It is the offer itself that is the healing gesture, not getting a particular response.”
The Necessity of Accompaniment
Here’s where healing gets tricky: you can’t do it alone. Not because you’re weak or dependent, but because the wound itself is the absence of accompaniment. When you were small and scared or sad or ashamed, you needed someone to be with you in that feeling. Their presence would have helped regulate your nervous system and encode the experience as “this is hard, but I’m not alone.”
Without that accompaniment, the experience encoded as “I am alone in intolerable pain.” No amount of solitary work can heal that wound because aloneness is the wound. You need to feel the implicit memory surface while in the presence of someone safe—a therapist, trusted friend, or healing partner.
“Together, we can stay with the sensations that are coming up, as uncomfortable as they might feel,” Baum writes about her work with clients. “Yes, it was really that painful and scary, and you were alone with it at the time. Now these memories can finally be held with the care and tenderness that your Little Me had yearned for when the experience(s) occurred.”
This accompaniment does something profound at the neural level. When the old memory is alive in your body (the first condition for healing) and someone safe offers what you needed at the time but didn’t get (the second condition), the neural network holding that memory literally opens and changes. You internalize the safe person. The wound begins to carry their presence alongside the pain.
The Concept of Disconfirming Experiences
Psychotherapist Bruce Ecker, whose research Baum draws on extensively, calls these healing moments “disconfirming experiences.” The original experience said: “You are alone. No one cares. You don’t matter.” The disconfirming experience says, through presence and care: “You are accompanied now. Someone cares. You matter.”
This isn’t positive thinking or affirmations. It’s an embodied experience that contradicts the original encoding at the level where it lives—in sensation and felt sense, not in words or thoughts.
Baum shares her own experience: “When my father’s pain led him to turn away from me, what I needed was someone to be with me, to acknowledge my pain, and to fill up the hole left by my father’s absence. For this old wound to heal now, I need to be in contact with the embodied pain of my father’s abandonment while in the company of someone whose heart hears my pain and who wants me to know that they are with me now.”
Over time, with repeated disconfirming experiences, the neural networks holding trauma begin to transform. About five hours after such an experience, the network closes, incorporating the new information. The explicit memory doesn’t change—it will always be true that certain things happened. But the felt sense of the memory shifts from “I am alone in danger” to “This happened, and I am held now.”
Working with Your Protectors
Before you can access and heal implicit memories, you often need to work with the protective patterns that have kept you from feeling them. Baum emphasizes welcoming these protectors rather than battling them.
Maybe you become a workaholic, staying frantically busy so sensations don’t have time to surface. Maybe you intellectualize everything, analyzing rather than feeling. Maybe you dissociate, going numb when things get intense. These aren’t character flaws—they’re brilliant adaptations that helped you survive when feeling the pain would have been overwhelming.
“Instead of wanting to make them go away, we began to say to them, ‘Everyone is welcome here. Tell me your story. What would have happened to me without you?'” Baum writes. “By recognizing these parts of herself as allies, we began to reduce the inner battle to more manageable proportions.”
When you can appreciate your protectors for the function they’ve served, they often soften enough to let you approach the wounds they’re guarding. This welcoming stance is itself a disconfirming experience—you’re not being rejected for your coping strategies, which may be the first time anyone (including yourself) has offered that acceptance.
The Timeline of Healing
How long does this take? Baum is refreshingly honest: months to years, depending on the depth of the wounds and the availability of safe support. This isn’t something you can hack or speed up. You’re literally building new neural pathways, and that requires repetition over time.
“Walking this path tends to expand our compassion for others and ourselves, and then for the world at large,” Baum writes about the long-term effects. “How we are built for caring relationships and for kindness toward one another. How our wounds, particularly the implicit memories of early attachment, shape the way we see and treat each other. How much these patterns can change when our early losses are met with nonjudgmental care.”
The changes happen gradually but unmistakably. You find yourself able to pause before reacting. You notice old triggers don’t activate you the same way. You can stay present in conflicts that would have sent you fleeing or fighting before. You feel genuinely drawn to healthier people and situations.
Living from Your Body
Eventually, this body-based awareness becomes not a practice you do but a way you live. You regularly check in with sensations, recognizing them as communication from your implicit world. When old wounds surface, you know how to care for your Little Me and reach out for accompaniment rather than battling alone.
“At this stage of my life, I can’t imagine not continuing to be in relationship with my inner world in this way,” Baum writes. “There is such sweetness in the connection between my Little Me and my adult self. Because of all the healing we have done, I don’t get overwhelmed by her pain and fear the same way I did in the beginning.”
This is the promise of body-based healing: not that you’ll never feel pain or fear again, but that you’ll be able to be with those feelings without being overwhelmed by them. The implicit memories lose their power to hijack your present because you’re no longer alone with them. They’ve been met, held, and transformed through being accompanied in safe relationships.
Your body has been keeping the score of your childhood all along—every moment of safety and every moment of fear, encoded in sensations you might not have consciously registered. The healing path requires turning toward these bodily memories rather than continuing to avoid them. It requires developing the capacity to feel rather than only think. And it requires finding people safe enough to be with you as the eternally present past finally, slowly becomes just the past—informing your present rather than controlling it.