From Anish Moonka on X:
“The actual research is wild. Every time you push down a feeling, your brain has to choose between suppressing that emotion and recording what’s happening around you. It picks the suppression. The memory doesn’t get saved.
A 2000 Stanford study confirmed this: people told to hide their emotions while watching a film remembered far fewer details than people who just reacted naturally. Suppressing emotions uses up mental energy, and that leaves less brain power for saving new memories.
Brain scans show why. A 2012 study found that suppression quiets the hippocampus (your brain’s memory-recording center) right when it should be saving information. The two brain regions that normally team up to lock in memories stop talking to each other.
Over time it gets worse. Suppression keeps cortisol (the stress hormone) elevated, and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus. Chronically stressed people can lose 10 to 15% of its volume. Just three weeks of high cortisol can shrink the tiny connection points between brain cells by about 20%. The good news: studies show this shrinkage can partially reverse once stress levels drop. Not necessarily permanent.
A Finnish study of 1,137 older adults tracked over roughly a decade found that habitual emotion suppressors had nearly 5x the risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for genetics, smoking, obesity, and education.
There’s a better way to handle emotions that doesn’t cost you your memory. It’s called cognitive reappraisal: instead of bottling the feeling, you reframe what’s causing it. (“This meeting isn’t a threat, it’s practice.”) A 2003 Stanford/UC Berkeley study found reappraisers had more positive emotion, better relationships, and higher wellbeing. Suppressors got the opposite on every measure. And reappraisal carries zero memory cost.
The difference comes down to timing. Suppression kicks in after the emotion has already fired, so your brain is fighting its own response while simultaneously trying to record the moment. Reappraisal changes how you interpret the situation before the emotion fully activates. Same event, same person, but your hippocampus stays free to do its actual job: recording your life.”
https://x.com/anisha_moonka/status/2031161794413343134
“The actual research is wild. Every time you push down a feeling, your brain has to choose between suppressing that emotion and recording what’s happening around you. It picks the suppression. The memory doesn’t get saved.
A 2000 Stanford study confirmed this: people told to hide their emotions while watching a film remembered far fewer details than people who just reacted naturally. Suppressing emotions uses up mental energy, and that leaves less brain power for saving new memories.
Brain scans show why. A 2012 study found that suppression quiets the hippocampus (your brain’s memory-recording center) right when it should be saving information. The two brain regions that normally team up to lock in memories stop talking to each other.
Over time it gets worse. Suppression keeps cortisol (the stress hormone) elevated, and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus. Chronically stressed people can lose 10 to 15% of its volume. Just three weeks of high cortisol can shrink the tiny connection points between brain cells by about 20%. The good news: studies show this shrinkage can partially reverse once stress levels drop. Not necessarily permanent.
A Finnish study of 1,137 older adults tracked over roughly a decade found that habitual emotion suppressors had nearly 5x the risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for genetics, smoking, obesity, and education.
There’s a better way to handle emotions that doesn’t cost you your memory. It’s called cognitive reappraisal: instead of bottling the feeling, you reframe what’s causing it. (“This meeting isn’t a threat, it’s practice.”) A 2003 Stanford/UC Berkeley study found reappraisers had more positive emotion, better relationships, and higher wellbeing. Suppressors got the opposite on every measure. And reappraisal carries zero memory cost.
The difference comes down to timing. Suppression kicks in after the emotion has already fired, so your brain is fighting its own response while simultaneously trying to record the moment. Reappraisal changes how you interpret the situation before the emotion fully activates. Same event, same person, but your hippocampus stays free to do its actual job: recording your life.”
https://x.com/anisha_moonka/status/2031161794413343134
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So, let me tell you why I find the above so fascinating.
All my life I’ve known that I have very few clear memories from my childhood. Over the last 2-3 years, I’ve come to understand a lot more about my upbringing and what happened. And the article above outlines a mechanism for this.
As I’ve explained before, my mother fits the textbook definition of a “covert narcissist”. Full-on NPD as near as I can tell and I’ve had 3 psychologists conclude the same. But only by proxy of course. She’s never been diagnosed — as most aren’t.
What that means in a nutshell, is that she overrode my inner experiences with her own. And as all children will do when faced with Authenticity vs Attachment to the caregiver needed for survival…I most often suppressed my own True Feelings for what I learned I was supposed to do, think, say and even feel.
So here’s the thing…through my Healing work, I’ve realized that the memories that I DO have from childhood are the times when my True Self surfaced. Times when I said or acted in accordance with how I REALLY FELT internally. Now, many of those were also times when that True Self got reprimanded, but that’s not the memorable part…because my True Self was constantly overridden by my mother’s emotions, opinions and judgement on how I ought to behave and react to things.
The memorable part is that I WAS BEING ME in those moments. And those are the only ones I actually carried with me out of childhood. Took me till age 50 to figure that shit out.
And even now I struggle with memory and have trouble remembering if things actually happened or if I dreamed them. Because that’s how the inauthentic memories feel. They’re not mine. I have no agency in them. And it’s one of the things that makes healing from this kind of abuse so difficult. We don’t have direct access to the things that happened and we have to dig in really deeply to get the perspective that’s needed to Heal.
You need the Truth of a situation in order to actually assess what happened. And when that Truth has been covered over with someone else’s bullshit, it takes more effort to reclaim it.
So, if this sounds like you, please know that you CAN Heal from this. It’s just a matter of understanding what happened so you can start to place things in their proper context in your Mind.
You have to rebuild a structure to store things because the one you built as a kid…that one isn’t yours. And that’s why it makes no sense and why you can’t remember.
In Love,
~TR 💖
—10 March 2026—
All my life I’ve known that I have very few clear memories from my childhood. Over the last 2-3 years, I’ve come to understand a lot more about my upbringing and what happened. And the article above outlines a mechanism for this.
As I’ve explained before, my mother fits the textbook definition of a “covert narcissist”. Full-on NPD as near as I can tell and I’ve had 3 psychologists conclude the same. But only by proxy of course. She’s never been diagnosed — as most aren’t.
What that means in a nutshell, is that she overrode my inner experiences with her own. And as all children will do when faced with Authenticity vs Attachment to the caregiver needed for survival…I most often suppressed my own True Feelings for what I learned I was supposed to do, think, say and even feel.
So here’s the thing…through my Healing work, I’ve realized that the memories that I DO have from childhood are the times when my True Self surfaced. Times when I said or acted in accordance with how I REALLY FELT internally. Now, many of those were also times when that True Self got reprimanded, but that’s not the memorable part…because my True Self was constantly overridden by my mother’s emotions, opinions and judgement on how I ought to behave and react to things.
The memorable part is that I WAS BEING ME in those moments. And those are the only ones I actually carried with me out of childhood. Took me till age 50 to figure that shit out.
And even now I struggle with memory and have trouble remembering if things actually happened or if I dreamed them. Because that’s how the inauthentic memories feel. They’re not mine. I have no agency in them. And it’s one of the things that makes healing from this kind of abuse so difficult. We don’t have direct access to the things that happened and we have to dig in really deeply to get the perspective that’s needed to Heal.
You need the Truth of a situation in order to actually assess what happened. And when that Truth has been covered over with someone else’s bullshit, it takes more effort to reclaim it.
So, if this sounds like you, please know that you CAN Heal from this. It’s just a matter of understanding what happened so you can start to place things in their proper context in your Mind.
You have to rebuild a structure to store things because the one you built as a kid…that one isn’t yours. And that’s why it makes no sense and why you can’t remember.
In Love,
~TR 💖
—10 March 2026—
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