Can’t Remember but Still React: Implicit Memory & the Body

"Why Am I Like This?" Have you ever reacted with fear, anger, or shutdown in a situation that didn’t make sense? Maybe you got anxious in a perfectly safe space, or felt an overwhelming sadness and didn’t know why. That reaction might not be irrational, it might be an implicit memory.

Implicit memories are emotional, bodily memories stored deep in your nervous system. They don’t come with a clear story, but they shape how you feel, respond, and behave, especially under stress.

What Are Implicit Memories?

Implicit memories are formed without conscious awareness. They don’t involve language or logic, and they’re stored in deeper, more primitive areas of the brain, like the amygdala, which helps detect threat and encode fear; the cerebellum, which coordinates movement and emotional learning; and the brainstem, which manages core survival functions such as heart rate, breathing, and the body's fight-or-flight response. Specifically, these functions are regulated by the medulla oblongata, the lowest part of the brainstem, which directly interfaces with the autonomic nervous system.

Most implicit memories are formed during early development, particularly between birth and around 2 to 3 years old, before your hippocampus (the part of your brain responsible for creating conscious, explicit memories) is fully developed. Some research suggests the hippocampus continues maturing until around age 7, but during those early years, the brain prioritises survival and emotional learning, meaning experiences are stored somatically and emotionally, not verbally or narratively.

This is why you might have strong emotional or bodily reactions to things you don’t consciously remember. The memory exists, just not in story form. This means implicit memories aren’t stored as stories or timelines. Instead, they show up in your posture, your breath, your reactions, and your gut feelings.

Implicit vs Explicit Memory

  • Implicit Memory: Emotional, somatic, non-verbal. Shows up as tension, fear, or instinct. No narrative.

  • Explicit Memory: Factual, autobiographical. You can describe it, recall it, reflect on it.

Think of implicit memory like a muscle memory or a scar, you don’t remember the moment it formed, but your body does.

How Implicit Memories Show Up Today

  • Flinching when someone raises their voice, even if they’re not angry

  • Trust issues in relationships with no clear origin

  • Social anxiety in safe environments

  • Overreacting or shutting down during emotional conflict

  • Physical symptoms like jaw clenching, gut pain, or migraines

Trauma and Implicit Memory

When a traumatic event overwhelms the nervous system, especially in childhood, the experience often gets stored as an implicit memory. During early development, the logical, narrative part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus) is still forming. This means the brain doesn’t encode the experience like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, the body holds onto the raw emotion, the sensory experience, and the survival response.

So, the memory doesn’t live in your thoughts, it lives in your nervous system. Your body might still respond as if the event is happening now, even though your conscious mind can’t explain why. This is why trauma survivors often feel confused by their own reactions. They may say things like, “I don’t know why I freaked out, nothing bad was happening.” But the body remembers what the mind doesn’t.

Over time, this can create patterned responses like shutdown, hypervigilance, or emotional reactivity, that seem to come out of nowhere. What’s really happening is that an implicit memory is being triggered: not with words, but with feelings, sensations, and impulses.

The Hidden Roots of Trauma

What’s important to understand here is that most trauma isn’t stored as a conscious story. It’s in the body. It’s implicit. And it often begins in the earliest years of life, long before we have the language or perspective to make sense of it.

We’ve all got that one friend who says, “I don’t have any trauma.” But trauma isn’t just about major accidents or dramatic events. It can be anything that overwhelmed your nervous system and wasn’t resolved at the time. For a child under seven, something as simple as being left alone too long, a parent withdrawing affection, or a loud argument in the next room can register as traumatic. The experience gets imprinted not in memory, but in physiology.

These early imprints don’t just disappear. They shape how we see the world, how we form relationships, how safe we feel in our bodies, and how reactive we are to stress. In fact, many of the beliefs and behaviours you carry today are direct results of these unspoken, unseen moments.

And while those protective patterns may have helped you survive or adapt back then, they can start to work against you later in life, keeping you stuck in fear, self-sabotage, or disconnection.

Breathwork as a Pathway to Healing

Here’s where breathwork comes in. Conscious connected breathing (like in IMD Breathwork) bypasses the prefrontal cortex and opens access to the limbic system where these memories are stored.

Breathwork helps:

  • Activate the vagus nerve, creating a sense of safety

  • Mimic the arousal state where trauma occurred, allowing safe access

  • Stimulate the autonomic nervous system, triggering release

  • Create new associations through neuroplasticity, where old patterns can be reprogrammed

Most importantly, breathwork doesn’t require you to have a story.

You don’t need to consciously recall a trauma to release it. This is what makes breathwork so powerful, especially for those who say, “I don’t remember anything bad happening.” When trauma is stored implicitly, it’s locked into the body and nervous system, not the rational mind. Traditional talk therapies can only access what you can verbalise. But breathwork bypasses the thinking brain and accesses the emotional and sensory centres, places like the limbic system, where unresolved stress and trauma are held.

By entering a safe, altered state of consciousness through breath, your body can complete survival responses, discharge trapped energy, and shift long-held patterns without needing to relive or even remember the original event. In other words, you don’t need a narrative, you just need a way for your system to release what it’s been holding. 

I am the case study:

For years, I had intense reactivity in relationships. But not in the way people often think,I didn’t push intimacy away. I clung to it, even when it was unhealthy. Deep down, I believed that if I could get this person to love me, to stay, then I would finally be enough. Lovable. Safe.

It didn’t matter how many years of therapy I did, over 20 in total. Something in me would panic when things got too calm or too consistent. I was always chasing emotional intensity, mistaking it for connection. And beneath all of it, there was this ongoing story: prove yourself, be better, earn love.

Then, during a Breathwork session, everything shifted. I accessed a memory from when I was just two years old, the moment my parents separated. I didn’t just remember it cognitively. I felt it. The fear, the sadness, the confusion. A flood of emotion that had been frozen in my system for decades suddenly thawed.

In the weeks that followed, through continued breathwork, I was able to process and release the emotional imprint of that memory. It doesn’t trigger me anymore. I no longer attract the same emotionally unavailable or chaotic relationships. That old pattern, the one I couldn’t think or talk my way out of—just stopped.

And here’s the wild part: talking therapy never touched it. That part of me wasn’t verbal. It was implicit.

You Don’t Need to Remember to Heal:

Implicit memories are real, powerful, and often invisible to the conscious mind. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them. The body knows how to heal when given the right tools.

IMD Breathwork is one of those tools. It works with your system, not against it. It doesn’t try to pull up stories that aren’t ready, it creates the conditions for the nervous system to safely let go.

Whether you know what caused your trauma or not, your body remembers. And with the right support, it can also remember how to feel safe again.

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What Actually Is Trauma? Do you really know?