Implicit Memory and Attachment: Why Relationships Feel the Way They Do

Can you truly relax in the presence of another person?

Do you find yourself giving too much—or holding back care altogether?

Is it easy for you to stay connected to yourself while being close to others, or do you often lose one to keep the other?

Do you frequently feel misunderstood, unseen, or crave more attention in your relationships?

Do you push people away before they have a chance to hurt or leave you?

Do you settle for scraps of connection, telling yourself it's better than nothing?

These aren't random patterns. They're not character flaws, emotional immaturity, or signs that you’re "too sensitive." These patterns are manifestations of implicit memories - past experiences stored in the nervous system that subconsciously continue to shape what feels safe in relationships.

Unlike the memories we consciously recall—like your wedding day or the name of your favorite teacher—implicit memory works behind the scenes, helping us perform tasks effortlessly and without conscious awareness. While explicit memory involves facts and personal stories we can consciously recall, implicit memory influences our behavior without us realizing why. It guides how we move, respond, and relate—without us needing to think about it.

This becomes especially significant when we talk about trauma.

Trauma That Doesn’t Speak in Words

When we think of trauma, we often imagine flashbacks, nightmares, or vivid memories. But trauma doesn’t always show up as a story we can tell. In reality, trauma can bypass the brain’s narrative centers and imprint directly onto the systems involved in emotion, survival defenses, and sensory information. This is why trauma can feel like a state of being rather than a memory.

This means that flashbacks can actually show up as panic in response to a certain stimuli, anxiety about or avoidance of certain people or places, chronic hypervigilance, even when you’re in a safe environment, or somatic symptoms like chronic pain, tension, or fatigue without a medical cause. These are emotional and somatic flashbacks.

How Implicit Memory Shapes Attachment

Your attachment style—how you bond, trust, and feel in relationships—is deeply tied to implicit memory. It’s not just about what happened to you, but how your body learned to respond to connection.  It's about the felt sense your body internalized about connection: Is it safe? Is it nourishing? Is it something I need to monitor, manage, or earn?

Our attachment styles are largely shaped in early childhood through our relationships with others. In the first few years of life, the brain is still developing. During this period, babies and toddlers don’t form memories in words or pictures the way adults do. Instead, their experiences are stored as emotional patterns, bodily sensations, and nonverbal associations—in other words, as implicit memory.

If you were met with consistent care, your nervous system likely internalized connection as a safe and reliable experience. But if you faced neglect, emotional inconsistency, or fear, your body may have adapted by becoming hyper-alert, withdrawn, anxious, or distrustful—attachment styles we now call anxious, avoidant, or disorganized.

These are adaptations—not disorders. They are your nervous system’s best efforts to stay safe in relationships that didn’t feel safe.

It's Not Just Childhood: Attachment Is Shaped By Many Layers

While early caregiving plays a key role, attachment is also shaped by broader forces:

Take for example:

• Your body: Things like chronic illness, chronic pain, or food allergies can complicate the experience of feeling safe in your body.

• Your community: If you do not fit the norms of your community, or have experienced harm in your community, feeling safe in your own community or trusting community members can feel fraught.

• Systems and institutions: Homophobia, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, fatphobia, and other oppressions shape our experience nagivating systems and can make us feel ostracized, neglected, and abandoned by society.

• Material resources: If material resources have been scarce throughout your life or have been weaponized against you, you might struggle to trust that there will consistently be enough of something around.

All of these layers can shape your implicit memory of what’s safe, what’s dangerous, and what’s worth risking.

Signs of Implicit Attachment Wounds

Even if we don’t consciously remember our early experiences or aren’t constantly thinking about the difficult things we’ve been through, they can show up in powerful ways such as:

• Difficulty trusting others or opening up emotionally

• Intense fear of abandonment, even in stable relationships

• Sabotaging closeness or pushing people away when things feel too intimate

• Feeling unworthy of love or connection

• Overreacting to small conflicts or perceived rejection

These aren’t flaws. These are not signs that you're broken. They are emotional learnings—ways your nervous system adapted to stay safe.

What Healing Looks Like

Your body is always seeking safety. It wants to trust, connect, and soften—but it may need support to do so.

Healing doesn’t mean forgetting the past. It means expanding our capacity for the present.

We live in a pretty emotion-avoidant culture. One that often rushes through discomfort, and rewards emotional independence. A lot of our attachment mechanisms are quick reactions to help override icky feelings like anxiety, shame, and fear. But this also keeps us from experiencing joy, connection, and the like.

If we long for safety, if we long to trust, we need to support our body to actually be with what comes up in relationships - the amazing, the challenging, and the inbetween. Healing doesn't mean never getting triggered. It means being able to stay with yourself when you do. It means recognizing that the fear you feel in a relationship might not be about the present moment—but that you have choices now that you didn’t have before.

Somatic therapy helps expand our capacity to feel safe enough to have a different experience in life and relationships.

Watch this video to learn more about what I mean when I say expand your capacity.

And if and when you're interested to try somatic therapy, reach out. I'd be delighted to see your name pop up on my calendar.