Implicit Memory, Attachment Trauma, and the “Overreaction” That Isn’t

Sometimes a small piece of news hits your nervous system like a freight train. An unexpected post. A colleague changes plans. A friend forgets to respond. A partner sounds distracted. Suddenly your stomach knots, your breath shortens, your throat tightens, and tears hover. A part of you knows the situation doesn’t warrant this level of distress — but it still arrives in full force.

This isn’t irrationality or emotional fragility. For many people in Kansas City seeking therapy for relational patterns, it’s often implicit memory and attachment trauma showing up in the nervous system.

Implicit Memory and Attachment Trauma in Adulthood

Implicit memory is a body-based memory system that develops before language (Schore, 2003). It stores early attachment experiences as sensations, emotions, and autonomic states rather than stories. When early needs were unseen or inconsistently met, the nervous system learned to predict disconnection and prepare for loss.

In adult relationships, small signals can activate these predictions quickly. Shame often arrives in the body before the mind can explain it. Shame’s physical signatures — collapse, tightness, downward gaze, heat in the face, inhibited breath — are part of a freeze/appease response aimed at preserving connection (Porges, 2011; Gilbert, 2007).

Internal Working Models and Insecure Attachment

John Bowlby called the mental templates formed through early patterns Internal Working Models. These models guide expectations such as:

• Are people available when I need them?

• Am I safe in relationships?

• Am I worthy of care and belonging?

For people with insecure attachment, minor relational cues today can activate the working models of yesterday. What looks like an “overreaction” is often a proportionate response to an old threat stored in the nervous system.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn in Kansas City Therapy Clients

The nervous system organizes survival responses through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (Levine, 2010). A snub may evoke fight (“How could you?”), flight (“I should just leave”), freeze (“I don’t know what to say”), or fawn (“I’ll fix it so they don’t get upset”). These strategies once protected attachment bonds.

Recognizing Implicit Memory in Real Time

A helpful marker is mismatch: your internal reaction feels much bigger (or smaller) than the situation. That’s often implicit memory activating.

Many Kansas City trauma-informed therapists use bottom-up approaches to help the nervous system update old attachment predictions, including Somatic Experiencing, nervous system tracking, and shame awareness work.

These approaches involve:

• orienting to the environment

• tracking body sensation

• allowing affect (tears, yawns, trembling)

• completing autonomic cycles

This helps the body metabolize what once had no support (Levine, 2010; Siegel, 2020).

The goal isn’t to erase early models, but to update them. When implicit memory becomes explicit — when one can say, “my body thinks I’m alone again” — new relational options emerge.

For Kansas City Readers

If you grew up with emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or insecure attachment dynamics, these patterns are common and treatable. Trauma-informed counseling in Kansas City, Overland Park, and Johnson County can help update attachment predictions, reduce shame-driven responses, and build secure relational capacity.

References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss.
Gilbert, P. (2007). The Compassionate Mind.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory.
Schore, A. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self.
Siegel, D. (2020). The Developing Mind.