In early 2016, Juliet Owen-Nuttall decided to bake a cake. It was something she – a trained chef and former wedding cake decorator – had done hundreds of times before. Except, this time, her mind was blank. “I had forgotten how to do it,” Owen-Nuttall says. “I know it sounds really strange but after the trauma of the last few months, it was like suddenly I no longer had access to any of the knowledge I’d built up over the years.”
Owen-Nuttall, 48, wanted to bake to help her decompress after the most stressful period of her life. A dream adventure – relocating to Costa Rica to look after horses on some of the world’s most beautiful beaches – had turned out to be a vicious scam, costing Owen-Nuttall and her husband, Daniel, 41, their life savings and forcing them to live in a small tent on the beach “in squalor”. The pain and shock caused her brain to “shut down entirely”.
“There are only certain bits I remember. When we found out we’d lost everything, I remember starting to feel severely physically ill. Then it’s all a blur.” Her memory was shattered; she describes certain periods as “blanks”, marked by forgetfulness and acute loss of basic skills – such as baking. “It’s like your mind has been shrunk down to a single, dark corridor. There’s nothing outside this corridor, and only the basics inside.”
What Juliet experienced is a common, if rarely articulated, phenomenon that occurs during points of high emotional stress, trauma and often grief. Some people describe it as a “fog”, or a film around reality; others report chunks of time being severed and lifted from memory, or reappearing as fragments. While we might associate this type of memory loss with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s not always so neatly categorised.
One psychological term for the condition is dissociative amnesia – a form of memory loss that is more severe than mere forgetfulness, and that can’t be explained by another medical diagnosis. It is thought to be more common among women than men, and can last from a matter of days to months or, in rare cases, years.
For Sophie, 35, from Hackney, this is something she struggles with daily. Eight months ago, she lost her baby during childbirth, and she has found the noticeable loss of memory since then difficult to cope with. “It’s the everyday forgetfulness that bothers me most,” she says. Sophie is using a pseudonym due to the ongoing legal dispute around her baby’s death.
In the past few months she has left her bag on the tube and in restaurants, and forgotten the names of close friends and dates. “Often, I don’t even realise until the next day. I spend half the day doing things I’ve already done, or thinking I’ve done things when I haven’t. It’s really frustrating and costly. Before this, I was impeccably organised.”
“It’s a really interesting function of the brain,” says Dr Chloé Rowland, a clinical psychologist. “Part of your brain, namely the hippocampus [the main memory hub] and the amygdala, the so-called emotional centre, basically go offline because of the chemicals, like cortisol, that are released at the point of intense stress. So you don’t fully lay down the memory of what’s happening. Then, because the memories are essentially offline, when things begin to come back they appear to be fragmented.”
Memory is such a remarkable function of the mind that, for Bernhard Staresina, professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, “It’s almost a miracle that we have a memory at all.”
Essentially, there are three stages of making a memory: encoding (the learning of information), consolidation (the process of storing) and recall (the ability to access information when you need it). “But, during these three stages a lot of things can go wrong,” says Staresina. “So, for instance, during the encoding stage, if you’re distracted for some reason, your memories don’t stand a good chance of surviving the whole metamorphosis to becoming a fully fledged memory.”
And things can go particularly awry when it comes to moments of heightened emotional stress, or trauma. “There’s a well documented effect called the ‘weapon focus effect’,” says Staresina. “If you’re held at gunpoint, all your attention is focused on the weapon, the most threatening item of the scene, hijacking all your attentional resources on to that gun and leading to the failure to perceive the rest of the scene.”
Because the memory is not fully formed, this can also lead to problems in recall further down the line. “When we’re trying to reconstruct the memory, we’re very open to suggestions or intrusions. The entire process of memory is very fragile.”
Often, the shock and devastation from a traumatic event can leave a person feeling displaced and confused, but it’s an unpredictable process, and it isn’t always linear. “Weirdly, I wasn’t like this in the immediate aftermath of losing my son,” says Sophie. “I had a long time where I felt very lucid, very concise. I did some public speaking and I was able to organise my thoughts very quickly. Then, that faded.”
During a crisis, some people experience a period of intense focus – a little like being in a fight, Staresina explains. “It’s almost like adrenaline. If you’ve been punched, you’re super sharp at that moment. It’s only later that bruises show up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the brain works on similar lines in that way.”
Those emotional bruises bring their own practical difficulties. “It’s difficult to ask for support because we don’t have the vernacular for it,” says Maggie Anne Hayes, 33. A breakup in 2018, followed by the traumatic death of her mother from cancer in 2021, left the trade union worker from north London with an increasingly unreliable memory.
“I forgot something really important at work,” she says. “I couldn’t keep up. Remembering dates – birthdays, important anniversaries – has always been my way of showing people I care. I only realised how much I used to remember when I started to forget.
“Suddenly, I had no recollection of entire conversations with my loved ones. Even this week, two years on, I forgot my best friend’s birthday. Of course, missing a birthday isn’t calamitous, but it becomes a further indication that you’re just not yourself. Even though it’s understandable that, in trying to cope with everything going on, my brain let go of a few things, it was still scary.”
Clearly, the effects of stress on our memories are vast. But, Staresina says, our brains aren’t permanently affected: “The good news is that anything that has been ‘carved into’ the brain, in that metaphorical sense, can also be untrained again.” Research shows that sleep is a crucial part of stabilising memory, and treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) – which is like CBT but adapted for people who feel emotions very intensely – can have remarkable effects, helping those “in the fog” to find ways through the after effects of trauma and stress.
After Owen-Nuttall returned to the UK in 2015, she was told that she had contracted an infection in her womb and would probably never fall pregnant naturally. It was the final straw, she says, and it triggered a “full mental and physical breakdown”.
“I remember thinking, I need to find a way back to myself. And I didn’t know how to get there. It’s like your brain is trying to deal with so much that it’s just switched off. It had gone back to basics, so I had to as well. The regret, coupled with beating myself up for not being able to remember anything, was exhausting.”
Together, she and her husband started to practise the things that had always come so naturally before – baking, cooking and studying. She had therapy and did “an awful lot of deep, inward-looking exercises”. Despite her prognosis, she became pregnant naturally three years ago.
Owen-Nuttall now works as a fertility wellbeing practitioner and has been writing about her experience, which she says is helping to unlock all the information that she once felt was lost for good. “There are still odd things Daniel asks if I remember from that time and it’s a complete blank,” she says. “It’s OK, though. It’s been hard. But, eight years on, I’m remembering more, and I finally feel like myself again. I’m very grateful for that.”
