“kapag babae ka, kahit ibinigay mo na ang lahat sa anak mo, pati puso’t kaluluwa mo, di pa rin sapat na tawagin kang mabuting ina. sana pwede nating sabihing, tama na. hanggang diyan na lang pagiging nanay ko.”
26 years ago, ANAK was released in cinemas.
Grow up watching your parents fight, and by age 12 your brain looks like a soldier's coming home from war. The same alarm circuits keep firing whenever someone gets angry near you. None of these kids were diagnosed with anything. Their brains had already changed.
Scientists at University College London scanned 43 kids in 2011. Twenty had documented family violence at home. When the researchers showed them photos of angry faces, the danger-detection parts of their brains fired exactly like they do in combat soldiers. The kids' brains had quietly learned, before they could put it into words, that anger means danger and danger can come from anywhere in the room.
That study was about violence. But Martin Teicher's lab at Harvard's McLean Hospital has spent decades showing yelling alone does similar damage. Verbal abuse from parents physically changes the parts of the brain that handle language and sound. The long-term hit on adult mental health is about the same as being hit, or watching one of your parents get hit.
And this is common. In 2024, UNICEF estimated 400 million kids under 5, about 6 in 10 globally, regularly face violent discipline at home: yelling, hitting, or both. In a Portuguese study of more than 5,000 ten-year-olds, 57.7% reported a household member regularly shouting or yelling at them. It was the single most common bad thing in their lives.
Teicher's team also found that the brain's memory and stress center physically shrinks by about 6% in young adults who were maltreated as kids. Vietnam combat veterans with chronic PTSD show roughly the same drop, about 8%, in the same area.
The damage doesn't stay in the lab. The CDC's most recent youth survey linked 89% of teen suicide attempts and 85% of teen suicidal thoughts to bad experiences before age 18.
But the same brain that absorbs fear can absorb safety. Romanian orphans moved into stable foster homes recovered real ground. Across decades, Teicher's research has shown that warm, predictable parenting physically builds up the part of the brain that helps a kid stay calm, and quiets the alarm system over time.
A child remembers the fights. They also remember who came back to fix things afterward. Both leave a mark.
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.