If we couldn't count on this, we would degenerate into terror. For example, if you thought the sidewalk was going to disappear out from under your feet, you would refuse to take a step. The brain must maintain the confidence that what it knows is true and stable. At the same time, the brain keeps suppressing more and more of what it knows. It does this to keep us safe in the moment, so that internal pain and external threat will be adjusted to at any cost.
Immediate survival outweighs truth.
The traumatized child, therefore, is alive but increasingly diminished. To function knowing less and less of our truth, and yet at the same time to maintain our belief in the basic ground underneath us, we fill in the spaces with false beliefs. We remember what we need to remember. We repress what we need to repress. We see what supports our view and we stop seeing things that do not.