When Stress Takes Your Sight

My Story With Prosopagnosia During Intimate Deception

I didn’t know there was a name for what was happening to me.

All I knew was that somewhere inside my marriage—quietly, gradually, and without warning—I began losing the ability to recognize faces. Not strangers. Not distant acquaintances. People I knew. People I interacted with. People I should have been able to identify instantly.

At first, I told myself I was distracted, tired, overwhelmed.

But the truth was far more frightening:

I was afraid I was going crazy.

Stress warped my perception of the world. No one tells you that intimate deception doesn’t just break your heart. It can also distort your brain’s ability to function. I would walk into rooms with panic rising in my throat as I scanned the space, terrified I wouldn’t recognize someone who clearly recognized me.

By the end of my marriage, it became so pronounced that I began warning people:

“If I don’t recognize you, please don’t take it personally.”

Imagine saying that out loud. Imagine the shame of it. The humiliation you brace for. The fear that something inside you is unraveling and you have no control over it.

At the time, I didn’t know this had a name.

I only knew the shame, the confusion, and the quiet terror.

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The Terror of Not Understanding Your Own Mind

The scariest part wasn’t the forgetting—it was the not knowing why.

The internal whisper: “What if something is really wrong with me?”

Trauma triages. It picks and chooses what it thinks you need to survive. Chronic relational stress, emotional instability, and covert manipulation push the brain into survival mode, and survival mode does not care about recognizing faces.

But I didn’t know that then.

All I knew was that something was slipping.

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The Unexpected Place This Showed Up: A Friendship I Didn’t Realize I Already Had

Years after my divorce and long after the fog began to lift, I met a woman named Karla.

We became friends slowly, and created the kind of friendship built on mutual respect, trust, and shared work. I recognized her integrity. Her steadiness. Her goodness. I even asked her to collaborate professionally, inviting her to share client experiences with me because I knew she was someone I could trust.

I had no idea we had a history.

No idea that years earlier, during my APSATS training, back when I was surviving by the thinnest thread, we sat next to each other for 4 days of training.

This year, while talking with friends about the trainings we’d attended, I said something casually, almost jokingly:

“I remember being at the training, but I can’t recall many faces. I do remember sitting in the back of the room with someone who felt really comforting… but I have no idea who it was.”

Karla looked at me with gentle surprise,

“Kim… that was me.”

Time stopped.

I felt the shame rise instantly — hot, overwhelming, unexpected.

How could I forget the face of someone who would become such a dear friend?

How could I not recognize her when she sits in Zoom sessions as one of my most important confidants?

How had I unknowingly built an entire friendship without realizing she was the same woman my nervous system had anchored to during one of the most dysregulated seasons of my life?

But that is the nature of prosopagnosia.

It steals visual memory — not connection.

It erases images — not intuition.

It fogs the details — but the body still remembers safety.

My brain forgot her face.

My soul did not.

Without knowing why, I had sought her out over the years.

Without recalling our beginning, I had gravitated toward her trustworthiness.

Without seeing her face in my memory, my heart recognized her long before my mind did.

Today, she is a board member of NACW®, a treasured friend, and an undeniable example of God placing people in our lives long before we understand why.

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What Trauma Does to the Brain

Only in hindsight did I learn the truth:

Prosopagnosia, face-blindness, is a legitimate symptom of trauma and chronic stress.

Your brain, overwhelmed and overextended, stops cataloging neutral information like faces because it is too busy keeping you alive.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying.

It wasn’t that I was losing my mind.

It was trauma doing what trauma does:

redirecting resources toward survival.

My inability to recognize faces wasn’t a personal flaw.

It was a nervous system screaming for help.

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How It Still Affects Me Today

Even now, prosopagnosia shows up when I’m anxious or under stress. It hasn’t completely disappeared. On hard days, I still forget faces or struggle to recognize people I genuinely know including parents of my children’s friends and colleagues.

It can be painfully awkward, especially when someone approaches me expecting familiarity and my brain offers only a blank slate. But instead of spiraling into shame like I once did, I now understand what’s happening.

My nervous system still carries echoes of the years it spent trying to survive. When the symptoms appear, I remind myself: This isn’t failure. This is a trauma imprint reacting to pressure. And with compassion for myself, I move through it.

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Shame Doesn't Get the Final Word

I carried embarrassment about forgetting Karla's face; someone so integral to my life now. But when I look back through a lens of compassion and through a lens of faith, I see something different:

Betrayal didn’t win. Injustice didn’t win.

Even when I couldn’t see clearly, literally or figuratively, God was weaving people, protection, and purpose into my story.

I didn’t recognize Karla’s face, but I recognized her spirit.

I didn’t remember our beginning, but God ensured our paths crossed again.

I couldn’t see the web being woven, but God did.

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To the Woman Who Fears She’s “Losing It”

If you are experiencing symptoms you don’t understand; memory lapses, fog, confusion, difficulty recognizing yourself or others, please hear this:

You are not crazy.

You are not failing.

You are not broken.

You are surviving something overwhelming.

And your brain is protecting you the best way it knows how.

Healing brings clarity.

Safety brings memory back online.

Time in truth brings sight.

I lost the ability to recognize faces for a season.

But God never lost sight of me.

And He hasn’t lost sight of you either.

Reach out if you feel you need support: www.coachinghope4u.com