Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh didn't say Christine Blasey Ford was lying, just remembering it wrong.

"I am not questioning and have not questioned that perhaps Dr. Ford at some point in her life was sexually assaulted by someone at some place, but what I know is I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone,” Kavanaugh told Fox News on Monday.

A day earlier, Deborah Ramirez came forward in The New Yorker as the second woman publicly accusing him of sexual assault. And the second woman to acknowledge gaps in her memory of events.

Critics pointed to those gaps and the three-plus decades that passed since the alleged assaults as proof of Kavanaugh's innocence. Experts said the brain processes trauma differently from other events and gaps don't detract from the veracity of the islands of memories victims do have.

"Just because there are pieces missing doesn't mean those that remain aren't accurate, especially those central details of the experience that may be burned into the brain to the day they die," said Jim Hopper, a Harvard Medical School consultant and teaching associate.

Ramirez accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself at a Yale dormitory party and "thrusting his penis" in her face during the 1983-84 academic year. She said she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words after drinking as a male student exposed himself to her. She told The New Yorker she remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants.

Ford said Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, tried to remove her clothes and put his hand over her mouth at a high school party around 1982. She said she remembers the layout of the house and the presence of Kavanaugh's friend Mark Judge but not the location of the house.

Kavanaugh denied both women's allegations.

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What makes trauma memories different?

Alcohol and time aren't friends of a clear memory – even trauma can impair memories. But trauma can also enhance memories – the result of an evolutionary need for self-preservation. As fear kicks in, the brain goes into a phase of hyper-encoding, or burning in, details about the beginnings of a dangerous scenario, such as the onset of sexual assault. It later shifts to a period of minimal encoding, when details not commanding the brain's attention aren't readily absorbed.

The evolutionary thinking is that moments leading up to, for example, an attack by a lion are more important in avoiding future attacks than whether the lion strikes with its right or left paw. Hopper said that's why some fragments can be particularly vivid and at the same time, survivors may not be able to put an assault into sequential order or recall full conversations.

That can hold true even when alcohol is involved.

"If 'burning in' things that could predict future danger is essential, then the capacity to do that will tend to be preserved even when your brain is impaired in other ways," Hopper said. "It should be the last thing to go."

That "burning in" mechanism can lead to strong sensory memories that cause people to say, "I'll never forget" that smell, sound, taste or feel.

Liz Taylor, who said she was raped as a freshman at the University of Missouri in 1996, said she met her rapist at a concert but can't remember who was performing. Her other memories remain vivid.

"I remember so much about that night. ... I could take you to the exact room where it happened. ... You don’t forget something that intense," she said. "It is imprinted in your being."

Buried, not dead

Though memories – even fragmented – may be strong, many survivors try to avoid thinking about a traumatic event to move forward in their lives.

"The extreme emotions and sensations associated with that event, if they break into your awareness, they’re incredibly disruptive," Hopper said. "So you want to push them out because they’re overwhelming – you can't study and you can't work. But you also want to push them away because they’re a threat to who you are and who you want to be."

Chrissa Hardy, 33, said her recollection was "hazy at best" after being raped at a party at age 17, but "the worst moments of that night I can see clearly." She didn't tell a soul for 10 years.

"I packed it away in a tiny box in the corner of my mind, hoping I would be able to forget about it forever," she said. "Eventually, memories of that night would pop into my head in pieces. And looking back, even when I wasn't dealing with the flashbacks, I can see now that I was generally unhappy and angry a lot of the time. I'm sure that was due to the trauma I was repressing."

Buried (not forgotten) memories become unearthed when a person feels secure enough to confront them.

These memories are "very strongly encoded and stored, but they may not be retrieved if the person doesn’t feel safe," Hopper said.

Even when survivors recall an event to themselves or others, they may relate the story in broad strokes, not the specific feeling of someone's hand covering their screams, for instance.

"It may take years until someone feels safe enough to remember and tell someone else about those really horrific sensations," Hopper said.

Working through it

A sense of safety and support goes a long way in helping people feel safe to retrieve trauma memories.

Many treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as prolonged exposure therapy or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), focus on survivors confronting and retelling memories in the controlled environment of therapy.

"The work in therapy involves recounting those memories, and not uncommonly, as ... they’ll tell the story multiple times to give minds and bodies a chance to process the memory, there will be certain details that come into sharper focus as we go along," said Seth Gillihan, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Those details can be more or less dramatic in nature, Gillihan said, though typically they're specific aspects of a story, such as a shirt the victim or perpetrator wore, not the kind of surprise twist you'd see on a crime show.

Gillihan said that eventually, when people have the emotional space to confront the event and those feelings, they're better able to find peace with what they do remember and what they don't.

"Once they are able to do that, we kind of take the book of the traumatic memory off the shelf, open to page one and start reading through," he said, "and they might start to put together some of the things that hadn’t been clear."

Naming it

Regardless of how detailed their memories of trauma are, many women will not label it assault or rape for months, years, sometimes ever.

For Morgana McKenzie, a camera operator, her wake-up moment came filming a sexual assault conference and hearing one of the professionals describe repression due to self-blame or avoidance of the term rape.

"I remember just zoning out for a moment and watching her through the viewfinder and feeling like, 'Oh my God. That's me. You just described me,' " McKenzie said.

A few years earlier, McKenzie said, a male colleague had driven her home, parked down the street from her house and began kissing her. She froze, she said, and it happened quickly: When she tried to get out of the car, he pulled her back in and closed the door.

"You're trying to rationalize that it isn't happening to you," McKenzie said. "Above all else, this is not happening to you. You are not going to become one of the stories that you read on your Facebook feed. It just can't."

When she did get inside, she said, she tried to put it out of her mind, to frame it as a bad hookup and not an assault.

"That was all I wanted. I wanted to convince myself that what had happened was maybe not the most enjoyable, but no, Morgana, the thing that schools teach you to be afraid of, the thing that parents warn you of, the thing that many people warn women of did not just happen to you. And I believed that. For months," she said.

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Real-world reminders of such painful memories can pop up in life daily and seem to make national headlines weekly. Though many assault survivors feel the need to avoid the news and social media for their own well-being, others turn toward it.

"My go-to [when memories are triggered] is actually Twitter," Hardy said. "I know that sounds crazy, because it's also where I get death threats from trolls, but I've formed several close bonds with other survivors, so I know I can log on and see people who understand my pain processing the same news that I'm trying to process. It puts me at ease to be in a space where I know I'm not alone."

It makes her hope that some day, fewer women will have such memories at all.

"I have so much hope for the next generation," she said. "That's what gets me through the tougher days ... Women are coming forward in droves, and I think the world is starting to see that this is a major problem that needs to be solved."