We present a microscopic formulation of the memory effect as proposed by the dynamic structure model [17,18] by considering the hopping of a charged particle among two sites in the presence of a locally rearranging structural environment. The state of the environment of each site is described by a structural variable, which prefers to assume different values if the site is occupied or vacant, and it varies in time according to an overdamped Brownian dynamics. We find that the dipolar relaxation strongly depends on how the bare jump frequency nu of the particle and the characteristic structural relaxation time tau(s) of its environment relate to each other. For nu tau(s) << 1 the imaginary part of the dielectric susceptibility chi"(omega) exhibits a single peak pattern, while for nu tau(s) greater than or equal to 1 a second, smaller peak appears at higher frequencies, which becomes more separated from the first peak with increasing nu tau(s). It is suggested that this behaviour provides an explanation for the decoupling phenomenon of secondary beta-relaxations from the main primary alpha-relaxations close to a glass transition.