Memories of traumatic events can live in your mind like an undesirable roommate: disturbing your sleep, putting you on guard, startling you, and interrupting concentration. You may wish a disturbing housemate would stay in their room, but instead they occupy common space with you and disturb your normal routines, even leaving traces of their presence in places they shouldn’t be.
If traumatic memories keep you from living out your life comfortably, you may be living with unresolved trauma. But what exactly is trauma?
The American Psychological Association defines trauma as: any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning.
10 Signs & Symptoms You Have Unresolved Trauma
Trauma is a psychological, emotional response to a disturbing event that reoccurs after the event. After a stressful or disturbing event, it is normal to need time to recover from the initial shock. This typically takes about 4-6 weeks. Post-traumatic symptoms may develop after the 4-6 week mark, including:
- Flashbacks or nightmares of the traumatic events
- Panic attacks or anxiety occurring in contexts related to the trauma
- Avoiding the people, places, things, or even emotions that remind you of the traumatic event
- Suffering from depression and feelings of hopelessness
- Detachment from family, friends, and partners
- Irritability and uncontrollable anger
- Disassociating, or disconnecting from reality
- Hypervigilance, being extremely alert and sensitive to your surroundings
- Being easily frightened or startled by stimuli related to the traumatic event
- Eating disorders or substance abuse as an attempt to cope
If you recognize these signs of PTSD, you may not have healed from a traumatic event.
What “counts” as a traumatic event?
If recalling highly stressful events creates significant emotional disturbances or disrupts your life, it could be a traumatic event. This could include moving to a new city, sudden job loss, or verbal bullying as a child. More extreme cases are also encompassed in this definition, such as witnessing death, experiencing near death, and sexual abuse.
Even if you thought you moved on from that horrific incident, avoidance symptoms are still likely living with you. Untreated trauma festers. What starts with a painful memory and avoidance of associated people or places can begin to affect other parts of your life. As many as 70% of adults in the United States have experienced a traumatic event at least once in their life, and up to 20% of them develop PTSD.
Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD because we all react differently to stress through the lens of our own experiences. A history of trauma increases the likelihood of PTSD symptoms. For example, if a taxi crashed carrying two passengers, one person might feel shaken up and wary of taxis for a short while, but the other might harbor fear and pain that grows over time. For that second person, the crash was traumatic and could develop into PTSD symptoms down the line.
More severe consequences can follow untreated trauma, including psychotic symptoms like hallucinations and delusions, or more devastatingly, suicide. If unaddressed trauma is impacting any part of your life, it’s time you get help.
Evict your trauma in 3 stages (with therapy)
Stage 1: Establishing Safety
Trauma abuses your defense systems. Symptoms develop as your defense systems kick into overdrive to protect you. In the first stage of recovery, you need to establish trust with your therapist, then begin to stabilize your symptoms. You also develop self-care strategies that help you feel safe in times when you feel the most vulnerable.
Stage 2: Remembrance & Mourning
When security and trust are established, telling your story begins. You may find that remembering and mourning your trauma evoke uncomfortable emotions. This is when utilizing your self-care strategies from Stage 1 come into play.
In this stage, your therapist will help you reconstruct trauma and transform memories through treatment best for you. Some treatments for trauma used at Austin Anxiety & Trauma Specialists include Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), and Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT).
Stage 3: Reconnection
After mourning your trauma and reconstructing new, healthy attitudes and beliefs towards the event, trauma is evicted. Now, it’s time to change the lock and keys by reconciling with your new self and with others. Disconnecting with the past allows for healing with your present and your future.
Send your trauma packing
Trauma firmly grips your life and causes you to feel unsafe, fearful, and hopeless. But you can release its hold on your life. It is important to seek professional treatment to resolve trauma and rebuild your sense of security. Contact Austin Anxiety & Trauma Specialists today and we’ll match you with a therapist who can help you send your trauma packing. We welcome you to feel safe with us
