Having a history of trauma leads to some predictable difficulties in life. This post is to help you understand some of the difficult emotions you may be experiencing.
During a traumatic experience, some emotions can feel overwhelming and confusing. As a result, many trauma survivors try to avoid strong emotions whenever possible. This response is understandable.
However, avoiding emotion makes it hard to self-regulate. Ideally, emotions motivate us to take action, address the issue, and then pass.For example, anger can show us where we need to strengthen a boundary. But when we ignore emotions, they return because we haven’t addressed the underlying need. Emotions are like toddlers—ignore them, and they get louder. The more we try not to feel them, the more they demand our attention.
When we avoid emotions long enough, we lose confidence in knowing how to handle them. They begin to feel like painful experiences with no purpose, which makes us want to avoid them even more. This cycle of avoiding emotions and feeling overwhelmed by them is what we often experience as anxiety.
During trauma, reduced activity in Broca’s area—the part of the brain that helps put experiences into words—can create a sense of “speechless terror.” Without words to process emotions, the body may interpret feelings and triggers as signs that the trauma is still happening. This can lead to being overwhelmed by emotions, impulsive reactions, and sometimes harmful behaviors.
What can you do?
Connect with safe people.
- We were created to have safe attachment with others. Our emotions calm down when we’re with our safe people.
Begin feeling emotions a little at a time.
- Practice letting them come, and then distract yourself from the emotion after a few minutes. Notice how you can have some influence over your experience of the emotion.
Put words to body experiences.
- For instance, “My heart is racing and I feel like I can’t breathe.”
- Putting words to experiences helps to show our brains that the trauma is no longer happening, which can lessen the terror the body feels.
- Putting trauma into words helps get rid of flashbacks. Talking about the emotions and bodily sensations helps us make meaning of them and integrate them into the whole of our life experience. Until we make meaning (like solving a problem), our brain continues to work on the memory and bring it up. As we make meaning, we become more used to them and the brain doesn’t keep it at the forefront of our mind anymore.
