How Trauma Affects Your Mental Health
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From time to time, we all experience unfortunate events, situations, and traumas. Although traumas might involve physical injuries and damage, they can also be emotional. If unaddressed, the results of these emotional experiences can last for years. Understanding how your trauma impacts your daily life can allow you to feel more patient and extend compassion towards yourself.
What is Trauma?
Emotional and psychological trauma results from incredibly stressful events that disrupts your sense of security, making you feel helpless and in a danger. Psychological trauma can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people. Traumatic experiences can be a threat to life or your safety, or any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed, violated, and isolated, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. What determines if an experience is traumatic is subjective and is determined by the emotional response of the person who experienced the event. What's traumatic to one person could be a bump in the road for another. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized. While traumatic events can happen to anyone, you’re more likely to be traumatized by an event if you’re already under a lot of stress, have recently suffered a series of losses, or have been traumatized before— especially if the earlier trauma occurred in childhood.
Here are a Few Common Symptoms of Trauma:
Avoidance of trauma reminders, including memories
Nightmares and other sleep problems
Self-blame, shame, guilt regarding the traumatic event
Irritability, anger, and other negative emotions
Flashbacks
How Trauma Impacts Your Daily Life:
Most people aren't aware how trauma impacts their daily lives. Often post traumatic experiences include strong feelings of anger, fear, guilt, sadness, or grief in the days and weeks following trauma. It’s not uncommon for you to develop mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. Trauma can change your perspective and outlook on many levels, and this new sense of self-awareness can affect the way you engage with family and friends and in your normal, everyday situations.
Having these feelings may make you feel alienated, irritable, or unable to relate when you spend time with others, which may make you feel like withdrawing. You may also find it difficult to jump back into a “normal” routine, which can have a real impact both at work and at home.
How to Heal from Trauma:
Living in the aftermath of trauma can be incredibly stressful, and living in a state of perpetual stress can cause physiological reactions that give rise to a variety of other symptoms. It's important to know that there is no "abnormal" reaction to trauma and you aren't on a deadline to heal. Healing from traumatic experiences is possible, if you have the right supports in place.
Here are a few things you can try right away:
Therapy: The stigma around therapy is beginning to wane, allowing Black women to seek help to learn how to cope with stress, process your trauma, and develop the skills you need to live a healthy life. If your trauma is more complex, find a therapist who specializes in EMDR, Somatic Therapy, and CBT
Let yourself cry. If you feel emotions building up inside you, it’s quite natural to want to release them by having a good cry. Crying will provide some relief and help you leave some of your pain behind you. Go ahead and cry.
Connect to a source: Don't isolate! Now is the time to stay connected to a support group, friend group, or support system that can hold space for you. Spiritual practices and community spaces work as well.
Be gentle with yourself: Allow yourself to feel what you feel when you feel it. Acknowledge your feelings about the trauma as they arise and accept them.
Take care of your health: Trauma can lead to unhealthy practices like substance abuse, overeating, etc. Be sure to be mindful of how you're treating your body during the aftermath of a traumatic experience.
Did you find this helpful? Let’s keep the conversation going. Here’s how you can connect with Anxious Black Girls™.
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