What Is Trauma (Part 2) - Emotional Signs

In this podcast, I am sharing emotional signs of trauma from my own personal experience, as a psychotherapist and how they can affect your life if left unresolved. Healing from trauma takes time and it can be hard to find the words to describe how we are feeling. These feelings can also be part of normal life.
Trauma affects our emotions leading to unexpected and embarrassing outbursts of anger and irritability. We lose connection with our intuition, sense of self, and what is important to us.

Transcript

Hello and welcome everyone to this second talk in the What is Trauma three part series and I want to talk to you today about emotional signs of trauma.

In the first one I talked about what is trauma and my own lived experience because I truly do believe it's important we start talking because when as I mentioned in that one we can feel shame,

Embarrassment,

We don't know how to deal with it,

We don't even have the words to experience what's going on and it might have happened in the past and you can't understand why you're not feeling good now.

You may have even done some therapy but things just keep coming back.

So I'm Chantal,

Psychotherapist and Reiki Master.

Ask yourself quietly as we're talking are you finding at the moment you're not coping in life as well as you used to but you're just not understanding why because at the moment in your life you're actually doing really well.

Everything seems to be okay but what might be happening is that you've experienced trauma in the past that you haven't resolved yet or perhaps haven't fully resolved enough and things are coming up or you might be being triggered again.

To support you and to gain understanding of what might be happening for you I'm going to talk about eight emotional signs of trauma.

So number one is shock,

Denial,

Disbelief.

This is a protective mechanism that your body goes into overdrive,

You go numb,

You actually have no idea what's happened to you.

Because the trauma if it's a one-off was so sudden it can also re-trigger a trauma from the past and that's what happened for me when I had my car accident.

I just had no idea for days what had hit me it was like I was living in another world.

I didn't know how to become present and you don't actually understand what's happening for you you go into a state of shock as mentioned and that is sometimes where you can stay or you want to even stay in there that's when you freeze in that space and then you don't always know how to go out to ask for help and get support and you just remain in that.

Just know that this is normal it's a way of protecting you because whatever you knew has suddenly gone upside down and inside out.

You question yourself now who am I?

Where do I go from here?

Just know that this can happen.

Number two what happens is then you have this feeling of feeling unsafe and insecure all the time.

So even though the experience or the trauma might have happened a long time ago or ages ago this neatly feeling just stays with you this constant watching this constant feeling unsafe and you're finding now you don't want to go out in the world.

Now again this can be gradual it can take years it can be sudden for example you can experience a sense of sadness or a distress that you simply don't understand there's no logical reason for this but it's in your body that's where it is that is still residing in your body because your body remembers it holds on to things it is there and what happens is then this can then in turn create a whole sense of helplessness and hopelessness that again triggers you didn't support yourself you don't know how to connect with this this whole sense of negativity and it affects how you see yourself and how you are in the world.

So it just feels easier to withdraw because it can bring up all these intense feelings of shame.

The third one is you start withdrawing from life you start withdrawing from loved ones from society and from things that you love to do.

It's just so much easier to stay at home it's just easier to stay with yourself in fact all you're doing is possibly enhancing the feeling because you want to be on your own but you don't know how to be on your own and what it does it brings up all the negativity that's in your mind all the thoughts flashbacks and stories yet it can be hard to step back out of the home into the world because you feel raw vulnerable and you just don't want to expose yourself again you don't want to hear what people have to say I know that happened for me for a long time I was the extroverted one I was the one that could go out and socialize I had such fun and joy and then literally nothing I didn't want to go out I didn't want to speak I didn't want to do anything and that frightened me and what that does is then it perpetuates this whole sense of anxiety helplessness and hopelessness so it takes time to be able to discern when you want to go out and then you can push yourself and enjoy or when it's time to just to stay home that takes time to work out it takes patience because when you can start discerning what happens is you're coming from that beautiful place that means that you're coming back into yourself into your own strength and trust in yourself the fourth one is that you start to lose interest in things that you love doing you no longer want to go for walks create cook so many things that you might not want to do you've just lost interest in all those things people you love in life which brings us then to the fifth one because when that happens what is you're doing you are micromanaging everything you're really really tightly controlling your life you have to control everything right down to every single little detail you need to keep yourself safe and this is one way of doing it because if you don't that fear comes up that hyper vigilance that constant watching so it takes time to be able to expand out again to feel safe to not micromanage and allow things to happen spontaneously to have fun again to play and if you find that you do trigger back into that space of fear and anxiety you now know you've got the tools where you can go and get support and help yourself because that's what it's all about is trauma it's learning to manage that having the tools and modalities to support you so when something happens you can step back into your life the sixth one is self-worth you lose your sense of self you lose your self-worth your confidence you no longer have self-esteem you actually don't know who you are anymore you don't know how to draw on that inner depth you no longer feel confident to walk out the door or excited and what that does it can affect your life how you are with your family with your children your career your business your friends because you're forever doubting yourself now you're forever second-guessing yourself and you're forever pleasing others because you don't know how to set your boundaries and you're needing others to do things for you and you're not going to be doing things for you because you no longer have to take responsibility you know how to take control of your life and that can be a really hard one to get to understand because you think you are but you may not be and i have to say that was my experience i really thought i was taking responsibility in my life but when i look back now i realized i was absolutely what you call abdicating rather than taking responsibility i was giving it to others and handing it over because i just simply couldn't do it i was too tired and too distraught and part of that was because i didn't trust myself my body and the world all this is heightened by the fact that your mind is so scrambled it actually feels like spaghetti and nothing is coming together you can't piece things together nothing's making sense you can't seem to bring all the little bits in your life together it creates forgetfulness it creates memory loss and constant concentration you find you're way more disorganized you really can't make sense of anything and what that does of course is creates a sense of stress which in turn heightens your fears your anxieties the nightmares and the fact that you never feel safe you never feel grounded so it's really important as mentioned that you find things to support yourself how to what they call self-soothe again self-soothe is how to soothe your nervous system how to soothe your body so you take you out of anxiety and brings you back into the moment brings you back into a state of calm because it also teaches you how to regulate your emotions so you're not going from one extreme to the other you can create balance in between but what you do need to do is find things that suit you because you can be told what to do but if it if you don't own it doesn't feel right you're actually not going to put it into place and then you're just going to keep staying on that hamster wheel going round and round and the last one is you could be experiencing anger feeling irritable and having emotional outbursts and you don't understand why because this is perhaps not you or if it has been you it just seems a lot worse but you're feeling embarrassed and ashamed how you're going to tell people how you're going to say that i'm sorry it takes so much courage to be able to acknowledge this is what's happening and that you may need help but this happens because you're constantly being triggered they're little triggers triggers out of your awareness and that's why it's so important to get help for someone to support you to understand what it is that keeps triggering you and what happens is of course these outbursts and irritability can happen at the most inopportune times and you're sitting there going where did that happen and you're looking at family friends colleagues and they're looking at you what happened here so it just makes it worse because it doesn't make sense and in fact what's happening here is is that you're actually protecting your self you're protecting your vulnerability what's actually going on inside of you you're putting on a brave face in a facade because you actually don't want people to know that you are not doing well inside that you are actually struggling let me know if anything resonates or if you feel you'd like to add anything thank you for listening and in the next one i'll be talking about the physical signs of trauma

Reviews

I found this very helpful listening to this talk so thank you 🙏

Coming out of a Medical misdiagnosis trauma from last May. Fear and distrustfullness is so overwhelming at times. Thank you for the insights.

This really resonated with me! I appreciate your insight. Thank you!