How past traumas are keeping us from living our best life
How past traumas are keeping us from living our best life
A rocky childhood, a violent assault, or a car accident are some examples of past traumas that affect us. These and many other traumas in life can keep you from living your best life. These are all the examples of traumas that will affect us until we address them.
Research has shown that these events may trigger emotional and even physical reactions. Physical reactions can cause health issues, including stroke, obesity, and cancer.
What is emotional and psychological trauma?
Emotional and psychological trauma results from extraordinarily stressful events. Shattering the sense of security you have and makes us feel helpless. Psychological trauma may leave you struggling with the upsetting memories, emotions, and anxiety that won’t just go away.
It may also leave you feeling disconnected and unable to trust other people. Traumas often involve the threat to safety or life. However, any situation that leaves you feeling highly overwhelmed and isolated may result in trauma.
It’s not the objective circumstances that determine whether some event is traumatic but your subjective emotional experience of this event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more you are likely to be traumatized.
Emotional and psychological trauma may be caused by:
– One-time events include an injury, accident, or a violent attack, mainly if it was unexpected or happened in childhood.
– Ongoing, relentless stress. Like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, fighting a life-threatening illness, or facing traumatic events that repeatedly occur. Domestic violence, bullying, or childhood neglect are also ongoing stressors.
– Commonly overlooked causes such as surgery. The sudden death of someone close. Humiliation or deep disappointment, the breakup of an important relationship, also if someone was deliberately cruel.
-Coping with the trauma of the natural or manmade disaster may present unique challenges. This can happen even when you are indirectly part of an event. While it’s unlikely we’ll ever be the main victims of terrorist attacks or a mass shooting, these traumatic events affect us.
Horrific images on news or social media of people experiencing these events are often the source of the trauma. Seeing these images may over and over overwhelm your nervous system and create traumatic stress. Whatever the cause of your trauma and whether it also happened years ago or yesterday, you can heal. Make healing changes and move forward with goals in your life.
Suppose you are under stress or have suffered a series of losses, or have seen trauma before, especially if the earlier trauma happened in childhood.
Childhood trauma may result from anything that keeps from the child’s sense of safety which includes:
– Separation from a parent
– Serious illness
– Intrusive medical processes
– Domestic violence
– Neglect
– The unstable or unsafe environment
Experiencing past traumas in childhood may result in huge and long-lasting effects. When childhood trauma isn’t resolved, a sense of helplessness or fear carries on into adulthood and setting the stage for more trauma.
