Trauma blocking is an effort to block out and overwhelm residual painful feelings due to trauma. You may ask “What does trauma blocking behavior look like? Trauma blocking is excessive use of social media and compulsive mindless scrolling. Binge drinking every weekend because you are off from work.
Along with memory loss, other signs of repressed trauma can include low self-esteem, substance abuse disorders, increased physical or mental illnesses, and interpersonal problems.
The latter can manifest as trauma blocking, where someone chooses to block and drown out painful feelings that hang around after an ordeal. Examples of trauma blocking include any number of distractions, often done to excess: Binge drinking. Mindless eating.
According to McLaughlin, if the brain registers an overwhelming trauma, then it can essentially block that memory in a process called dissociation—or detachment from reality.
The psychology of blocking someone can have a harsh impact, with some individuals brushing it off while others become deeply aggrieved. This can lead to negative emotional reactions, ranging from sadness to anger and even depression. In extreme cases, it can cause a person to seek out and confront the blocker.
Other symptoms may include hypervigilance and an exaggerated startle response as well as feelings of guilt or shame. People with unresolved trauma may also feel irritable or easily angered, have difficulty concentrating and making decisions, or be prone to self-destructive behaviors such as substance abuse.
Dissociative amnesia occurs when a person blocks out certain events, often associated with stress or trauma, leaving the person unable to remember important personal information.
For some people, the tremors are big movements in the muscles. For others, they are tiny contractions that feel like electrical frequencies moving through the body. TRE® is not painful—in fact, most people enjoy the sensations.
The emotional toll of individual event(s) may become too much to bear and manifest into avoidance of anything similar to past events. This avoidance behaviour – termed; trauma blocking – has the potential to cause individual issues in recovery; especially if left unresolved.
In addition to other effects childhood trauma can have on your life, trauma can also cause memory loss. For example, if you suffered abuse at the hands – figuratively or literally – of your caregivers, you may completely block out that time in your life or minimize the memories.
Not remembering trauma can be a coping mechanism, which is when the brain protects someone from experiencing the intense feelings associated with memory. So instead of a clear, detailed memory, someone may have gaps or only remember vague sensory aspects, like a color or smell.
Unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, relationship problems and physical symptoms like headaches or nausea are some of the ways that unresolved trauma can manifest, according to the American Psychological Association.
Dissociation is one way the mind copes with too much stress, such as during a traumatic event. There are also common, everyday experiences of dissociation that you may have. Examples of this are when you become so absorbed in a book or film that you lose awareness of your surroundings.
You can help this transition with mindfulness training or breathing exercises. It's the brain's neuroplasticity that makes it possible for this rewiring to occur and for EMDR to change the way traumatic memories are stored so that they no longer activate strong emotions.
So, these three parts of the brain- the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex- are the most-affected areas of the brain from emotional trauma. They can make a trauma survivor constantly fearful, especially when triggered by events and situations that remind them of their past trauma.
Smiling is a way to “protect” therapists.
By downplaying their pain they are attempting to minimize the upset they believe they are causing. Laughing while recounting something painful says, “I'm OK, you don't have to take care of me. ' Instead, clients are actually attempting to take care of their therapists.
With PTSD and anger, common symptoms include irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation). These are typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people or objects. Another potential symptom is reckless or self-destructive behavior.
Silence intensifies the impact of trauma, and trauma that goes unspoken, un-witnessed, and unclaimed too often "outs itself" as more violence to self or others.
Filtering, ignoring, blocking, and withdrawal are all characterized as defensive coping mechanisms.
In many cases, blocking someone who disagrees with you starts a fire when there was nothing there to begin with--except for your own angry feelings. Blocking isn't just a mental health break. Use the option after lecturing someone and giving them no chance to respond and it's a manipulative move.
Blocking someone after the end of your relationship does NOT mean that you hate them, don't care or don't love them. It just means that you care about YOURSELF more. You care about your sanity and your happiness. You care about healing.