Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect.
flashbacks. nightmares. repetitive and distressing images or sensations. physical sensations, such as pain, sweating, feeling sick or trembling.
When faced with a life-threatening injury, the body redirects blood to try to save the brain and heart. This may rob the intestines and lungs of oxygen and other vital substances. Doctors can give the patient blood and other fluids to prevent damage to other organs.
That is because the experience of stress, particularly traumatic stress, can trigger active survival responses of fight, flight, or freeze. When your body can't activate or complete these responses, those sensations become trapped in your nervous system.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.
The symptoms of unresolved trauma may include, among many others, addictive behaviors, an inability to deal with conflict, anxiety, confusion, depression or an innate belief that we have no value.
Mindful breathing, meditation and exercise are all methods you can try now to mitigate the effects of an overactive nervous system. If you choose to work with a therapist for assistance, they might use their knowledge of polyvagal theory to bring your body back to its natural state of healthy homeostasis.
Trauma sensitizes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the body's central stress response system. You can think of this as the juncture of our central nervous system and endocrine system, which makes us more reactive to stress and more likely to increase the stress hormone cortisol.
Blunt trauma includes falls, road traffic crashes; crush injuries, assaults (punches, kicks) and burns. Penetrating trauma involves shooting, stabbing or falling onto a sharp object (known as impalement).
There are actually 5 of these common responses, including 'freeze', 'flop' and 'friend', as well as 'fight' or 'flight'. The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear. Understanding them a little might help you make sense of your experiences and feelings.
The normal healing and recovery process involves the body coming down out of heightened arousal. The internal alarms can turn off, the high levels of energy subside, and the body can re-set itself to a normal state of balance and equilibrium. Typically, this should occur within approximately one month of the event.
The most common areas we tend to hold stress are in the neck, shoulders, hips, hands and feet. Planning one of your stretch sessions around these areas can help calm your mind and calm your body. When we experience stressful situations whether in a moment or over time, we tend to feel tension in the neck.
Unresolved trauma puts people at increased risk for mental health diagnoses, which run the gamut of anxiety, depression and PTSD. There are physical manifestations as well, such as cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure, stroke or heart attacks.
Emotional Trauma Symptoms
Psychological Concerns: Anxiety and panic attacks, fear, anger, irritability, obsessions and compulsions, shock and disbelief, emotional numbing and detachment, depression, shame and guilt (especially if the person dealing with the trauma survived while others didn't)
“In the face of physical or emotional pain, or a traumatic incident, our sympathetic nervous system has three responses: fight, flight or freeze. Emotional numbing is freezing. Our brain shuts down as a protective response to keep us safe when our nervous system is overloaded,” he says.
Traumatic body memories are particularly observed in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with intrusively re-experienced traumatic life events that manifest in the form of somatic flashbacks including physical sensations such as smells, tastes, pain, haptic experiences, pressure or sweating.
Studies suggest that trauma could make you more vulnerable to developing physical health problems, including long-term or chronic illnesses. This might be because trauma can affect your body as well as your mind, which can have a long-term impact on your physical health.
From our extensive trauma-related research, we now recognize that unaddressed trauma is the hidden cause of most preventable illnesses, and is associated with eight of the 10 leading causes of death, including heart, lung and kidney disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, suicide, and accidental overdose.