Try not to use alcohol or illegal drugs following a traumatic event as a way to cope. While they can make you feel better in the short term, they won't help your recovery in the long term.
Face your feelings.
It's normal to want to avoid thinking about a traumatic event. But not leaving the house, sleeping excessively, isolating yourself from loved ones, and using substances to escape reminders are not healthy ways to cope over time.
Seek Professional Help. The stress that comes with a traumatic event can be crippling. Sadness, fear, grief, and depression can take hold. If your feelings in the first month after the event are so severe that they interfere with your regular life, find a mental health expert in your area who can help.
Using avoidance as your main way of coping with traumatic memories can make PTSD symptoms worse and make it harder to move on with your life.
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.
After a traumatic experience, the emotional toll may be so heavy that people may avoid anything that might remind them of what happened. Some people's efforts to block residual feelings of trauma may look like adapting avoidance behavior to avoid feelings of pain, also called trauma blocking.
Talking about personal trauma can force you to revisit painful memories. Forming coherent thoughts about traumatic experiences can trigger flashbacks, nightmares, and panic. Talking about it has got to be so much worse. You can heal from PTSD.
Trauma dumping refers to sharing a traumatic story without thinking about how it will affect the listener, or oversharing in an inappropriate context.
Responses to trauma can last for weeks to months before people start to feel normal again. Most people report feeling better within three months after a traumatic event. If the problems become worse or last longer than one month after the event, the person may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
No, but with effective evidence-based treatment, symptoms can be managed well and can remain dormant for years, even decades. But because the trauma that evokes the symptoms will never go away, there is a possibility for those symptoms to be “triggered” again in the future.
Smiling when discussing trauma is a way to minimize the traumatic experience. It communicates the notion that what happened “wasn't so bad.” This is a common strategy that trauma survivors use in an attempt to maintain a connection to caretakers who were their perpetrators.
It's normal, and even healthy, to vent and get emotional support from loved ones. However, trauma dumping is a consistent pattern of oversharing when one 'dumps' their difficult, stressful, or traumatic feelings on others. This behavior can negatively impact relationships, the person sharing, and the person listening.
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
In conclusion, posttraumatic stress disorder after the intense stress is a risk of development enduring personality changes with serious individual and social consequences.
People who have had a traumatic experience may develop social anxiety symptoms if they are not able to get effective treatment and recover from their trauma. Social anxiety is a type of anxiety disorder that can lead to fear in certain social situations or situations where you are expected to perform.
Trauma can change your life in profound ways. While not everyone who experiences or witnesses a traumatic event will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), those that do frequently suffer in silence.
Traumatic reactions can include a variety of responses, such as intense and ongoing emotional upset, depressive symptoms or anxiety, behavioral changes, difficulties with self-regulation, problems relating to others or forming attachments, regression or loss of previously acquired skills, attention and academic ...
The energy of the trauma is stored in our bodies' tissues (primarily muscles and fascia) until it can be released. This stored trauma typically leads to pain and progressively erodes a body's health. Emotions are the vehicles the body relies on to find balance after a trauma.
Trauma is difficult to heal from. It's meant to be. Trauma is the way that our brains and bodies adapt to an experience or environment of life-threatening powerlessness: to situations of overwhelm that are extremely dangerous to our survival. If our brains and bodies don't take that seriously, we won't stay alive.