How To Recover From Emotional Trauma
What is emotional trauma?
Do you ever find yourself reacting or behaving in ways that don’t seem to make sense or that cause you or others harm?
Maybe you keep exploding with anger, you keep ending up in relationships with emotionally unavailable people, your mind is always anxious, you are numbing out with screens or work or being constantly busy…
These behaviours are often a sign of emotional trauma, which I define as the emotional imprint left on your body, mind and soul from challenging life experiences.
There are a million different ways it can manifest:
Feeling chronically unsafe, helpless or powerless
Overwhelming emotions like guilt, shame, sadness, anger
Depression, shutdown, disconnection; feeling grey or meh
Excessive thinking, intrusive memories, cringebombs
Anxiety and tension
Physical symptoms including fatigue, insomnia, migraines, chronic pain
And then there are the ways we cope with these imbalances, turning to work, substances, relationships, busyness, control and so on to help ourselves to feel better.
Crucially, the trauma isn’t what happened to you. It’s not about the event. It’s what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you. It’s the emotional wound that was created.
And, just like any physical wound, your emotional wounds need tending to and treating with love and care.
Your emotional traumas (and the behaviours that they drive) are a cry for love from parts of you that are stuck in a painful place in the past.
How does emotional trauma come about?
What happens with emotional trauma is that something happens to us that generates a powerful survival response.
For example, we get laughed at in school and we suddenly freeze, feel ashamed and go red.
A little kid doesn’t have the resources (or support) to deal with this sudden burst of emotion and nervous system energy, so she has to hide it and push it down.
She would have needed an empathetic adult to hold her to make her feel safe, validate how she feels and help her to discharge the frozen energy in the body.
In this case, she doesn’t have that so must resist her own survival response. When she pushes that energy down, it doesn’t disappear. It makes an ‘imprint’ on her nervous system. It’s like that part of her and all that shame energy gets stuck, frozen in time in that moment of unsafety.
And that part of her stays that way—and can even get deeper over time—leaving her nervous system in a state of chronic unsafety and arousal.
Perhaps from that point on that part of her will get triggered every time she enters a classroom. The frozen part still thinks she is under threat of being laughed at, so her body will try to keep her safe again by freezing and feeling unsafe.
The thoughts, feelings and behaviours associated with these ‘traumatic’ events loop in our unconscious. These unconscious trauma loops determine how we experience the world: as fundamentally safe or unsafe, of ourselves as fundamentally worthy or not and others as fundamentally safe or threatening.
Over time, we accumulate more and more of these imprints in our body and can feel more and more dysregulated.
Symptoms of emotional trauma
We experience emotional trauma as a deep disconnect from ourselves, others and life.
The specific symptoms look different for everyone, based on their unique nervous system and survival strategies.
Some people tend towards emotional intensity (lots of emotional overwhelm and lots of ‘drama’ in their life), while others tend more towards numbness, dissociation and distraction.
Some can swing between the two.
Essentially, the body feels stuck in a state where it feels that it is constantly under threat. The felt sense of past threats echo endlessly in the present moment, unable to resolve themselves.
Rather than being a temporary, passing movement, these survival patterns become a permanent state of being.
How we cope with our trauma
One of the most painful aspects of trauma is our attempts to live with it. We are, essentially, trying to live with a huge amount of undigested emotional/survival energy looping in the background of our lives (unconsciously, most of the time).
And we come up with a host of coping mechanisms to help us deal with it:
Addictions
Anxiety
Depression
Irritability/anger issues
People-pleasing
Poor relationship choices
Perfectionism
These can all be ways of keeping that stuck emotional energy at bay.
Often, our trauma responses hide our trauma from the outside. Someone can appear to be fine and even ‘have it all’. But this can be, in fact, a trauma response: numbing out to our emotions by chasing success and outward perfection as an attempt to cope with our deep wounding.
Can anything cause emotional trauma?
It bears repeating: the trauma isn’t what happened to you. It’s what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you.
As such, the actual event can be anything: perhaps a single extremely stressful and painful event. Or it can be “small” things that might not phase some people but nevertheless impact us deeply. Or the impact of a chronically unsafe environment that we lived in for years.
Let’s give some examples:
Big ‘T’: an incident of physical or sexual abuse
Small ‘T’: getting a question wrong in class
Chronic ‘T’: living in a house where your parents were arguing all the time
Any of these can trigger a survival response that then gets stuck in the body as an emotional imprint.
How to heal emotional trauma
It’s possible to heal from emotional trauma.
However, it’s not an overnight job. It’s more like a marathon than a sprint. It takes time, commitment and courage.
Know, however, that you don’t have to do it alone. Having the support of family and friends, an attuned therapist and/or a community of practice can make all the difference in the world. We are deeply social beings and need the presence of another regulated adult to help bring our nervous system back into balance.
What we need to do is go into the body—where the stuck loops of frozen emotion and survival stress live—and to help them feel safe enough to come to the surface to be felt, processed and integrated.
It’s about bringing love, safety, compassion, acknowledgement and understanding to these frozen, stuck parts of us so they can start to unfreeze and relax.
When these loops can ‘complete’ themselves, it’s as if the body suddenly realises that the threat is over. And your nervous system can relax. You’re safe! Phew!
This is a physiological process of your nervous system. This is why you need to include the body in your approach.
Talk therapies are about as useful here as they are for helping to heal a broken leg. These issues can’t be resolved by thinking about them. You can’t heal with an intellectual conclusion!
Nor do many ‘wellbeing’ approaches work with this. There’s no yoga posture you can take that will shift decades of shame or anger.
We have to go into the body and meet these stuck, frozen emotions directly.
This is the work of somatic therapy.
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is starting to reconnect to these incomplete survival responses/stuck emotional residue from the past that we were forced to repress.
There are various kinds of somatic therapy, I’ve put together a long list here: 51 Types of Somatic Therapy.
We acknowledge them, feel them, listen to them, help them feel safe enough to get ‘unstuck’ and cease the endless looping.
There are a few key characteristics of this work:
Direct experience: we’re always working with what’s here in the present moment
Safety: parts of us became stuck because they felt unsafe, and they need to feel safe again and realise that the danger has passed - so creating an environment of safety is paramount
Curiosity: we are always coming from a place of curiosity and exploration - what actually *is* my experience? Not what I imagine or assume it to be
By concentrating on what's happening in your body, you can release pent-up trauma-related energy through shaking, crying, and other forms of physical release.
There are a few principles that govern how we do this:
Window of tolerance: this is the capacity of your nervous system to contain a particular experience without getting overwhelmed or disconnecting
Increase your capacity: by moving between a resource and the emotional residue your nervous system can grow in capacity to contain and process emotions
Transforming the stuck emotional residue: healing happens when we are able to contain and be present with our emotions/sensations without being overwhelmed.
Here are some resources I have created to teach you some core practices and principles that you might find helpful.
Hope that helps. Any questions, just send me an email (ben@drunkenbuddha.net)
