8 Common Impacts of Trauma
What are potential impacts of trauma?
Trauma changes our relationship to ourselves. It changes our relationship to the world, our experience of self-trust and our sense of feeling safe within our own being.
Trauma is anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves and sense of wholeness. It’s typically the result of a shocking event (or a series of repeated disempowering events) that overwhelm the central nervous system, and change how we react to feelings of threat, anxiety, and overwhelm. It can fracture our sense of safety and well-being, and imprint us with vigilant states of tracking for danger, even when we’re not aware of doing so.
To learn more about the nature of trauma, visit my article, What Is Trauma?
Let’s look at a few common impacts of trauma:
Patterns of anxiety and addiction
Trauma creates anxiety patterns that are often channeled through addictive and compulsive behaviors, as an attempt to manage the intensity of unresolved emotional, physical, and psychological shock.
We may experience an unconscious compulsion towards addictive behaviors in an attempt to silence the anxiety that arises when our sense of safety, worthiness, or belonging is destabilized.
Increased impulses to control our life, our body, our thoughts, and those around us are often a result of seeking stabilization. When this occurs, we may be experiencing a form of psychological survival, which diminishes our ability to feel the power of our inner guidance, healthy discernment, boundaries, self-trust, and trust in others.
Research studies are revealing how persistent patterns of anxiety are often related to an undercurrent of unresolved trauma and associated missing experiences and core wounds. This is why going to the root of the causes of anxiety can have more beneficial long-term gain than managing the symptoms through medicating without looking under the hood at the deeper causes.
Some people appear to have it together externally, but internally, they’re plagued with 24/7 patterns of anxiety that can present through overachieving, a high need to be in control of self or others, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, explosive anger, or compliance and submitting their will to others.
Through my own self-study, and working with hundreds of clients, I see a drive towards addictive habits as a means to manage the rising voices of shame, self-criticism, and perceived brokenness.
2. Feelings of isolation, self-doubt, and aggression
One of the painful results of trauma is feeling powerless and alone. Trauma fuels shame. Thoughts and internal voices of self-doubt can become so familiar that our perception of ourselves becomes increasingly skewed, diminished, and fragmented.
In my own journey, I noticed significant patterns of taking projections of others, such as disappointment and criticism, inward into self-blame. This subconscious pattern of doubting my instincts had isolated me from my own inner authority and power. Early in life, I had learned to swallow others’ projections of pain, in order to avoid feeling cast away or exiled. I took others’ judgments of me as an accurate reflections of myself. Unraveling childhood messages and patterns, as adults, takes a laser sword of light to recognize and dismantle unconscious patterns at subtle levels.
If we’re not pointing blame inwards, then the alternative off-loading unresolved pain and intense emotions is through aggression turned outward as blame, ridicule, humiliation, and shaming of others.
3. Extreme numbness or overwhelm with sensations
People suffering from unresolved trauma dance along the spectrum of two extremes:
A struggle to access emotions and body sensations:
Unresolved trauma can make it difficult to feel our emotions and access our body sensations. It may be easy to think, rationalize, speculate, and use the brain in response to stress, while our physical sensations and emotions are more challenging to access.
If we’re heavily reliant upon our intellect, we may miss opportunities to discharge and shake it off because we’re compelled to protect ourselves by "keeping it together,” or having all the answers. Or, we may habitually defend against others’ feedback about our impact or unconscious behaviors that cause disconnection.
These strategies can cause a further loss of access from our body intelligence, which is a key source to our healing process. And it can push others away or build a reputation of being scary, defensive, or arrogant when really, we’re wounded, scared, and protecting ourselves, often without conscious awareness.
A constant dialogue of sensations from the body and mind:
Unresolved trauma can cause us to feel our body all the time through chronic pain, health challenges, or overpowering states of anxiety that are only quelled through addiction and other sources of numbing.
Both extremes, and everything in between, can result in an inability to identify our triggers, and to self-regulate when activated.
4. Unexpected resurgences of bottled up emotions
Often, we unconsciously cope with trauma by suppressing the associated memories and emotions. A typical trauma symptom can be the experience of bottled up emotions unexpectedly exploding, which may appear significantly out of scale given the situation or stimulus.
Patterns of rage and blame are part of a fight strategy to manage the intensity of feeling overpowered, vulnerable, or out of control.
Withdrawing, deflecting, and avoiding our feelings can be a result of a flight strategy whereby we dissociate or flee into addictions and busyness to avoid feelings.
The body longs for homeostasis, so hopefully, as painful as it might be, our defenses will soften enough to allow the bottled up and repressed material to come to the surface for healing and integration.
Learn more about moving from activation into discharge and resolution in What Is Trauma?
5. Causes illness and imbalances in our physical and emotional well-being
I’m fascinated by the growing research studies exploring the high correlation between unresolved trauma and physical illness, challenging mental states, emotional fatigue, loss of aliveness, and despair. If you’re like me, maybe the impacts of trauma have initiated physical challenges, such as autoimmune diseases, digestive challenges, chronic pain, or fatigue. Or emotional challenges, such as feeling a persistent lack of safety, belonging, or faith in love and intimacy.
6. Trauma can be responsible for lack of boundary setting or transgressions
One of the most common causes and results of trauma is boundary violation. We learn about boundaries, long before we can process information conceptually.
Our templates of boundaries are subtle, nuanced and designed based on our environment, and what’s taught and modeled. How our needs and boundaries are tended, or neglected, is a key influence to the formation of our boundaries template. Learn more about the formation of attachment templates in How Is Our Attachment Template Formed?
Boundaries are often clouded by what we are taught we should do versus honoring what feels right.
I remember as a four-year-old being told I had to sit on a neighbor’s lap and give him a kiss. I hated it and it made me squirmy, uncomfortable, and overwhelmed with anxiety. I was encouraged to do it for my own self-interest in the coveted sparkling piece of Bazooka gum that I longed to feel dissolve on my tongue. And, for the interest of others who didn’t want me to be rude. Even after expressing my resistance to this ritual, I was told that it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t sit on his lap. A mixed message between what was true for me and what was true for my family’s self-image and perception in the neighborhood.
When boundaries are transgressed, anywhere along the spectrum, from subtle energetic to extreme physical, it creates confusion. Depending upon our boundaries template, we may be unaware when our boundaries have been transgressed until long after the fact, because we didn’t learn certain filters that would have thrown up a red flag to warn us. Or, because we’re dissociated, which means we’re unable to access the felt sense in our body of those red flags. Breached boundaries is a painful reality that many of us navigate everyday, and an empowering one to learn to heal and reclaim our power through boundary-setting.
To learn more about boundaries, you can read my article Mapping Your Relationship to Boundaries.
7. Disassociation: Flight, fight or freeze
Dissociation is another genius attempt to cope with overwhelm and anxiety by jumping out of our body. Dissociation is an automatic physiological impulse to a threat response using fight, flight or freeze to avoid the intensity.
Once dissociated, it’s harder to access our higher-level thinking, and rationalize our way out of activation and into self-regulation.
Dissociation is also a psychological experience in which we feel disconnected from our grounded, present moment self. It can feel like a spacey state of floating, a lack of presence, and a sense of fuzzy confusion.
After my the death of my brother and early childhood traumas, junior high and high school continued to fill the burgeoning reservoirs of unresolved trauma within. My brain was not available to learn. My grades were horrific. I mostly lived in states of flight or freeze, which meant that I lost access to the part of my brain (the pre-frontal cortex) which is designed for learning, problem-solving, creativity, and planning.
My prefrontal cortex, like most people with unresolved trauma, was mostly off-line without a signal. I was in survival mode, but I just thought I was dumb, which only compounded my inner critic and trauma further. I felt defeated and alone in a dark world. Eventually, it began to make sense once I learned about the impact of trauma and stress on the brain.
This is one way that trauma causes the mind and body to become immobilized. In a perverse combination of wisdom and self-fulfilling prophecy, dissociation is both an intelligent response to states of overwhelm, and yet it can also leave us vulnerable to further reptition compulsion of similar trauma, while self-fulfills painful cycles.
8. Cycles of repetition compulsion
Repetition-compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats, or reenacts a familiar event, over and over again. This "re-living" can also take shape in dreams, during which the psyche offloads memories and feelings associated with earlier wounds.
We repeat experiences to seek a new outcome and resolve the underlying pain. It’s our intelligent attempt to rewrite history and integrate the fragmentation of trauma.
Our core wounds will attract specific people and relationships to help us integrate what's been fragmented within us. As an adult, repetition compulsion can play out through a love interest who, by definition, will possess at least some of the emotional deficits or traits associated with painful relationship imprints from childhood.
Ideally, we heal trauma in the loving presence of others who can make room for whatever we are feeling, without judgment or projection. Yet, not everyone is available for this type of support, especially if they’re traumatized too, afraid of what our feelings activate in them, or more interested in fixing and moving on as quickly as possible.
Remember the definition of trauma? Anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves. Not all repetition-compulsion is a result of trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder, and yet, if we were to dissect our patterns of repetition, it’s likely that many of them root from experiences during which parts of ourselves were banished or fragmented for safe-keeping from further violations, exposed vulnerability, and powerlessness.
Healing trauma and reclaiming our power
Often, we’re not aware that challenging circumstances in the present are actually manifestations of something traumatic, unresolved and rooted in our past. How can we resolve trauma and repetition-compulsion?
With self-awareness and personal responsibility, anything becomes possible. To welcome everything is a significant marker for healing. We can heal and transform the pain of the past. We can gain mastery and become more integrated into the mind, body, and spirit.
My working hypothesis is that we can make a shift from a painful habit of repeat and reinforce, and instead, rewire the brain by consciously choosing to repeat and repair. We can integrate our core wounds with self-reflection and personal ownership, making courageous new choices and through our relationships with others.
The key ingredient is being held by a nonjudgmental and safe container that is built on trust, empathy, and vulnerability. As we interrupt and address outdated reactions, a new response begins the rewire in our brain and heals our missing experiences.
Extensive neuroscience research indicates that our brain has neuroplasticity — the brain is pliable and has the capacity to rewire neural pathways, including our beliefs and mind-body patterns.
There is an evolutionary process at play here. We are ever-evolving creatures, and our natural state of being is Love. Our entire being longs to remember our wholeness. By repeating core wounds, we’re subconsciously seeking to reclaim lost aspects of ourselves.
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?
If you’d like to continue to explore the journey of addressing and healing trauma, I’ve written a series of articles on the topic:
Next:
Self-Acceptance Power
What Is Trauma?
How Does A 'Dark Night Of The Soul' Catalyze Our Integration & Healing?