Explore how traumatic stress shows up in your mind and body using the following self-assessment checklist of mental, emotional, and physiological symptoms. The first group of symptoms indicates that your sympathetic nervous system may be stuck in defensive mode.
- _ I find myself thinking about the trauma at inconvenient times.
_ I expect the worst to happen.
_ I have difficulty relaxing or sleeping.
_ I feel irritable or angry often.
_ I sometimes cry uncontrollably or feel completely overwhelmed.
_ I feel restless or jittery.
_ I feel anxious or panicky.
_ I have nightmares or wake up in a fright.
_ I experience daytime “flashbacks.”
_ I feel “on guard” or hyperaware of people’s body language or tone of voice.
_ I experience shortness of breath feel like I cannot get enough oxygen.
_ I feel my heart beating rapidly or feel pains in my chest.
_ I sweat profusely.
_ I have frequent food cravings for sweet or salty foods.
_ I have a hard time regulating my blood sugar.
_ I get frequent colds.
_ I grind my teeth or clench my jaw.
_ I experience muscle tension in my arms and legs.
_ I have difficulty focusing my mind at work or in school.
- This second grouping of symptoms is related to your parasympathetic nervous system’s
more primitive dorsal vagal complex.
_ I often feel tired or lethargic.
_ I feel hopeless or depressed.
_ I feel emotionally dull or numb.
_ I feel ineffective or powerless.
_ I feel shame or unworthiness.
_ I feel foggy or dizzy.
_ I feel disoriented.
_ I have difficulty remembering things.
_ I find it difficult to talk sometimes.
_ I sometimes “go away”.
_ I have indigestion or acid reflux.
_ I often feel nauseous. After eating, I have indigestion or diarrhea.
_ I have been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition.
Perhaps you notice that you alternate between these two types of symptoms being keyed up sometimes and exhausted at other times.
It takes courage to confront trauma. The process of healing can feel daunting if not terrifying. Unresolved trauma has significant consequences on mental and emotional health. You might alternate between feeling cut off and feeling flooded with emotions such as fear, anger, or despair or suffer from anxiety and depression. Maybe you resort to disconnection or dissociation to get through the day. Relationships are often compromised. Your physical health may also be impacted by illness or chronic pain. You
find yourself attending to the wounds of the past while living in the present. Simply attending to the demands of daily living can feel insurmountable at times.
Having strategies to remain mindful and feel grounded is essential. My goal is to empower you embrace your true self. Mindfulness-based experiential practices will help you to develop both self-acceptance and a sense of safety. Recovery from trauma requires that you have a reparative experience in a relationship. A compassionate therapist who can embrace the confusion, discomfort, anger, grief, shame, and pain.
Together you’ll build trust, gain perspective, and find healing tools that work best for you.
Trauma survivors tend to perceive the world as if the event is happening right now. You may be triggered by certain sounds or extremely agitated at the site of an angry face.
Trauma survivor’s brains become wired to detect danger and the sensitivity to threat becomes generalized. The brain learns to generalize and be fearful of every perceived threat even when a threat is not real or not present. People who were abused or neglected during the first few years of life have the most severe trauma symptoms. The
networks in the frontal area fail to develop as a result of trauma and the individual develops a limited ability to regulate their emotions. Language-based therapies fail because trauma by definition is nonverbal. The language center of the brain is in the left hemisphere but trauma is stored deep in the reptilian brain and right hemisphere as somatic and implicit memories. Words themselves are not enough.
Credit: Arielle Schwartz
