You may recognise some of these experiences.
IN THE BODY
Physical tension or a sense of tightness in the body, headaches or dizziness, digestive difficulties, muscle tension, or changes in breathing and tightness in the chest.
Feeling lonely or isolated, finding it difficult to trust or feel close to other people, or noticing patterns in relationships that are difficult to understand or change.
IN RELATIONSHIPS
Feeling anxious, fearful, panicked or easily overwhelmed; feeling angry or ashamed; or, at other times, feeling empty, flat, numb or unable to access how you feel.
EMOTIONALLY
Getting caught in rumination, negative self-talk or self-blame, struggling with low self-worth, memory or concentration, or losing interest in things that once mattered to you.
IN THOUGHTS & EVERYDAY LIFE
Trauma can leave us feeling powerless, helpless or ungrounded, and make it difficult to feel fully present in our lives.
When the past is still present
Trauma is often talked about in terms of what happened, an event, an experience or a period in our lives. But the event itself is only part of the story, what also matters is the impact it had on us, and as such it is often this impact that we carry forward long after the experience itself is over.
For some people, there is a clear connection between what they have experienced and what they are struggling with now. For others, the connection can be less obvious. This can be particularly true when difficult experiences happened over a continued period of time, or when what we needed was missing or absent from our lives. These experiences can be much harder to recognise and put into words.
We may also understand what happened intellectually and still find ourselves responding in ways that are difficult to change or make sense of. These responses can show up in our emotions, our relationships and our bodies, in anxiety or feeling constantly on alert, shutting down, exhaustion or disconnection, anger or strong physical reactions, or patterns that repeat themselves over and over again.
Therapy can include talking over these experiences, but it does not always mean repeatedly going back over what happened. We can work with the ways those experiences continue to affect you in the present, while making space to understand the past where that feels useful.
Talking about our experiences and understanding how they have affected us can be an important part of therapy. But sometimes understanding something does not, on its own, change the way we feel or respond. I integrate somatic approaches, which means we can also pay attention to what is happening in the body and in the present moment. This might include noticing physical sensations, emotions, impulses or changes in how connected or safe we feel as we talk.
Working in this way can help us work with what feels stuck in the body, in repeated responses and patterns, and create space to move through the experience and find new ways of responding.