EFFECTS

⇐Back

How does a traumatic event affect someone?

This section will be more focused on helping you better understand the different ways that trauma can affect someone. As we know, everyone reacts in different ways and there is no right or wrong way to respond because there isn’t a “best way to react”. What is important though, is to recognize the signs and know that these reactions are normal. Those events are overwhelming and it’s just human nature to react in a certain way.

1. Why trauma affects people differently

Trauma does not impact everyone in the same way. Everybody has different backgrounds, support availability and coping mechanisms.

• Some are luckier and have strong resources, like a person to talk to or prior positive coping experiences and therefore better coping mechanisms^Ref.
• On the other side, others may feel isolated, overwhelmed and may not know how to actually handle what they are feeling.

Just so you know and feel a bit reassured, both reactions are completely valid and normal. Common reactions after a traumatic experience may include those following symptoms:

• Fatigue
• Confusion
• Sadness
• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Emotional numbness^Ref
• Dissociation
• An increase in physical tension or arousal

These are pretty common signs of distress. In some more severe cases, someone might experience anxiety for a longer period, dissociation on a stronger level or intrusive memories that just keep returning again and again.

2. Emotional reactions

A traumatic event is not something that leaves you indifferent, it creates strong emotional responses such as:

• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness

It is normal to feel those emotions after a traumatic event. However, some people may feel overwhelmed by emotions they don’t recognize. If they have never experienced something so intense, they may have trouble putting words on what they are feeling. People then become overwhelmed and because they experience such strong and bizarre emotions, they don’t want to experience them again because they directly link it to the trauma they experienced. You then start to panic^Ref because you don’t want to feel overwhelmed yet again and feeling those emotions now becomes dangerous.

3. Emotional Numbness

In some rare cases, the emotional impact may become so heavy that the mind creates a protective shield. This barrier that the brain creates is what psychologists call emotional numbness. This feeling may have multiple repercussions on your feelings like:

• A difficulty feeling sadness, fear or anger
• A feeling of emptiness
• A disconnection from memories or thoughts
• Feeling like life happens at a distance

The U.S department of health conducted research on a young woman who had been sexually abused and had pending alcoholism. They wanted to find out what she felt about those past experiences. The woman said that she felt nothing at all. This is an example of emotional numbness. Her body put all her emotions on mute to survive. Quick reminder: Not showing strong feelings does not mean that someone is fine. Trauma never looks the same for everyone.

4. Physical effects of trauma

Your body, most of the time, carries a weight that is called traumatic stress. Your body may feel some physicals reactions to trauma like:

• Sleep problems or deprivation
• Stomach and digestive issues
• Skin reactions
• Breathing problems

Sleep issues are often linked to hyper vigilance. Hyper vigilance^Ref is when the body stays alert and always ready to take on any danger. Although hyper vigilance is meant to protect us, it can cause trouble in your day-to-day life. Hyper vigilance may cause someone to overreact to normal and harmless situations because the body believes that it is threatened and that the threat is nearby. We mentioned before that people may feel emotionally overloaded. After being overwhelmed with emotions, some people may engage in self harm because they have had experiences with self harming behaviors in the past.

5. Changes in thoughts and beliefs

A traumatic event comes in and shakes up the person affected by it. As a result, someone’s view of how the world works may even alter because of a traumatic incident.

Some examples of disruption in basic understanding of the world are:

• A survivor of sexual abuse might begin to believe that no one is trustworthy because they got attacked by a complete stranger. Their brain associates strangers to the traumatic event.
• Someone who experienced a life-or-death situation may begin to see the world as unpredictable and unsafe.

These shifts can make it difficult for someone to feel secure, even in situations that are not dangerous, because the traumatic event reshapes their comprehension of these events. It reshapes beliefs about safety, trust and personal relationships. Also, you or the person concerned, may start to rationalize^Ref every situation. You might think that there is always a reason for something happening while in actuality there isn’t. In rare cases, dissociation^Ref may appear and you might feel like you’re living by your body and watching your life go by.

6. In summary

Every reaction that we talked about in this section are completely valid even if they’re less common. Trauma affects not only emotions but also the body and the mind in different ways. Understanding these responses and the effects of trauma will help you to feel more secure and comfortable with traumatic events.

Next⇒

Home