Process Your Feelings from Trauma to Manage Anxiety

When you are constantly anxious, it is hard to confront traumatic experiences and process your feelings from trauma. What can end up happening as a result is that you may avoid dealing with the situation. However, processing your feelings from trauma is critical.

For example, you might avoid talking about it with someone, so when it is brought up, you sidestep any discussion about it. Or, if you come into contact with a trigger, you try to find a way to avoid confronting it. Or, you might try, as best as you can, to avoid any thoughts associated with the experience.

Why It Is Important to Process Your Feelings from Trauma

Experiencing trauma can result in emotional dysregulation; in other words, difficulty regulating emotions like feeling sad, anxious, or angry.¹ As a result, emotional dysregulation may result in negative coping behaviors such as compulsive behaviors or engaging in high-risk activities. It can also create a pattern of difficulty in processing emotions, such as experiencing numbness to intense emotions or high levels of anxiety.

In my experience, I have seen the effects of intentionally suppressing emotions associated with trauma. I've found that the anxiety I experience can sometimes be lessened by processing emotions that are associated with trauma.

Sometimes, I would prefer not to think about them and even perhaps pretend that they didn't happen. However, the problem with that is that the impact of not processing trauma can lead to problems dispersed throughout your mental and physical health. For example, some symptoms that have been linked to stress associated with trauma include sleep disturbances, cardiovascular concerns, and neurological issues.¹

How to Cope with Anxiety and Process the Feelings from Trauma

I've found that traumatic events are difficult to put a finger on because they are inherently subjective. How we experience traumatic incidents depends on several different factors, and I've had to go through quite a bit of self-reflection to think about events that have impacted my anxiety.

Therapy helps process emotions associated with trauma and is helpful for embarking on a path to healing. I've found that therapy provides me with feelings of safety that allow me to be vulnerable when my inclination may be to avoid any emotions that cause discomfort.

Other helpful strategies I've found include journaling and practicing mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, seems to be quite helpful for me in calming the physiological symptoms I experience.

I think it is also important to remember that there is no specific timeline for processing feelings from trauma. This may take time, and I've found that self-awareness is a great place to start.

Below is a video in which I discuss the importance of processing emotions associated with traumatic experiences.

If having to process feelings from trauma is something you have experienced and dealt with, share the strategies you use to cope in the comments below.

Source

1. Treatment, C. F. S. A. (2014). Understanding the impact of trauma. Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services - NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/