PSYCHOLOGY

Unresolved Trauma? — How to Know You’re Not Healed

Telltale signs that you have more work to do.

Trauma triggers can feel like a skipping rock across the pond of your life.

Unresolved trauma can hit you when you’re calm, seemingly out of nowhere. Skipping across your calmness, casting ripples that affect you, and often, everything around you — your relationships, your job, your sleep.

It’s not really that poetic. In fact, it’s downright ugly at times. Sometimes, it’s clear you have lots more healing work to do.

But what if you think you’re healed up? You’ve done the work, wrote the journals, had the conversations, cried until you were out of tears, and even after all this time has passed, your trauma still affects you.

It’s been months or years or decades. So, why do you feel like there’s something that’s still not right?

It’s Time to Re-Address Your Past Trauma(s)

Why did that person just set you off? Why are you crying in the car at lunch break and aren’t really sure why you’re upset? Are you depressed? Maybe.

But it could also mean a bit of unresolved trauma is being dislodged, cast across you — skip, skip, skip. Then you’re left trying, again, to settle the waters.

If you’re nodding a long, or feeling the prick of a tear in your eye right now, don’t worry. It’s quite normal for traumas to resurface and for you to feel unsettled.

Imagine an old injury to your body that flares up from time to time. Your spirit, your heart, your mental health, your internal wellness — are these not part of your body, as well? When old “injuries” begin to feel pain, we stop what we’re doing and tend to that need for our bodies — and this should also go for our emotional wellness.

It’s ok to not be ok.

The Size of Trauma

Your unresolved trauma can be a boulder, a pebble, a skipping stone — no matter its size, it must be dealt with. And here’s where I should point out that traumas come in all shapes and sizes — and that none of us can blame another soul for how their body, mind, and spirit are affected by the traumas they carry. Trauma, pain; they are indiscriminate. One small trauma can ruin a life just as quickly as one large one can.

✅ Years of abuse — We’ll skip the details here. No one wants to see that shit in print.

✅ Childhood schoolyard bullshit — You know the type. The name calling. The teasing. The bruises.

✅ That one time your mother forgot you in the grocery store while you gazed at the round colored balls of chewing gum, just waiting to roll down that silver slide to your cupped hand. Momma didn’t have a dime. She was short-tempered with you, and then in her haste to get everything to the car — she left you in the store by mistake.

✅ That time your sister threw a spider in your face.

✅ That time your car slid off the road and you felt so out of control.

✅ Those hospital stays when you were four.

✅ That time Santa winked at you and it just felt terrible and scary.

Traumas, you must know, can appear small and unintimidating, or they can be large and criminal or life-altering — the point here is to not feel guilty if your particular wound (or wounds) do not look like someone else’s. The size of your trauma isn’t important. Nor is the duration of your pain.

What matters right now is how it is affecting your present-day sense of comfort, joy, stability, confidence.

Trauma and Your Mind

The old adage “sticks and stones may break my bones but words may never hurt me” is likely one of the dumbest and most innacurate sayings of all time. While it may help someone to thwart hurtful words and try not to let them “stick”…this saying is essentially the fingers in the ears, the avoidance tactic, that only served in a moment of utter panic when you were a child.

As an adult, you need better coping skills than fingers in the ears or head plunged into the sand.

There are a variety of things that have hurt you — words, violence, shocks to the psyche, abandonments, losses, and even medical traumas. There are so many ways our bodies can be hurt — and thanks to the miraculous healing nature of our bodies, those wounds may heal up, leaving us with tender spots or scars.

But what about the mind and heart?

Traumas of the mind and heart are not so easily diagnosed, treated, and cured or healed up. When those old wounds ache, it can be just as bothersome and intrusive as a physical wound, and even re-traumetizing if you aren’t able to navigate the emotions when they arise.

Your treatment tactics may differ for a mind or heart wound — but they are just as important to apply. Just as you would with a lingering physical injury that needs self-care and medical support — your invisible wounds also need care.

It’s when they need care that they will reach out to you in ways that may be misinterpreted if you’re standing around with your head in the sand or your fingers in your ears.

Signs You Are Experiencing an Old Wound That’s Speaking to You

• Experiencing the same feelings as the original trauma, or flashbacks to the original trama(s) (PsychCentral.)
• Physical symptoms such as rapid heartbeat, sweating, crying or trembling
• Feeling stressed, panicked, afraid, sad, overwhelmed

Some people will have a subconscious reaction to things that remind them of the original trauma. These reminders are called trauma triggers, and they can be a common issue for people living with unhealed trauma.

What Is A Trauma Trigger?

A trauma trigger is a stimulus that causes memories or reactions to severe or sustained trauma. For example:

* You get a tight feeling in your chest every time you drive past the place where you had a car accident.

* Your palms sweat and your cheeks flush when a certain person touches you.

* You walk into a medical facility and the smell brings you back to your previous surgeries, making you feel nauseous. — UPMC Healthbeat

Unresolved Trauma

Is there some magic formula to identifying trauma veins? The striations that therapy certainly dug out but didn’t fully mine? How is it that one knows those nuggets of memory are still fortified with fear and unresolved emotion?

The key word here — and don’t you launch into a right-wing assault on this word, there’s no place for that in this conversation — is triggers. Yes, even that word these days is triggering. But I mean this in the therapeutic sense of the word. Unresolved trauma is heavy, weighted on your soul. And you can feel that.

When some unsuspecting person or event or word or glimpse of sensory detail brushes against you in your present day — it dislodges those pebbles of pain. Stirs them up a bit. And if you are especially triggered…the skipping rocks starts and you spend your precious present-day time trying to calm those waters all over again.

So, what’s stirring you up? What’s dislodging your pain and making you feel so unsettled — or worse, making you lose your shit in the breakroom on some poor, unsuspecting coworker who simply said What’s up with your hair today, Sue?

Helpful Trigger-Identifying Exercise

Here’s an exercise that may help you to identify exactly what’s pulling you backward — toward your unresolved past trauma, instead of allowing you to navigate your current days feeling confident and healed. There is no medical science here — no fancy psychology terms — no diagnoses to tuck into the folder on your health…simply an easy exercise to help you identify where you need work.

I began doing this for myself years ago and learned that it really works for me. Perhaps, it will help you too.

Step One: Be Mindful

For the couple of years after I left a toxic relationship, I kept getting those “here are your memories” things from Facebook. (Facebook — Fix your algo so it recognizes breakups and bereavements…um-kay?)

Those pictures always set me back in my healing, but I also realized something else was going on.

You realize at some point that your thoughts have gone a little dark, scary, or anxious. When this happens — stop everything you are doing.

Your brain is re-visiting a trauma response and you may have experienced a trigger.

Step Two: Trace Your Thoughts & Current Sensory Input Back to the Pain

Be mindful in this moment. Retrace your steps…what were you doing, what happened, who called, what exact memories popped into your head…when the anxiety started.

What was the beginning thought that pushed you into over-thinking, ruminating, pacing, sweating, crying or other anxious behavior. If you quietly, patiently, mindfully retrace your steps, you can often find the trigger that put you into a negative mental space.

When you identify the trigger, you can supply yourself with the positive self-talk and clarity you need to process it more logically, rather than with an emotional or trauma response. Do this quickly, then do something else. Anything else that feels calm, safe, and good. This ackowlegment of your pain and then redirection to something more positive will help train your mind to focus on the forward momentum of healing, rather than ruminating and being controlled by those trauma reactions.

It’s empowering to take conrol of your own body’s trauma responses.

Identify When You Become Unsettled

Part of mindful trauma processing like this is to recognize your body and mind’s reactions to the triggers and identify the initial moments of disruption.

When you begin to become unsettled, once again, address the trauma with all of those wonderful tools you learned in therapy.

Address the Pain Directly

Running from pain makes it worse. It really does. As someone who has been through more than her fair share of trauma, I have learned to address the pain directly. This makes me feel in control when emotional disruption tries to sap my spirit and my strength.

And if the tears simply need to come so you can feel better, do that mindfully and intentionally. (I sit in the car and blast live Counting Crows songs and cry for a few minutes. Works every single time. Then, tears wiped, music off, back to my life that I love.)

Although our instinct may be to bury the past, minimize, or avoid our pain, feeling the feeling of what happened to us can actually lead to healing. It can help us separate our early experiences from the present day and identify the negative overlays these experiences have on our current lives, including our physical health and relationships. — Dealing with Unresolved Trauma, Psychology Today

Moving Forward | Healing Your Unresolved Trauma

If you’re dealing with unresolved trauma, this does not mean that there’s something wrong with you. There’s no timeline to heal your pain, nor is there some rule that says a “tiny” trauma heals faster than a “bigger” one.

How our minds heal and grow is still quite a mystery. It’s ok that you don’t have it all figured out right now. Just take the time and patience with yourself that you need to continue healing. And listen to your traumas when they speak to you through your body’s natural stress responses. These small conversations with your body and spirit will guide you toward that trigger-free living we all want.

Christina M. Ward is a freelance wellness writer, editor, & nature enthusiast from North Carolina. Christina writes about topics that help others to live an informed, authentic, and inspired life. She’s three (soon four) poetry collections to her name, and has edited dozens of others for poets around the world. Books: Amazon Newsletter: Fiddleheads & Floss Newsletter Portfolio: Christina M. Ward