Understanding Psychological Trauma and Anxiety

In the modern world, processing and understanding trauma can be daunting. Anxiety and trauma are often linked inextricably, and healing both can take time and support.

What is trauma? What is anxiety?

Trauma is, at its most basic level, a psychological response to distressing events. Trauma is linked to emotional disturbances, physical symptoms, and psychological manifestations. Trauma is an individualistic response and can play out differently for each of us.

Anxiety is a persistent feeling of worry, fear, or unease that can interfere with our functioning at work, school, home, and in relationships. It can involve feelings of impending doom, concern about “what ifs,” or fear of judgment and rejection. Anxiety has many different roots, and one of those is trauma. While everyone can experience anxiety at small levels occasionally, clinical levels of anxiety are pervasive and occur often.

Understanding these definitions allows us to recognize their impacts and gives us an important first step in healing.

Links Between Trauma and Anxiety

As discussed in the previous section, trauma can be a trigger for anxiety. Trauma often triggers our “fight or flight” response and puts us into survival mode. When we are on high alert, our brain is constantly trying to get back to a state of calm, and homeostasis.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), trauma incites a stress response in the body, which puts our brain into a mode of sending out signals for help. Trauma and anxiety both keep this stress response heightened for longer periods.

Our trauma also can trigger an apprehension that the traumatic event could happen again, leading us back to those uncomfortable negative feelings. This apprehension can then become anxiety.

Three Symptoms of Trauma-Related Anxiety

Hypervigilance is a symptom of anxiety and can often be linked to a trauma response. Hypervigilance is when we are in a state of heightened awareness and concern, keeping us on edge regarding what might happen in the future. This is a key factor in our anxiety responses in the wake of trauma.

Related to this is someone being keyed up. This is when someone is constantly on edge and in a heightened fight, flight, or freeze state. This keyed-up state is often associated with feeling a racing heart, high alertness, restlessness, and/or difficulty focusing on tasks at hand.

Both hypervigilance and being keyed up can keep us from focusing and therefore prevent us from functioning at work, home, school, and in relationship to others.

Avoidance is another response to trauma and a symptom for a lot of people with anxiety. Avoidance can be in behavior, emotion, and cognition. Meaning, we can avoid situations we worry about or fear will trigger a trauma response, and we can also repress or ignore thoughts or memories of traumatic or anxious events.

Though avoidance can help keep us from negative or unwelcome thoughts and emotions, avoidance can also prevent us from functioning at the levels we’d prefer.

Socio-Cultural Factors Affecting Women’s Trauma and Anxiety

For a lot of women, cultural and social influences impact their mental health. This can especially be true when it comes to anxiety. Women experience a higher incidence of sexual trauma, abuse, and domestic violence. They are also expected to carry the main burden of the family’s mental load, care for the home, and are often still expected to build careers outside of family life.

Sometimes, cultural and social stigmas regarding mental health can prevent women from seeking support and treatment, further complicating the effects of anxiety and trauma for women who experience them. These complex pressures often lead to heightened anxiety levels in women, both for those who have experienced trauma and those who haven’t.

Physical consequences of trauma in women

Trauma and anxiety can both lead to physiological symptoms for everyone, especially women. These physical symptoms can be short-term in nature, like racing heart, difficulty breathing, sweating, temperature changes, etc. Many times, physical symptoms can be longer-term and come out in gastrointestinal issues, chronic pain – like fibromyalgia – and other stress-related conditions.

Another physical concern of trauma and anxiety is long-term exposure to stress. This lowers our body’s immune response opening us up to shorter-term viruses and bacterial infections that can be harder to fight off. This long-term exposure to stress can also contribute to difficulty sleeping, which also impacts our immune function and overall mental health.

Addressing physiological symptoms of trauma and anxiety can be a key in healing and recovery of trauma and can also affect anxiety reduction.

Considerations for Treatment

Self-Care for Recovery and Prevention

When it comes to healing anxiety in the wake of trauma, we can do many things for self-care that will help us progress. Some ideas for self-care when it comes to anxiety and trauma recovery and prevention are practicing mindfulness and meditation, setting boundaries, getting moving in ways that work for you and your body, creative expression, practicing grounding, connecting with others, self-compassion, and making healthy lifestyle choices, including hydration, sleep, and nutrition.

Putting these into practice little by little each day will make a huge difference in your recovery journey from psychological trauma and anxiety.

When it comes to connecting with others, we know from studies and history that we rely on others for support in our mental and emotional health. Setting up a support system of family and friends can be crucial in processing trauma and anxiety. Having people we can rely on and talk to is a huge piece of mental well-being, including healing from trauma and going through anxiety.

Therapy and Professional Support

No one needs to endure trauma and anxiety on their own. While building your support community can be crucial for self–care in recovery, reaching out for professional help will also make a huge impact on your healing. Therapists can use techniques such as CBT, DBT, narrative therapy, and more to help guide you through the recovery process. With professional support, you don’t have to go it alone.

With CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and REBT (rational emotive behavioral therapy), we have tools to help us challenge negative thoughts that often drive anxiety and can be rooted in trauma. We explore the history that gives us the view we hold of ourselves and the world around us, which contributes to these automatic negative thoughts.

With these tools, we begin to affect change in ourselves by challenging thoughts, exploring new thoughts, and laying the foundations for healthier emotions. We learn that it is not the events and situations themselves that cause mental distress, but our internalized beliefs and automatic thoughts in response. Once we can face these, we can change them.

Similarly, DBT gives us the tools to challenge our negative thoughts, while also giving us the experience of mindfulness and gives us opportunities to change maladaptive behaviors and increase distress tolerance.

Combining these techniques in the therapeutic framework of narrative therapy allows us to work on changing our narratives. These are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about others, about the world, and about the situations we go through. In this framework, we can externalize the issues we are experiencing and begin to tell ourselves more empowering stories.

At Seattle Christian Counseling, we understand that trauma and anxiety can have a huge impact on women’s lives. Working with me in these areas provides a tailored approach to healing in times of trauma and anxiety. If you are ready to start today, reach out.

The work I do provides a safe, compassionate environment for healing and growth for women, teens, and families. As a therapist, it is amazing to be able to help women heal. I specialize in anxiety struggles in women and am here for those who need support and services.

If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out. Check out our website for more information and to set up an appointment so that you or those you love don’t have to go it alone.