How Traumatic Events Can Lead to Anxiety and Depression
Life is full of unexpected surprises and events, and many of the situations you will go through will not be positive ones. Negative, or bad, events are often referred to as traumatic experiences. While many people go through bad events, these situations can leave a lot of people with depression and anxiety. Feeling depressed and anxious from traumatic experiences is quite normal, but these experiences don't have to affect you like this forever. Here are a few things to understand about this.
The Feelings Traumatic Experiences Can Cause
While everyone deals with hard events in life in different ways, many people experience one or more of the following feelings afterward.
- Numbness, almost like the event did not really happen
- Denial of the event
- Sadness
- Confusion
- Changes in moods
- Painful memories, flashbacks, or nightmares
- Isolation
- Inability to concentrate and focus
- Problems sleeping
These are all normal feelings and emotions; however, one bad event in life will not necessarily leave you feeling hopeless, sad, and depressed for the rest of your life.
Reasons Trauma Can Affect a Person Forever
When people are affected by traumatic experiences, they have a choice of how to respond. You may not have had a choice with what happened to you or what you went through, but you have the choice with how you take the situation from here on out.
One of the reasons some people deal with anxiety and depression for decades after a bad event is because their thought patterns and experiences may not have been dealt with. If you do not deal with the problem in good, healthy ways, your brain may never be able to process the right way to think about the situation. This is what can lead to a life full of depression, stress, and anxiety. Keep in mind, everyone goes through difficult situations, but you can make it through your experiences stronger and better off.
Ways to Deal with Traumatic Experiences
If you are struggling with anxiety or depression from an event that happened many years ago, you can overcome these feelings with the right help. The first thing you should do is seek help from a counselor that specializes in anxiety and traumatic experiences. Counseling can be one of the most effective solutions for treating anxiety, and here are a few ways it can help.
You will have the freedom to talk about the event—If you have never fully revealed the details of the event, then they may be bottled up inside your brain, and this can have many negative effects on your mood and your health. When you start meeting with a counselor, you will hopefully at some point feel comfortable enough to share the painful details of your story, and this will be the starting point of the healing process.
You will learn the truth in the situation—You may never find out why you went through the event you went through, but a good counselor can help you understand important truths relating to the experience. This can include learning the truth that what happened was not your fault. You may also learn that this event does not represent who you are today.
You can find ways to move on—Counseling can also be helpful for offering encouragement for you to move on and get involved with the right people, groups, and organizations. Finding resources is vital for dealing with trauma from life, and this could help you tremendously.
Struggling with painful emotions from past events can be hard, but you can get past this. To learn more, contact a counseling center such as Trauma Counseling today to schedule an appointment.
Share