You might not even realize you have trauma. Especially when it comes to adults, trauma can be unpredictable. Things that have one person breaking down crying can seem to roll off another person completely. In addition, even more confusingly, that same person might melt down a year later.
However, breaking down crying is far from the worst-case scenario of untreated trauma. There are tons of problems that can crop up due to unresolved tension in your heart and mind. After all, the human body is not firmly divided between those two things. Trauma to the body can change the mind, and trauma to the mind can trickle down to hurt the body.
Today, we are going to look at seven dangers of untreated trauma. These can affect your life, your health, and your relationships more readily than you might expect.
Getting Too Comfortable with Negativity
In a very simple way, trauma will cause a person to accentuate the negative. This is a survival mechanism, as humans have long focused on the negatives in their situation in order to spot threats. However, that perpetual threat modeling can become a bad habit.
Trauma can make a person constantly vigilant for the next thing that hurts them, making it easy for them to spiral into more and more defensive negativity. This response becomes so automatic that doing anything else feels unreasonable, and positivity becomes uncomfortable.
At that point, even something as simple as getting out of bed can feel like it is not worth it.
Trauma Makes You Sensitive
Being sensitive to other people’s needs and feelings can be a good thing. However, drinking water can be a good thing, and you can still drown. That threat modeling reaction to trauma can also result in you becoming hypersensitive to the pain you seek to avoid.
Suddenly, every setback is a disaster, and every criticism is a shot in the heart. After all, you worked so hard internally to see these things coming, and they still got to you.
Oversensitivity is a warning sign that your trauma might be worse than you thought.
Trauma Makes You Hold Grudges
We should clarify that in the end, it is your choice whether or not to hold a grudge against someone who wronged you. However, at the same time, the thought patterns that trauma forms can make it easier to hold a grudge than to let go of one. This is compounded by that sensitivity.
It is easy to imagine a person being buried under his or her negative feelings when every comment from another person feels like an unforgivable sin.
Trauma Leads to Obsessive Thinking
Some people are simply born with obsessive thought patterns like those produced by obsessive compulsive disorder. However, for others, that obsessive thinking comes from unprocessed trauma.
One of the difficult things about trauma is the fact that a traumatized person will want to both be the perfect, helpless victim in order to explain his/her trauma, and yet at the same time comb every detail of his/her traumatic memory to find where he/she went wrong to end up there.
Both of these components are neither right nor wrong. However, taken together they create a double-helix of potentially infinite self-doubt.
Trauma Disrupts Sleep
Stepping away from the emotional side of things for a moment, trauma can cause heavy disruptions to your sleep cycle. Part of the physical symptoms of trauma is the overproduction of cortisol and noradrenaline, two hormones that can wake you up.
These hormones are designed to get you tense and moving in case of danger. The problem is that you cannot exactly be tense and moving while sleeping. If a traumatic memory or trigger occurs while sleeping, then it will not matter what your body is trying to do. It has evolved over millions of years to override anything with your survival, even if nothing is actually threatening you.
If you have ever lost sleep to a traumatic memory, that is why.
Your Heart and Stomach Can Only Take So Much
Not that this helps anyone relax to hear, but untreated trauma can cause heart rate issues and lead to the formation of stomach ulcers. The problem relates to those hormones we mentioned before ― whether they hit your bloodstream while you are trying to sleep or are wide awake.
Over a long period of time, stress upon your heart from these substances leads to it being erratic. There is another layer to it that people often fail to consider. You see, if your heart rate rises and falls from running or exercising, then that is far healthier than your heart rate rising and falling due to stress. This is because the cardiovascular system improves along with it.
However, if your heart is being used while your cardiovascular system declines in health, your chances of heart problems only get higher and higher. In addition, trauma tends to make it harder for a person to work out as well. It affects the heart in multiple ways in that sense.
Trauma Reactions Can Push Friends and Family Away
An ever-important distinction in dealing with trauma is separating the trauma from the trauma reaction. No particular trauma is a death sentence. No matter what happens to you, it is possible for you to recover from it. However, if you react poorly to that trauma, you can make things much worse for yourself — up to and including alienating your friends and family.
Once you have to deal with trauma, you must respond to it in some way. There is no perfect way to deal with it. However, some methods of dealing with trauma, such as drinking or yelling at people, are obviously worse than other methods.
Conclusion
If you are dealing with trauma, seek outside help. Therapy, medication, and exercise can help strengthen your ability to deal with trauma. If you do not control your reaction to trauma, then it will control you.
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