Working Through a Recent Trauma

After a traumatic event, it is normal to have a hard time adjusting.

By definition, a trauma is an event where you feel like your life or the life of someone else is threatened. Of course you are going to be having a lot of feelings! You may have a hard time concentrating, have headaches, or just feel tense. You may notice feeling stressed, tearful, or even numb. It is totally normal to feel shook up and to be trying to put the pieces back together.

If you are noticing, however, that things are not getting better after a few months, it may be helpful to reach out to a mental health professional to get extra support. Even after a traumatic event, you can still live a vibrant and whole life.

If you’ve recently gone through a trauma or a stressful event, we’ve put together a list of suggestions for how to take care of yourself. Remember, you do not have to go through this alone. If you are feeling overwhelmed or things are not getting better, remember you do not have to go through this alone. Reach out today to a mental health provider to get the support you need.

1. Spend time with supportive others. After a traumatic event, it is really important to find supportive people you can be with. As humans, we are designed to be in community and being with supportive others can do wonders for helping us work through what happened. Connecting with others may look different for different people. For some folx, this may involve talking about what happened and working through those thoughts and feelings together. For others, it may just be as simple as sharing space with your friends and doing enjoyable hobbies. Regardless, make sure that you are taking time to call in your community to support you.

2. Take time to work through your emotions. After a traumatic event, it is normal for a lot of emotions to come up. In fact, this is a sign that you are alive! To help you work through those feelings, take time to journal or find some other creative expression to work through what you’re feeling. If you find it is easier to feel your emotions with others, consider talking to a supportive friend, family member, mentor, religious leader, or a mental health professional.

   • Check out the “How We Feel” app to check in on your emotions and learn some skills for dealing with them. Research shows that just identifying your feelings can help you work through them more effectively.

3. If you need to take a day off, take the day off. You just went through something really big and of course it takes time to work through it. Don’t put pressure on yourself to have it all figured out right away and take the space you need.

4. Continue to live your life. After a traumatic event, it is normal to need some space to work through what happened. Make sure, however, you are still doing the things that make your life meaningful. Get out of the house, go see friends, and do your hobbies. If you are noticing that you are avoiding things that remind you of the event, try to find gentle ways of challenging that avoidance while reminding yourself that you are safe. It is okay if you start small (sitting near a car after a car accident vs. driving around in traffic). Just make sure that you start.

5. Eat regularly. After a trauma, it may be hard to notice when you are hungry. This is because our body may have turned off our parasympathetic nervous system (which helps with resting and digestion) so that our fight, flight, or freeze response (sympathetic nervous system) can help keep us safe. If you are skipping meals, consider setting a timer and eating even if you’re not feeling it. If you are too stressed to meal prep,simplify your eating routine. Consider ordering food, getting ready cooked meals, asking friends/family to cook for you, or preparing one or two big meals for the week just to get by.

6. Tend to your body through movement. Moving our body is an amazing way to help us regulate our nervous system. Feeling hyped up and full of anxious energy? Try doing some cardio to get that energy out. Feeling tense and can’t relax? Try some gentle stretching. Feeling frozen and numb? Go for a gentle walk to help yourself reconnect with your body and the world around you. As you try out different types of exercise, you will start to figure out what types of movement work for you (and for different emotional states). Set up some time to move for at least 5 min a day (even if it is just a quick walk up the street).

7. Take care of your nervous system through paced breathing or breath work. It is normal for our fight, flight, or freeze system to be activated during a traumatic event. This system is what helps us survive difficult events by releasing hormones that help us fight, run, or stay small and stay safe. But after we have survived the trauma, we have to turn that system back off so we can rest and not feel so keyed up. To learn how to turn that nervous system down, try some paced breathing exercises or breath work to turn back on your rest and digest system (parasympathetic nervous system). Some of my personal favorites are paced breathing, box breathing, alternate nostril breathing. If you are noticing tension in your body, you can try Progressive Muscle Relaxation where you practice tensing muscles while pacing your breathing. Insight timer and youtube have a lot of great options only a quick google search away.

8. Avoid alcohol and other substances. While alcohol and substances can make you feel better in the short-term, in the long-term they can get in the way of your overall recovery, especially if you’re using them to cope. Instead of turning to alcohol, consider reaching out to a friend, journaling, or doing a soothing activity to work through what is going on.

9. If your trauma was in the media or news, take time away from excessive news coverage. It is okay to take a break to take care of yourself. Feel free to take a break from news, social media, or conversations about the event if that helps you heal.

10. Take care of your sleep. It is not uncommon for folx to have difficulty sleeping after a traumatic event (or start sleeping too much). To take care of your sleep, try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. If you are having trouble falling asleep, take time to do gentle stretches or relaxing activities before you go to bed (mindful coloring, folding laundry, stretching, breath work, etc.). If you’re having nightmares, take some time to journal and then do a soothing activity before heading back to bed.

11. Meditate. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to help reduce stress and help folx recover from trauma. If you are interested in learning more about mindfulness, check out our free resource page where there are many free apps/resources for mindfulness practice.

12. Meaning Making. After a trauma, a lot of our basic assumptions about the world can be shattered. Give yourself the space to think about how things have shifted. Take time to reconnect with your values and reflect on what is most important to you. If you are a spiritual or religious person, this may be a time to turn towards your faith. Regardless, this can be an opportunity to go deeper and explore what type of life you want to live moving forward.

13. Connect to ritual. If it is helpful for you, consider creating some rituals to help you work through what happened. Even if you don’t consider yourself a religious or spiritual person, you may try out some meaning-making practices. Some examples could include lighting a candle for or drawing a picture for a person you lost, saying a prayer or talking to a higher power about what happened, making a donation to a charity that helps others who are going through similar things, write down what happened and then sending the letter out to sea on a tiny boat, spend time with religious texts that talk about suffering (i.e. book of Job, the Four Noble Truths), meditate, practice loving-kindness (metta), or write a letter to someone you have difficult feelings with and then throw it away.

14. Reach out for help. If you are feeling overwhelmed or notice your symptoms are not getting better after a month or two, remember that you do not have to do this alone. There are trained healthcare professionals who can help you work through what happened. Reach out to us now at the link below to learn about support options through Vibrant and Whole Psychology.