Gain Clarity & Self-awareness by Healing From Past Trauma

Unresolved trauma can manifest in feeling overwhelmed or confused about life years and decades after the trauma occurred. Healing from trauma can help you succeed, be more focused, and have greater clarity — even in areas seemingly unrelated to the trauma itself.

Key points

Feeling overwhelmed or lacking clarity can often be traced back to unresolved trauma.

Trauma disrupts your capacity to learn essential skills and function effectively in life.

Trauma plays a role in emotional dysregulation.

Healing from trauma can improve all areas of your life.

Overwhelm and lack of clarity can often be traced back to unresolved trauma

At times of significant change or transition in life, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed or uncertain. These feelings or lack of clarity can be especially pronounced when you face important decisions that can determine the trajectory of your life, such as whether you should marry your long-term partner or relocate for a particular job. For many people, those feelings of being overwhelmed or confused tend to subside as you figure out what you want. For some of us, however, it can be very difficult to figure out what are our values and what we want. Without clarity, junctures where we need to decide often become overwhelming.

Is feeling overwhelmed and unsettled a common theme in your life? Emotional discontent is very often rooted in unresolved trauma that can continue to affect your life long after actually experiencing the traumatic event or events. Trauma can have a profound effect on your emotional and mental well-being, and lead to confusion, feeling overwhelmed or unsettled, and feeling unfocused.

Trauma disrupts your capacity to learn essential skills and function effectively in life

Trauma takes different forms and affects everyone differently. Trauma can be caused by a one-time event such as a car accident or experiencing a natural disaster, or it can be a series of recurring exposures to trauma.

Trauma in early childhood, sexual abuse, assault, and exposure to violence, all have lasting effects on our sense of self. Trauma destabilizes your sense of safety and security in the world, which disrupts critical brain functioning and interferes with your capacity to learn, engage in critical thinking, and develop the basic skills you need to function effectively in everyday life. When you don’t develop these skills early on, you notice the effects in both emotional and practical ways over the years, but might not always realize that all the difficulties you so often struggle with can be traced back to trauma.

The role of trauma in emotional dysregulation

Trauma experienced early on in childhood is one of the biggest risk factors for subsequent emotional distress and mental illness. Traumatic experiences disrupt your emotional regulation and lead to a range of psychological and physical symptoms, such as hypervigilance, irritability, sleep disturbances, and can even chronic pain. This means that trauma can cause emotional disturbances such as depression or anxiety, and also physical ailments such as chronic pain. Trying to treat these symptoms without addressing the underlying trauma rarely results in any lasting significant improvement. Building the ability to live a calm and fulfilling life requires addressing the trauma in your past.

Healing from trauma is important for your emotional wellbeing

Healing from trauma is essential for your emotional well-being, and your capacity to function effectively in everyday life. Unresolved trauma has a profound and lasting effect on your physical, emotional, and mental health, and impairs your executive functioning and your capacity to enjoy your life. By addressing the effects of trauma, you can begin to resolve past experiences, develop new coping strategies, and improve your emotional regulation. Working to resolve past trauma does far more than just address the trauma itself!

Healing trauma can also improve other areas of your life

What many people find surprising is that healing from trauma doesn’t just improve the particular area of life where the effects of their trauma are most obvious. In almost all cases, healing your trauma also raises your ability to thrive in multiple dimensions of your life, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Addressing trauma can be compared to healing one organ in your body. When that one organ functions better, the effectiveness of surrounding organs and the interconnected bodily processes will improve at the same time. So too in your emotional life. Healing from trauma enables improved functioning in other areas of your life, including in your most important relationships. By healing your trauma, you are likely to find that your relationships are more relaxed and more fulfilling, your headspace more focused, and your life is just better and more enjoyable.