One out of every three adults experiences at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, and that event has a negative impact on mental health.
When you are involved in a traumatic event, your body creates a stress response. That response helps you decide whether to fight to run away. This response raises your blood pressure and heart rate to express how it is interpreting the danger around you.
Directly after that same experience, these feelings diminish as that fight or flight response turns off. But shock and denial kick in as your adrenaline burns off. After several hours or days, you might experience guilt, sadness, or anger. These feelings are meant to diminish with time. But if they don’t, they create a traumatic disorder that can result in depression, emotional numbness, sleep problems, concentration problems, panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares, anger, and addiction.
A child who is regularly exposed to unsafe living environments rife with domestic abuse or gang violence experiences this fight or flight response more often than is typical. This means resting adrenaline rates go up, leading to continual feelings of anxiety, problems with concentration, sleep and appetite issues, and poor mental health. The same is true of adults who experience trauma and don’t work to resolve it.
When this happens, it often results in long-term depression and anxiety. Coping with the symptoms is usually done with drugs and alcohol. But that only makes things worse.
Given the impact trauma has on mental health, trauma treatment is incredibly important. Without it, trauma finds a way of continuing to inhibit daily thought, function, and action.
Too often, people are unaware of the trauma they have experienced, especially from childhood. They might know that certain situations trigger them, making them upset, anxious, or depressed. So, they turn to drugs and alcohol to self-medicate. Overcoming addiction can be hard, but not addressing underlying trauma makes it even harder. That is why trauma-informed therapy is so useful.
Prevail Recovery Center is a South Florida rehab center that provides evidence-based, trauma-informed therapy for mental health and addiction disorders. Contact us to learn more today.