When Bad Things Happen

If you’ve gone through a traumatic experience or suffered repeated trauma, you may be struggling with upsetting emotions, frightening memories, or a sense of constant danger that you just can’t kick. Or the trauma may have left you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people.

When bad things happen, it can take time to get over the pain and feel safe again. But with the right treatment, self-help strategies, and support from family and friends you can speed your recovery from emotional and psychological trauma. Whether the traumatic event happened years ago or yesterday, you can heal and move on.

Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless and vulnerable in a dangerous world.

Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and alone can be traumatic, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.

Emotional and psychological trauma can be caused by single-blow, one-time events, such as a horrible accident, a natural disaster, or a violent attack. Trauma can also stem from ongoing, relentless stress, such as living in a crime-ridden neighborhood or struggling with cancer.

Recovering from emotional and psychological trauma takes time. Give yourself time to heal and to mourn the losses you’ve experienced. Don’t try to force the healing process. Be patient with the pace of recovery. Finally, be prepared for difficult and volatile emotions. Allow yourself to feel whatever you’re feeling without judgment or guilt.

-Don’t isolate yourself.
Following a trauma, you may want to withdraw from others, but isolation makes things worse. Connecting to others will help you heal, so make an effort to maintain your relationships and avoid spending too much time alone.

-Stay grounded.
In order to stay grounded after a trauma, it helps to have a structured schedule to follow.


-Take care of your health.
A healthy body increases your ability to cope with stress from a trauma.