Emotions I most commonly find within trauma therapy.
There are a lot of different ways you may find yourself looking to work through trauma.
You may have a firm understanding you experienced trauma. Horrible things happen all throughout life and whether you recognize it in your childhood, escaped a situation as an adult, or experienced a horrific one-time event, some people have an immediate understanding of what they survived. Others come to the realization through the help of other professionals doing the education on the definition of trauma, trauma responses, thinking traps, etc. Many of us value resiliency over coming to terms with the hurt that has been caused to us. A lot of people can be quick to say “Yeah, that was horrible but I don’t think it really affected me that much.” In all honesty, it might be true but the more than likely answer is they’re downplaying their emotional responses. Others may find out they were traumatized by listening to others describe their life stories. We may be listening to a friend label life experiences similar to ours as trauma and we had never considered the fact we were traumatized before then.
However you get to the point of needing to work through trauma, I often hear the same question, “Where do I even start?”
There is no right or wrong answer to that question and 15 different therapists will likely give you 15 different answers. If you’re asking me, my answer is emotional education. Brene Brown does a lot of research and education on emotions, defining them, and identifying their behaviors. She talks about the “Happy, Sad, Mad Triad” and how the average person can only identify 3-5 on a daily basis. If we are only equipped with a handful of emotions, how can we possibly even begin to talk about our life experiences with the language needed to truly encapsulate what happened to us?
If you’re looking to build language around trauma, I’ve created a list of the most common ones I hear. This doesn’t speak for everyone’s experience but offers a bigger generalization of experiences:
Anxiety is defined as an emotion characterized by tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes. Anxiety encapsulates a number of different experiences such as spiraling thoughts, catastrophic thinking, needing to act on specific stressors to maintain control, constant scanning, and much more. Ultimately, anxiety has the ability to activate our fight-or-flight response. This can lead to really complicated relationships with emotions like anxiety because when we experience trauma our fight or flight responses are activated leaving us to never really know the difference between “something horrible is happening” and general worry about a stressful event. If left unchecked, anxiety can evolve into hyper-vigilance, a general distrust of people, and avoidant behaviors.
Anguish is described as “an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness” by Brene Brown. If we are talking about trauma, we know the feeling of twisting in our gut, the knot in our throat, and the heat of those tears when we find ourselves powerless in a situation we would pay any dollar amount to change or get out of. Ultimately, anguish is exhausting and honestly difficult to make emotionally known other than crying or other behaviors we mark as sadness. As we try to work through the hurt and damage that has been inflicted upon us, if we only have an average emotional vocabulary we can only really speak to sadness or maybe even depression. Imagine how limiting and dismissing it feels to describe one of the most difficult human emotions we can experience as sad, and then wonder why we can’t seem to feel better. Maybe we can even get angry at the fact that people don’t seem to register our level of sadness or anger with ourselves for not being able to correctly process our emotions.
Hopelessness and despair are cousins of emotions. They belong to the same family but they become apparent within different points of our timeline. Hopelessness is created from negative life events that lead us to adopt negative thought patterns, creating a perception of the inability to change the circumstance. Despair has the foundation of hopelessness but extends beyond to the perception of a person’s future and one’s ability or inability to find happiness, change, or healing despite their greatest efforts. Negative self-beliefs, self-blame, shame, and guilt, are not emotions that inherently belong to us. They were imprinted into us from our abusers or those around us facilitating the negative life events. We aren’t born into self-hatred, we are taught it in order to keep compliance with the trauma or to keep the victims quiet once they’ve survived the situation.
Grief is comprised of three other components which include, loss, longing, and feeling lost according to Brene Brown. Loss can include the obvious, which can be the loss of a family member, spouse, or child. It could also include the loss of a job, a house, a family heirloom, etc. Loss can also be a bit more abstract, when we experience emotional abuse, sexual abuse, or any other form of abuse we can in many ways lose the ability to control what is happening to us, and we can lose connection with those who abuse us, we can lose parts of us as a sacrifice to placate our abusers. Longing is described as more than wanting, it’s a desire to regain, for wholeness, understanding, or meaning to the situation. We often can’t come to terms with why someone would abuse us, or we can find ourselves wondering why was it MY child who had to develop a horrible sickness, and even ask what did I do in order to deserve my house burning down? Feeling lost is the emotional disorientation of life itself. When we experience loss our world definition can change overnight. The feeling of being lost leads to disconnection, and experiencing the rug being ripped out from under us.
Shame is among the most common emotions I work with in clients and honestly among the biggest barriers to treatment. Shame has elements of believing that we are bad, wrong, flawed, broken, and somehow we don’t deserve love and connection. Shame depends on you feeling like you’re the only one who struggles as much as you do, it grows through silence and isolation. Shame wants you to believe that not only are you the odd man out, but you DESERVE to be the odd man out for your feelings, thoughts, and life experiences. Brene Brown identifies a “cure” to shame, which is self-compassion. Self-compassion is a nice word, a word we probably even try to work with. However, traumatic experiences teach us that we aren’t worthy, we ask for too much, and we do too much. How dare we ask for just one more thing? Everyone is capable of self-compassion but not without exiting our negative self-beliefs, reworking problematic thought traps, and integrating general self-acceptance.
Betrayal simply put is someone violating our trust in them. Examples of betrayal are our close friends sharing our secrets with others, extramarital affairs, lying, manipulating, sexual coercion, and physical aggression from trusted people in our lives. Betrayal is marked by anxiety, distrust, embarrassment, and shock. People acting the complete opposite of what they promised us is the ultimate threat to our safety. We can find ourselves asking, “If I trusted this person and they treated me so horribly, how can I ever trust again?” Betrayal works heavily with breaking down one’s internal and external safety. We can find our fight or flight responses activated within these situations and feel the need to isolate or go scorched earth, depending on your personality archetype.
Again, if I were to hold up a feelings wheel and ask you to point to emotions you feel about your trauma, you may not include all of these, you’ll likely find even more to list. However, these are the most common ones I find once a proper vocabulary has been built around emotion identification. Imagine expanding your ability to talk about your life starting from sad, mad, and anxious to feeling grief, anguish, betrayal, longing, and despair. It doesn’t make everything better but it does point us in a much more pointed direction in terms of where you want to go within your healing process.
If you want more information on this topic or found yourself thinking, “Stephanie referenced Brene Brown a lot in this post,” Brene Brown has recently published a book titled Atlas of the Heart. This book is often the very first piece of therapy homework I give to my clients and refer to it as an emotional encyclopedia. It’s a great place to get a lot of information without booking an actual therapy session.
If you want to talk to me more about trauma therapy, where to start, or want to work with me on your journey, book a free 15-minute consultation on my website and we can get the work started!
Stephanie Townsend, LMSW, CCTP, ART Practitioner
