I have thought about this blog a lot, as many people do face this ‘Trauma from Nowhere’ – many find themselves crossing paths with this when they are within their final stages of feeling worthless and belittled as they have struggled to comprehend their minds and its new occupants, it is really difficult struggling with a mental health condition whether it be temporary or ongoing, but then chuck confusion in and it can send the mind on a very downhill path – I hope this helps anyone who is struggling with such feelings, comments always welcome …
Many adults can end up facing delayed and/or re-occurrent trauma, around 1 in 8 adults experience some form of mental health issue within their adult period from delayed trauma, first the low moods can start and they can carry on progressing, then the nights can get longer, then we can find ourselves getting agitated quickly as we start to lose patience, then we can begin to start feeling pointless as we exist in this same manner every day, we can start to isolate ourselves, hiding so others don’t see us this belittled and broken, then the suicidal thoughts can come and they can quickly evolve from thoughts to tendencies, and under the midst of all this we actually can’t figure out why we are experiencing all of this.
Many adults who experience adverse childhood events can sometimes represent a mental defect during their adulthood period, where their trauma is concerned during the childhood period it was a different cognitive process, it can re-represent itself needing another process to heal, it can leave their mind suffering with many different tendencies such as feeling worthless, under-valued, low mood, lack of sleep and much more.
During our childhood and adolescent years our brain has limited capacity and processing skills, as we are still amidst our growth period, we are still sponging parts of our individuality as we become our adult self, it is around 25 we develop our frontal lobe which is the reasoning region, so as a child suffering trauma it is a very different process to that of an adult, there is a huge lack of understanding in many areas which can leave a child very confused, trauma is generally blocked out by the brain at this age as it can’t process it properly, then through our years of ageing into adults it can pop up in different formats, representing itself amongst triggers, but we develop coping mechanisms to hide from them, we then maybe take a pause as we hit exhaustion and the trauma floods in, and you find that you haven’t prepared yourself for this…
Trauma within early years has been studied within the adult mind, researchers have conducted many different studies relating to childhood events that have depleted the adult mind. Studies have shown that adults with an adverse childhood background have an enlarged amygdala as opposed to those who had a childhood with no traumatic events.
What it the Amygdala? The Amygdala is the integrative centre for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation. It is commonly thought to form the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli, including detection of threat and activation of appropriate fear-related behaviors in response to threatening or dangerous stimuli.
Having an enlarged amygdala shows that there is a lot more mass for emotions to be processed (this is where the confusion comes from), negative events during brain development cause the amygdala to enlarge. Enlarged parts of the Amygdala cause adults to suffer due to the mass of the surrounding neurons in the Amydgala, causing confusion as emotional neurons have a more stressed environment to transfer within. (D.shaw 2022) – this is my theory anyway;
Trauma can also re-align brain patterns and genes as a young child whilst developing into adolescence, this can make the transfer into an adult more confusing as you do not ‘recognize’ this new version, it also serves confusion because the ground to process emotions has been processed from mental health it then makes mental health conditions more prone. (This needs more neuro-science research)
When facing trauma, especially when it has appeared from nowhere, it can be so confusing as the trauma you are facing in your head is not in your reality, trauma from nowhere usually stems from childhood trauma, re-evaluating your childhood trauma with a listening ear will be helpful in helping you understand why you have a bundle of extra emotions inhabiting your mind.
When you are within this trauma it can be really difficult to comprehend due to it not being present anymore, it can stem from something that happened 5/10/20/40/60 years ago, it can come from anywhere and can appear at any point in your life, it has no schedule. If you are experiencing trauma from adverse childhood events please do not panic, try to find the cause of it, from experience I have found that people who face trauma in this manner have blocked it out several times, disregarding it as though it happened to long of a time ago to still feel the pain over, if you ever feel your trauma please sit with it and try to evaluate its new presence , it may be that due to the young age you experienced your trauma, you may not of been able to process it properly, so it has come back to be processed, sometimes the trauma can make you believe you are of little to no value – this is not true. It is important you remember this, it is not your fault, you are enough, you are just struggling, and it is okay to struggle.
When trauma has no physical aspect to it, i.e it has no representation, it can create a representation, it can appear in means such as extreme self-hate, which can be anything from hating the way you look to self-harming, a general feeling of feeling unsafe, feelings that you could get hurt if you go outside or becoming extremely scared of getting ill, feeling as though you are being watched or that you are under threat, it can also appear as though others are talking about you. It can create new aspects in your mind, this inevitably gives the trauma a value or a reason to be there, it is a channel to vent through, understanding this representation is critical to understanding trauma you are experiencing now, and please always reach out, email me if you want to chat about the above article, or if you need assistance straight away, please contact SAPUK.
All my love D x
Please always reach out, we can help here at SAPUK with any over whelming feelings, we are all equal and we all deserve to be heard and understood. I am also very aware this statement needs more footing so will redevelop it, as this is based upon findings during experience with SAPUK