Betsy GuerraBilingual Keynote Speaker, Psychotherapist/Coach, Author, Leadership Training and Life Coach Certification

What Is The ANIVERSARY REACTION in trauma? #podcast

6 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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0:49

Betsy Guerra explains the anniversary reaction: how your body and mind respond to trauma or grief when seasonal cues like back-to-school or August roll around. She shares how she felt stuck in these funks, then learned she could choose not to let grief dominate her life.

Chapters

Anniversary reaction is when your body knows that you've experienced trauma or grief in a particular season of the year and it starts acting up and you feel it, right? Like for many years, back to school was a trigger. August was a trigger. Like I remember being like in a funk and feeling all these unpleasant emotions and I didn't know how to deal with them 'cause I worked a lot on like, you know, preparing for the day off, but then it would catch me before or it would catch me after. I thought, Well, maybe anniversary reaction is never gonna go away 'cause we have no power over it. But for years, I've been like, I refuse to accept that. I'm not gonna accept that grief is always gonna stay with you and you're gonna always have a hole in your life forever because they were part of your life and they're gone. And I refuse to believe that grief isn't temporary.