Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains how anxiety stems from fight-or-flight responses but can linger as a trauma symptom. A shopping trip or friend's home can retrigger old memories, leaving you feeling unsafe. Understanding where your anxiety comes from lets you actually process it.
Hey there, everybody. It's Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Today I'd like to talk about anxiety as a symptom of trauma. Yes, anxiety can be a feeling that anybody feels. Anxiety is part of our fight or flight response, and it tells us that there might be a threat. Remember, feelings are not facts. It's your body's stress response system, fire alarm, HPA axis, whatever you want to call it, going off, saying, here's some energy, there might be a threat, get up and check it out. Okay, so anxiety is a response to a possible threat. When you've experienced trauma, you have formed memories about a very, very unsafe situation, a very threatening situation. And when you're reminded of those memories, even if you think you've complet processed them, sometimes when you're reminded of those memories, when those memories are triggered by a sight, a smell, a sound, or just a random thought, you may start feeling anxious again. So it's important to recognize that anxiety can be triggered by trauma. Likewise, people who've experienced anxiety, or, I'm sorry, trauma, may get triggered when they are out places, like when they're shopping or when they are at a friend's house or on vacation. Every time that they get triggered when they're out somewhere, then that place may start to feel more unsafe. That place may start to become associated with trauma feelings. And those feelings can be really powerful. Were they objectively unsafe in that situation? Probably not. But it reminded them of the trauma, which. In which was a situation in which they were objectively unsafe. When this happens, people start feeling less and less safe anywhere they go. And that lack of a sense of safety, that lack of a sense of personal power contributes to people feeling anxious not only about their own safety, but about the safety of other people, about what's going to happen next, about not being able to control things. So anxiety can emerge, if you will, from unresolved trauma or from trauma that goes on for a long period of time. Why is it important to recognize that? Well, because dealing with anxiety, dealing with those triggers and developing tools to help you feel safe and empowered requires in most cases that you recognize that some of those feelings are not accurate in the current context. And then you get curious and explore, well, if I'm not experiencing a threat in the current context, where is this feeling coming from? Because it's there for a reason. It's trying to tell me there might be a problem, so where would I have learned that? And then to explore where that might have come from and process that issue. And that will help people really fully resolve or better resolve some of their anxiety trauma related issues that come out as anxiety that come out as a sense of unsafeness and lack of personal power.
