Chronic Anxiety: Why Did My Anxiety Persist Despite Healing My Trauma

Q and A time. I have a lot of questions coming through on DMs, and sometimes the questions are a little bit more complicated. And I think it's great that we can answer these together on Instagram Live and other platforms. And so I had a really beautiful question come in, and I want to do my best to answer it. And I have a picture that I drew for you, the question. I'm going to read it to you. And so the question is in regards to trauma. And so the question is after you have resolved trauma with a therapist, from what I'm understanding from your information that I've listened to and read through that your brain can still get stuck in the fight flight freeze mode. Retraining your brain is a process itself. After you've addressed and healed from the past trauma, Right. This person goes on to ask. I ask this because I feel like I have peace. And yet I still feel that my brain is putting me in that fight flight mode. And I get a lot of physical symptoms, which of course gives me more anxiety. And so the question is, if you've done the work, if you've gone through trauma, if you've done the healing work, can you still experience feelings of anxiety, especially physical anxiety? And the answer is yes. And in some senses, the trauma work should be a big part of healing that. But oftentimes, anxiety and trauma and the healing aren't linear. So it's not as though I drove down this road and I hit a nail and I got a flat tire. And so we go down the road, sweep it up, and therefore my tires won't ever get flat again. Because there could be other things that happened. So maybe you got a flat tire and then your car spun out, a piece of your car fell off of it. And now you have other things that can make your car flat if you turn around and drive back. So there could be other things. So I drew a picture, and I want to explain this to you. I think that sometimes drawings can speak a thousand words. And so what we have here in this drawing is we have a picture of the brain. We have the prefrontal cortex. We have the midbrain, we have the brain stem. This is the back of the brain. And then the brainstem comes down here. Here's your cerebellum. And we think of trauma informs of big T traumas. And then we think of them in terms of little T traumas. A big T trauma is a large traumatic event that one goes through, which would be maybe like a car accident or a natural disaster. It's something that's really large and tends to be a one time event. So in this drawing you have the trauma, it goes into the brain. And then what your brain does is it sends all sorts of signals to other parts of your brain and it creates associative networks. An associative network is a network of associations. So that may be, let's say that you're driving down the road and a red truck, they rear end you, right? So your brain will create an association between red and truck equals the trauma of getting rear ended. So in the future, even though you've done the work on that event, maybe you still see red trucks and get anxious. And even though it doesn't feel logical, your brain still has that information stored. When we think of little t traumas, little t traumas are small, smaller events that tend to be more repetitive. And so this can be gaslighting, it could be negligence, it could be being bullied at school. Although arguably some of those bullying events could become big T traumas. But little t traumas tend to be smaller events that happen more frequently or little accumulations of events. And so what can happen with little t traumas and is they can create their own separate network. So you see here, this is its own little network and it's isolated to its own little area. But sometimes these little t traumas can also remind us of a big T trauma which can make that little event feel bigger than maybe it is. Have you ever had that happen before where something small went on, but it felt like a lot bigger to you than it should have? So when we're thinking about the brain, we think about little traumas, big traumas, and then we think about what are called associative networks in the brain. And depending on the area of brain where the trauma is stored is sometimes and oftentimes trauma is stored in parts of the brain where there's non verbal. You don't have access to being able to think about it logically. The part of your brain that's logical is your prefrontal cortex. Here. This is the center, the emotional center, the limbic system of your brain. And then of course your brain stem, which is what produces those feelings of fight, flight, freeze. So what happens when we go through a trauma event? According to internal family systems, ego state trauma informed therapies is that your nervous system will form an ego state. An ego state is where your body forms a part of you, a part of your psychology that will aim to protect you and help you be aware of signs that other traumas may be coming. Right. And so your ego states, Sometimes we have a couple of ego states, sometimes we can have a whole bunch of ego states. And so I gave you an example. And so let's say this is Susie's brain. Susie got rear ended by a red truck. That was a big scary trauma for her. And then she's also seen some television shows where there were some red trucks driving erratically. So there's an association in her brain. And then she also may have had some other things go on that just amplify her overall anxiety and stress. Right. So Susie has adapted to these stressors by creating, and this is an unconscious process by creating ego states. So part of Susie's symptoms is she feels irritable, she has some perfectionism, and she also has a lot of anxiety. Right. And so when we're doing the ego state work, what can happen is maybe she focuses in on the anxiety, she focuses in on the red track rear ending her and she feels peace and calm when she thinks about it. But if their brain, if her brain is still dealing with stress and nervous system stress in the midbrain, that can still create an amplification of her symptoms. And if these parts of herself haven't also been, they haven't been healed or dealt with, they can still continue to produce symptoms of anxiety. She may be overly perfectionistic, which can cause suffering, or maybe she deals with a lot of irritability and frustration. So in this question, the person said, I feel like in my heart of hearts that I have resolved my big trauma. I feel peace about what's happened and yet I still feel a ton of anxiety. And so for you who are asking that question is first of all, ask yourself, could there be other things that are contributing to your anxiety? Is your nervous system holding on to stress? Is your nervous system creating ego states? Or do you have parts of yourselves that maybe that part of yourself is really anxious, but then there's this other part of yourself that feels a lot of peace. So maybe we would add a category to this. That is your peaceful part. Right, peaceful part. And maybe that part used to be really scared about the getting rear ended. It might have been really scared about the car accident, but maybe now that part isn't contributing to your anxiety. It could be one of these other parts. And so if you feel like you're stuck in the situation, it means that there's more work to do. It means that your body, your mind, your symptoms are trying to tell you something. And so I created something called the three minute hack, which will teach you how to go and get that data. Because like this person said, maybe you did the work on the trauma, but maybe there's something else that you haven't quite seen. So get the three minute hack. You can find the link in the bio, it's totally free. And I'll teach you how to do the work to figure out why you're still feeling anxious. And you can do it in under three minutes. Okay? If you have any other questions, I'm here for you. This has been Dr. Nicole. You can find me at drnicolecane, at all of our Instagram, our YouTubes, Pinterest, and my website. Thanks for asking questions. Lots of love, my friends. Bye.