Why Does Past Trauma Still Affect Me? | Dr. Karol Darsa

You can know exactly what happened to you, understand why it hurt you, and still have a reaction that makes no sense to you in the present. Hi, I'm Dr. Karol Darsa, psychologist, author, and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment Center. Today I want to explore a question many people struggle with. They say, why does something that that happened years ago still affect me today, even when I understand what happened and have worked hard to move forward. So you can know exactly what happened to you, understand why it hurts you, and still have a reaction that makes no sense to you in the present. A conversation becomes tense and you cannot find your words. Is that how you feel? Someone sounds disappointed, for instance, and you feel an immediate need to fix it. You're somewhere, you have no reason to believe it's dangerous, but you can't stop watching the people around you. That's hypervigilance. Or you feel almost nothing, right? You know an experience mattered, but when you talk about it, it sounds like a story about someone else. And you wonder, why am I still affected by something that happened so many years ago? So to answer that, we have to look beyond how long the event occurred. We have to look at what happens when something in the present brings that experience close again. So this is a very important question. What happens to your attention, your physical state, your ability to think, feel, and make choices? Because the continuing effects of trauma are not always found in how often you remember the event. So sometimes they're actually found in the responses you have come to consider your personality. What do I mean by that? I'm just someone who worries a lot, or I don't do conflict, I don't need anyone, never been connected to my feelings. Those are some of the things that people say, and it could feel accurate, but they don't really tell the whole story. So in my books, The Trauma Map and The Trauma Bridge, I explore how trauma can create disconnection, why reconnecting with yourself is such an important part of this healing. And this is what I want to explain, several ways of how effects of trauma can persist. So it could be ongoing activation, shutdown, dissociation, patterns of avoidance that bring relief without really necessarily resolving the difficulty. These are some possible responses. Don't use them for diagnosing yourself. Understanding them can change how you interpret something you may have spent years judging yourself. So let's begin with the difference between an event ending and your response changing. During a frightening experience, the immediate task is getting through it— survival. You may become intense— intensely alert. Your heart rate can increase. Your attention can narrow towards signs of danger. Or you want to urge, you have an urge to run or escape. And when you can't escape, other responses happen like freezing, becoming detached from your experience. These are not really good decisions, but you don't always have an opportunity to calm down and see what the situation is, right? And this is important because people often judge their reaction afterwards. They say things like, why didn't I speak, you know, when the trauma happened? Or why didn't I leave? Why didn't I fight back? So it's important to understand your survival responses. It doesn't change, of course, what happened, but it can change the meaning you assign to your reaction. Then there's a second question: what happens afterwards? For many people, distress decreases with time and support. Not everybody who experiences trauma develops lasting symptoms, of course. But for some, reminders continue to bring back a sense of threat or helplessness even when the situation is different now. Consider someone— think of it, right, this example— somebody who had a car accident and their physical injuries may heal, their car is okay, and they understand driving is part of life, of course. But then another vehicle brakes suddenly, so their response could be very intense. Their muscles tighten. The heart races, the attention becomes everything on everything that could go wrong. So the response is happening now in connection with something learned through an earlier experience. This is different from deliberately deciding to think about the accident. So a reminder could be from outside, external, like a sound or a location. It can also be internal sometimes, like a thought, image, or a physical sensation. And sometimes the person recognizes the connection only after the reaction has begun. And that's one reason reassurance alone may not immediately change how a person feels. I know I'm not in the same situation is usually important information, but being able to say it does not guarantee that every part of the response will settle at once, right? You could still feel really activated. So to understand this, let's look at the different states of activation. One of them is called hyperarousal. This simply means you're highly activated, on edge, easily startled, watchful, or you get overwhelmed easily. You could have a racing heart, restless energy, irritability, anxiety, not sleeping. So hypervigilance is of course one of the expressions of this. Your attention constantly looks for signs that something is Wrong. Some I'm in danger, right? So what does that mean in relationship? It could mean that you're constantly rereading a message that you get, or you're trying to understand: Is the person angry with me? You're putting a lot of effort, and that could be very tiring. You may look at as though you're simply paying close attention, but really internally you're preparing for a danger that could happen. So you live in fear. And when your attention is directed so much at the possible danger that's coming. Concentrating on other things becomes harder. It doesn't mean that the thinking part of your brain is not working, but it's just interfering really with your ability to think more in an organized way, right? So compare that with a different experience. Someone becomes quiet during a difficult conversation. Their experience— sorry, their expression changes very little. They don't say anything. They're like, it's Fine. So you think they're calm, but internally they could really be struggling. They often are either numb, slow down, shut down, maybe they check out. In my book Trauma Bridge, actually, I discuss about that, the hyperarousal and how this creates a shutdown response. It's also important because trauma doesn't always make someone visibly emotional. Sometimes it makes their emotional experience difficult to reach. They could look like they're together, composed, but they could feel really disconnected inside. So they can feel a lot of different states at the same time. It could be a lot of different reactions at the same time, right? Sometimes they go blank, sometimes they go anxious. If we ask, how upset do you look? We can really miss what's happening. A more helpful question could be, how present do you feel right now? And that brings us to the topic of dissociation. What is dissociation? It's a disconnection in experiences that we feel, like we don't feel awareness, we don't have the feeling, we don't know sort of where we are. Someone could feel detached from their body, not feeling the body. It's almost like you're observing yourself from far away. So an experience could be really difficult to recall, right, like memory difficulties. Of course, it's not the same as saying that every distracted moment is a trauma symptom or a dissociation. A lot of the problems can come from different causes as well, but dissociation is usually someone's normal trauma response. When we're overwhelmed, we could feel detached, and that is how we make things more bearable. In the Trauma Map book, I describe how disconnection can really continue after a danger is ended, right? So because coming back to your body could still feel very uncomfortable, so So you could still look like you're feeling really out of it or you feel apprehensive and you don't really notice what's happening until you become much more present in your body. It doesn't mean that you're resisting healing. This person could be encountering a response that once helped them to cope with something that's overwhelming. So if we respond by demanding that they feel more or they disclose more or they talk more about it, Actually, you could push them further away. That's the reason why pacing in therapy is very, very important. You don't want to push anyone. We want to understand what happens when the person approaches their experience not forcefully but gently, right? That's why there's a difference between dissociation and avoidance, and I'll talk about that. Dissociation is simply not choosing to think about something, right? Like, you can't feel it. But avoidance is more maybe a conscious decision of wanting to remove yourself from an experience. They can overlap, but they're not exactly the same thing. An avoidance needs an explanation, and sometimes setting feelings aside is necessary. For instance, in an emergency, you could take an action before you attend to the emotional impact. Sometimes taking a break is wise. Not every difficult feeling needs to be explored. So the concern is when you're avoiding distress becomes a way of how you organize your life. So let's return to the person we talked about, the car accident. Maybe they stopped driving on the road where it happened, then they avoid highways, then they avoid riding with other people. In that moment, they feel some relief, but their life becomes increasingly restricted while the underlying fear remains. So what do you think about that? Or consider someone who avoids disagreement because it feels threatening. Well, that may keep a relationship outwardly peaceful by never really expressing a concern because there will be less immediate conflict, but they have few opportunities, less opportunities, right, to discover what happens when they speak honestly with someone who can respond respectfully. But that doesn't mean they should confront an unsafe person or force themselves into a fearful situation. So it just means that we should distinguish between a necessary protection, a useful pause, and a pattern that's steadily narrowing their choice. In my book, The Trauma Map, I discuss how emotional avoidance can provide short-term relief but creates long-term difficulties. One of those difficulties is actually the disconnection, that effect that I'm talking about, that you disconnect from your feelings. So someone could say something like, I don't feel really upset about this anymore. But also they don't even feel joy, affection, or really positive feelings. So this is an important difference. The absence of visible distress does not by itself tell us whether someone has recovered or become less connected to their experience, of course. Another place the effects can persist is in how someone relates to their own experience. So I use often the term self-abandonment to describe how people disconnect from themselves. It's not for blaming, of course, but if expressing a feeling once really made you feel bad, then you probably learned to dismiss it before anyone else could, right? If disagreement threatened an important relationship, then you learn to agree before considering what you wanted. Years later, these responses can happen so quickly that you even— you don't even notice the decision. It's just automatic. So someone asks for something, you say yes. Or later on you realize you are not actually comfortable with that. You agree with them, but underneath you feel anxiety about disappointing someone, and then you feel relief when the interaction is comfortable. This is why simply saying, have better boundaries, may not really address this difficulty. So this person may need help noticing the reaction, understanding the expectation behind it, and developing a different response in circumstances where that's safe. And not every difficulty with boundaries comes from trauma, of course, but when trauma is relevant, the work needs to reach beyond advice about what someone should say. So by now you're thinking, I recognize all of this, why doesn't that make it stop? Aha, understanding matters, but it's important to give language to experiences that may feel confusing or you feel shame about it. Describing a response when you're relatively settled is different from having access to that understanding when you're activated or disconnected, right? This is where a concept called the window of tolerance could be very, very useful. I talk about this in the Trauma Bridge book. I use this framework to describe the range of activation within which someone can remain present Or, you know, how are they feeling? It doesn't mean, of course, they're perfectly calm. You can feel sadness, anger, or fear, but still you have some ability to notice what's happening around you. So that's when you are within the range. So outside of that range, a person is overwhelmed, either anxious or really depressed. So think about some disagreement you had, and if you feel upset, or if you were having a hard time to understand yourself. Or if you felt like you were being attacked or you couldn't follow the conversation, you were like kind of checked out, right? So of course your ability to work with that has changed in that moment, and that's the window of tolerance. It's a clinical framework. It's not really a separate part of our brain, but that's just sort of how we explain. So the value is about understanding and directing our attention to our capacity. It's really a question of capacity. Can I right now engage with what's happening in front of me? Am I being less present, more present, or do we need to change something? That helps us understand why talking about an experience is not automatically the same as processing it. Talking, of course, can be meaningful. Being believed is very important. But really good trauma therapy is doing much more than that. So the fact that a story has been told doesn't tell us everything about what happened. While it's being told, was the person while they're talking? Were they present? Were they engaged? Were they overwhelmed? Did they? Were they detached? Did they get too stressed? Right. So particularly as a therapist, those questions give me a lot of information. And of course, my goal is not to produce the most complete or emotionally intense account. Right. I'm not expecting that from a client. But it's it is to help the person that. that, that has the experience to support them in a meaningful manner. I talk about that in the trauma bridge. It's called dual awareness. This means you're, you're aware of an earlier experience while you're present. So someone, for instance, could be discussing a scary memory while they're aware and they're sitting with a therapist in the room, and but they can pause at the same time so they're not checking out. And they're not being asked to pretend like the memory is painless, but they're also not asked to go in it too much, right? So they're supported in, in keeping contact with the present moment. So staying present is really telling someone to be able to talk without getting overwhelmed. And it explains this way why reconnection is central to my approach. The aim is not to retrieve the information But it's to help someone remain connected to the present moment, to the surrounding, and to their body while they're talking. This work, of course, should be very individualized and well supported. So you don't need to try to process a traumatic memory on your own while watching this video. Please make sure that you have enough support. Present difficulties can be addressed without assuming that a complete historical account is available. Like, you don't need to you know, give me all the details. Your, your, your body will tell you a lot of what's happening too. So it's possible to take suffering seriously while respecting uncertainty. You, you may not remember a lot of things, right? Before we finish, I want to talk about a boundary around everything that I just described. Not every strong reaction is caused by trauma, and not every sense of danger is mistaken response to the past. Sometimes a person is still living in the harm, instability. Of course, there's— there could be an ongoing danger. In that situation, we should not ask them to regulate themselves into accepting what's happening, right? They need safety first. So, but persistent sleep problems, numbness, anxiety, concentration difficulties— you need to definitely have a better explanation that fits all of that. So again, why you're still affected by things that happened years ago? Because reminders bring you activation. Because maybe you're still feeling disconnected in order to protect yourself from these difficult feelings. And because avoiding could give you a relief. And because maybe you understand those patterns long before you can respond differently, and now when they occur, you can react to them differently. So don't think, I should be over this. Right? Don't judge yourself. If you're still feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, or, or both at the same time, and you're asking, how do I get relief? How— what kind of support? How do I get support that would help me? Those questions are not for blaming you for how you survived. It's just to help you identify what needs attention now. So the passage of time cannot tell us everything about recovery. Actually, a more meaningful measure is whether you have increasingly freedom to participate in your life, that you can recognize what you feel, you respond to what's actually happening, and still stay connected to your body and to the present moment. The past may remain part of your history without having the same influence over your present. That's the reason why we focus a lot on being present in that. So if you want to know more about it, Just, you can look at my books, Trauma Map or The Trauma Bridge, or you can definitely connect with us from reconnectcenter.com. And next video, I'm going to explore more about what healing from trauma looks like and how meaningful change can appear in everyday life. Thank you.