When Your Anxiety (or Depression or ADD...) is Really Trauma

You’ve felt anxious for as long as you can remember.  Ready to crawl out of your skin.  Irritable.  Your mind running on an endless hamster wheel has led to way too many sleepless nights and difficulty functioning the next day.  Your muscles are so tense all of the time that you tend to be exhausted pretty much always. And it’s hard for you to focus because of the racing thoughts and the way you have to pay attention to everything around you.  Is it any wonder that you sometimes “self medicate” with an extra glass of wine, or sleeping pill, or whatever it may be so that you can turn things off in your mind and body for a while?

You haven’t always called these feelings “anxiety”, but when you finally heard that word, you grabbed onto it because it helped you to at least make a little sense of what was happening to you.  Only when you talk to friends about their anxiety, it’s like comparing apples to oranges.  Both are fruits, but not much else is the same.  If your friends have anxiety, then theirs must be the “light” version and yours is anxiety on steroids.

That’s because many times trauma symptoms and anxiety symptoms can overlap.  But with trauma, you’re dealing with a hijacked limbic system -- that fight, flight, freeze part of the brain -- so it can feel exponentially worse.  Worry becomes hypervigilance and, before you know it, things are not only a threat, but life or death situations.

Then there are the nightmares.  The flashbacks.  The images, smells, sounds, tastes, and sensations that haunt you during waking hours.  Nothing, noone, and nowhere feels safe.  Not even inside your own body.  Your friends joke that you need “anger management skills”.  Really, you need trauma therapy.

If you could trace back your racing thoughts, nightmares, irritability, and hypervigilant response, maybe you would find yourself at the scene of a car accident.  Or a sexual assault.  Or almost two years of a global pandemic.

If you’ve “always” been anxious, maybe you can trace these patterns back to an unstable home growing up.  Maybe you never felt physically safe.  Maybe you were never emotionally safe.  Or you witnessed domestic violence.  Maybe your parents or caregivers were unwilling or unable to offer nurture, guidance, and healthy limits.  

Your brain files all of these things in that fight, flight, freeze part of the brain.  It’s just doing its job, trying to keep you alive and safe.

But anxiety is not the only thing that we misidentify.  Oftentimes people have deep seated depression that stems from similar situations.  When you’ve survived horrendous things, you can sometimes be duped by your brain into believing that you’ve deserved the bad things that have happened to you.

Or when it’s hard to focus on work or school or whatever other task that’s at hand because your brain is too busy scanning the environment for threat, we sometimes incorrectly call that ADD.

I could go on… OCD, phobias, and more can have their origins in traumatic experiences.

How can you tell the difference?  That’s where talking to a professional can help tease things out.  And when it comes to trauma, there’s no such thing as “white knuckling it” to get through the next assignment or task or whatever and then hoping that things will somehow get better on their own (really, that hasn’t worked so far for you, has it??).  But, with the right professional help, you can heal from not only the symptoms you’re experiencing, but from the traumatic event itself.  

Want to know more?  Give us a call at 813-434-3639 and set up a free consultation to see how we can help.