Recovering From Traumatic and Stressful Experiences
Frozen pond, the day things got hard. Photo by Quinn Corte, 2024.
Recovering From Traumatic and Stressful Experiences
I recently had a traumatic experience.
A family member had an accident, and I spent a distressing 10 hours in the emergency room. They're recovering well and going to be okay—thank goodness. But there was a brief window when I didn’t know if they were going to be alright.
When I arrived at the ER, I went into survival mode. I felt a spike of terror that immediately activated my fight or flight response. My muscles tensed up to take action and my adrenaline spiked to give me a boost. Meanwhile, less urgent processes like digestion and immune response decreased to conserve energy.
The rest of the world faded away as all my internal systems became laser-focused on making sure they were safe.
And then after I got all riled up, there was nothing for me to do. I just sat there for hours, waiting for news, tending to them closely, and eventually going home without many answers.
In the days that followed, they got better and better. (Again, thank goodness.) But I did NOT.
I was a mess. I was locked up with so much neck and shoulder tension that I had daily migraines. My digestion stopped working properly. And I was totally on-edge, jumping at every little noise. I couldn’t get any work done.
“What’s wrong with me?” I kept asking myself.
Luckily, my wise self replied, “Absolutely nothing.”
Deep down, I knew I was experiencing a natural response to a traumatic event. My body wasn’t broken. It was actually doing its job beautifully.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk says in The Body Keeps the Score, "After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety."
The threat I experienced in the hospital had gradually dissipated. But my nervous system never got a clear signal the danger had passed. My body was staying taut and vigilant to protect my family.
I knew my symptoms were “normal” for me—migraines, tension, and stomach issues are exactly how my body manifests stress. But after a week of migraines, I lost patience. I was trying all my techniques to discharge the stress from my body, but none of them “fixed” me. I couldn't relax.
During this experience, I’ve re-learned something important: recovery takes time.
Whenever I got frustrated, I reminded myself that my nervous system needed time to unlock and regulate. The techniques might help later, but for now, I didn’t need to fix anything. I just needed to rest; to offer myself creature comforts and patience. I scheduled a therapy appointment and saw a friend. And I practiced giving myself the compassion I was so naturally offering my loved one as they recovered.
I'll pause here to state the obvious: this whole thing was way more traumatic for them than for me. But seeing a loved one suffer is horrible, and so often we fail to acknowledge that caretakers need recovery time as well.
It’s not realistic to bounce back immediately after something intense—especially for those of us with big hearts and sensitive systems.
The experience reminded me that we all process stress and trauma differently. As I’ve done research for my book about stress relief and navigated my own hard times, I’ve discovered that two people can react to the same experience completely differently. A lot of factors contribute to this, including past traumatic events and how sensitive our nervous systems are. But really, we are just different. Human bodies metabolize stress in different ways.
We also react to stress differently over the course of our lives. Even though we sometimes pretend we’re robots, we’re actually fluid beings. Sometimes we’re resilient and sometimes we’re tender. As we age, experience shapes how we relate to stress emotionally and physiologically. Life transitions, hormones, energy levels, wellness, relationships, and moods naturally fluctuate daily and seasonally. All these conditions impact how we cope with stress.
It’s important to remember that nothing’s wrong with us, no matter how we react or recover.
Sometimes, there aren’t shortcuts. We just have to go through it. So, when stress-relief techniques don’t work, try patience and compassion instead.
I promise that recovering is much easier when we don’t beat ourselves up the whole time.
Your turn:
What do you need to recover from highly stressful experiences?
Do you have a harder time giving yourself compassion, time, or asking for support?
What stories do you have about what what recovery "should" look like? How can you reframe those stories to be more compassionate?