As weird as this sounds, I have done several projects on different emotions over the past few years. These came to mind and got me thinking about how they connect to trauma. Emotions are a key part when it comes to trauma. Trauma messes with your head a lot and can make you feel things at any given time for any given reason. These emotions can either be good in terms of the healing process, or very bad. The two emotions that I have studied most and believe are connected to trauma, are sadness and anger. Now, when a person thinks of the word trauma, surely these are emotions that first come to mind. Trauma is a negative word, and sadness and anger are negative emotions, however, they can be quite beneficial in the healing process. I am going to be focusing more in depths as to what both sadness and anger are, because there is a lot more to them than people think.
Before moving any further, we are going to go over what trauma, sadness, and anger all mean just to make sure everyone is on the same page. Trauma is essentially an experience that caused you major distress or an injury. Sadness is unhappiness, misery, or heartache. Anger is a strong feeling of hostility, irritation, or rage. What I find most interesting with these two emotions is that they often correlate together. Sadness often turns into anger, and anger often turns into sadness. Weird how that works. Let's dive a little deeper though, shall we?
Sadness is more than just tears or the blues, and I'm here to give a little insight to it from what I've learned about it through research over the years. Sadness is unavoidable and negative emotion, which is often associated with trauma, loss, and hopelessness. It is an emotion that is longer lasting and may result into a mental illness known as depression if it is too long. However, do not confuse the two. Depression is an illness and sadness is an emotion. Normally, I would go more into depression, but I want to focus more on emotion, meaning sadness and anger. Going back to sadness. When you're sad, it is very easy to lose interest in a variety of things such as activities you found enjoyable, work, and even your personal relationships. Sometimes, sadness goes as far as to making these things difficult for you or just difficult to deal with. This tends to damage your life in the sense that it makes you want to just stay home, and more than that, just be alone. Some ways that you can tell if someone is experiencing sadness is based on their actions, sounds, or overall appearance. This includes tears, eyebrows pulled together, lips in the form of a frown, cheeks raised, eyelids lowered, and maybe a break in their voice. This is actually a form of communication and usually when these signs are seen by someone, that someone often feels a desire to help them. Everyone experiences sadness but the intensity of it depnds on the person and what has happened. How someone responds to sadness affects everything about them, including what and who is around them. If you want to get out of sadness, here is a way that might work..first, figure out where you are and where you want to go. Then, choose what would be the greatest way to get there and then do so.
Like sadness, anger is another normal and essential, sometimes long emotion. It varies from annoyance to full on rage and it tends to be a reaction to something we see as upsetting or threatening, often disappointing. This can be toward ourselves or others, including our pets. Anger tells us that something is wrong, whether we know it or not or whether we are justified in feeling it. Some physical reactions for anger include tension, adrenaline rush, fight or flight response, a spike in blood pressure, and a spike in heart rate. How we express our anger can include an increase in volume when using our voice, slamming or throwing things around, running away from a situation, stating we are angry and want an apology, or simply just shutting down. Anger isn't always bad thoough, it can motivate us and sometimes help us protect the ones we love. However, if we cannot manage it well, we may end up making poor decisions that will affect the people we love, our work in the workplace or school, or just simple daily functions. Sometimes, how we were raised or factors of mental illness play a role in how we are with anger. If we were raised in a home that has difficulty communicating, then we may not have had the chance to learn how to properly express anger. One of the many mistakes a lot of us make when we are angry is suppressing our anger, otherwise known as bottling it all up. If you bottle things up for too long, more extreme emotions and breakdowns will happen. You'll feel a constant nagging of something eating at you. Learning to manage anger is extremely important. Distractions help a lot by getting you to relax which is the opposite of anger. Some of my favorite methods include reading, lighting candles and listening to music, or going for a walk. If you don't manage your anger well, the possibility of losing loved ones is unfortunately higher because it's hard on them, especially if you are aggressive in anyway or turn to drugs and alcohol for a coping method. Sometimes, unhealthy caring for anger can cause heart issues such as strokes, attacks, disease, and then even headaches and high blood pressure. If you find your anger is too much and too often, to where it is very dangerous, you may want to seek out a psychologist because how you handle your anger, can often lengthen or shorten your life. One way to handle your anger better is knowing that anger is a secondary emotion, meaning you need to find out what the primary emotion is first before you take on the anger. One thing that I found in my research over the years is that when you're angry, catecholamines (neurotransmitter chemicals) are released which gives you this little boost of energy. Yes, emotions get out of control, especially anger but the the prefrontal cortex of your brain helps keep that emotion, along with the other ones, in check, for the most part. I say for the most part, because in life, a lot of the time; things don't seem to go as planned. In addition to that, the left prefrontal cortex has the ability to switch off emotions which can be good or bad. Good in that sometimes it gives you a breather from the pain some emotions can give you, but bad in that without certain emotions, sometimes you are more likely to become reckless which often is dangerous.
Ignoring anger or sadness does not make them go away. It just makes you bottle them up so that when you finally do let it all in, you completely lose it and break down, which can cause some serious problems in your health and daily life. Now that we dived a little bit into what both sadness and anger are, maybe that'll help people understand trauma a bit more and know that emotions are difficult sometimes, but needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment