Updated on December 19, 2025
It’s been a year since the car accident. You walked away with minor injuries, and everyone told you how lucky you were. But lately, you’ve noticed something strange: every time you get in a car, your heart races. You avoid highways. You snap at your partner for no reason. You’re exhausted all the time, but you can’t sleep.
When friends ask if you’re okay, you say “fine.” Because objectively, you should be fine. The accident wasn’t even that bad. Other people have been through worse.
But here’s what most people don’t understand about trauma: it’s not about comparing experiences or measuring whose pain counts more. Trauma isn’t defined by what happened to you. It’s defined by what happens inside you as a result.
Your body remembers what your mind tries to minimize. And that gap between “it wasn’t that bad” and “I don’t feel okay” is where unresolved trauma lives.
What Makes Trauma Different from Stress
Trauma occurs when an experience overwhelms your nervous system’s ability to cope. Your brain and body shift into survival mode, and sometimes they get stuck there long after the danger has passed.
This isn’t a weakness. It’s biology. Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk’s work has shown that trauma is literally stored in the body as changes to the nervous system. Intense emotions during traumatic events create long-term patterns in how your body responds to reminders of what happened.
Unlike regular stress that you process and move through, unresolved trauma keeps recycling. Your nervous system stays on high alert, scanning for threats that may no longer exist.
How Unresolved Trauma Shows Up in Daily Life
Trauma doesn’t always look like flashbacks and nightmares. Sometimes it looks like everyday struggles that don’t seem connected to anything specific.
When Your Emotions Feel Out of Control
You’re at dinner with friends when someone makes a joke that lands wrong. Suddenly, you’re furious, way beyond what the situation warrants. Or maybe you’re the opposite: you feel nothing most of the time, like you’re watching your life through glass.
Unresolved trauma disrupts emotional regulation. Your nervous system learned to respond to danger, and now it treats everyday annoyances like emergencies. You might explode over small things or shut down completely to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
This isn’t about having a short fuse or being too sensitive. When trauma keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode, you lose access to the middle ground between numb and overwhelmed.
Avoidance That Narrows Your World
Maybe you’re always busy. Your calendar is packed, your mind is racing, and sitting still feels impossible because that’s when the thoughts creep in.
Or you avoid specific places, people, or situations that remind you of painful experiences. You stopped driving on certain roads. You don’t go to parties anymore. You keep relationships at a surface level because a real connection feels risky.
Avoidance makes sense as self-protection. But over time, the world you can comfortably inhabit gets smaller and smaller. The strategies that once helped you survive start preventing you from living.
Physical Symptoms Without Medical Cause
Your neck and shoulders are constantly tight. You get headaches that won’t quit. Your stomach is a mess. You’ve been to doctors, had tests run, and everything comes back normal.
Here’s something many people don’t know: trauma lives in your body, not just your mind. When your nervous system stays on high alert, it keeps your muscles tense, your digestion disrupted, and your immune system compromised.
Van der Kolk’s research found that trauma survivors often experience chronic physical symptoms, including pain, digestive issues, and frequent illness. These aren’t imaginary. Your body is reacting to the ongoing stress of an unresolved threat response.
Hypervigilance That Won’t Turn Off
You startle easily at loud noises. You scan rooms for exits. You check locks multiple times. You can’t relax, even in places you know are safe.
This constant state of alertness is exhausting. Your nervous system is doing its job, trying to keep you safe. But it’s operating on outdated information, treating the present like it’s still the past.
Sleep becomes difficult because your brain won’t let you be vulnerable enough to truly rest. Even positive experiences feel muted because you’re always partly focused on potential danger.
Intrusive Memories and Thoughts
The memories show up uninvited. A smell, a sound, or seemingly nothing at all triggers vivid images or sensations from the traumatic experience. Sometimes they’re full flashbacks that make you feel like you’re back in that moment. Other times they’re just fragments: a feeling, an image, a physical sensation.
These aren’t regular memories you can think about and file away. They’re more like your nervous system is replaying the trauma, trying to process what happened, but getting stuck in the loop.
Shame That Feels Like a Core Truth
Trauma often comes with messages about who you are. Maybe you were abused as a child and internalized the belief that you’re unlovable. Perhaps you experienced assault and blame yourself for not fighting back. Maybe you witnessed something terrible and feel guilty for surviving when others didn’t.
These aren’t just thoughts you can logic your way out of. Shame from trauma operates at a deeper level, shaping how you see yourself and what you believe you deserve.
You might struggle to accept compliments, push people away before they can leave you first, or sabotage opportunities because some part of you doesn’t believe good things can happen to people like you.
Relationships That Keep Missing Connection
Trusting people feels impossible, or you trust too quickly and get hurt repeatedly. You want intimacy but panic when someone gets too close. You repeat patterns from past relationships even when you recognize them happening.
Trauma changes how we attach to others. If your early relationships taught you that closeness means danger, your nervous system will sound alarms when someone tries to get close, even if they’re safe. If you learned that love means chaos, calm relationships might feel boring or wrong.
This isn’t about choosing bad partners or not wanting a connection. Your body is protecting you based on what it learned, even when that protection interferes with the closeness you want.
When Self-Help Isn’t Enough
Some people work through difficult experiences on their own over time, with support from loved ones and healthy coping strategies. But unresolved trauma often needs more specialized help.
Consider therapy if any of these feel true:
- Your trauma symptoms are interfering with work, relationships, or daily activities in ways you can’t manage alone.
- You’re using alcohol, food, work, or other behaviors to numb or avoid difficult emotions, and it’s creating new problems.
- Your relationships are suffering because trauma makes it hard to trust, stay present, or communicate what you need.
- You have physical symptoms like chronic pain, insomnia, or digestive issues that doctors can’t explain or treat effectively.
- You feel stuck, like you’re just surviving rather than actually living, and nothing you’ve tried on your own has made a real difference.
The hardest part about unresolved trauma is how it can make you feel like you’re the problem. You’re not. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you. It just needs help updating its threat detection system.
How Therapy Helps Heal Trauma
Several approaches have strong research support for treating trauma effectively.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they’re less emotionally charged. A comprehensive meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms, depression, anxiety, and subjective distress with moderate to large effect sizes. The beauty of EMDR is that it often works without requiring you to talk in detail about what happened.
Somatic therapy approaches work directly with your body to release stored trauma. Since trauma lives in your nervous system, talking about it isn’t always enough. These approaches help you notice and shift physical sensations, allowing your body to complete the defensive responses that got interrupted during the trauma.
Trauma-focused CBT helps identify and change thought patterns that keep you stuck. It’s beneficial for the shame narratives and distorted beliefs that trauma creates.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you understand and work with the different parts of yourself that developed to help you survive trauma.
The right approach depends on your specific situation, symptoms, and what feels safe to you. Many therapists in Austin, including at Firefly Therapy, integrate multiple approaches to match what you need.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Healing from trauma isn’t about forgetting what happened or getting back to who you were before. It’s about integrating the experience so it’s no longer running your life in the background.
You’ll know healing is occurring when your body begins to feel safer, when you’re able to discuss difficult experiences without being overwhelmed by emotion, and when there is more space between a trigger event and your reaction to it.
Healing means you can be present for good moments without waiting for something bad to happen. It means trusting yourself to handle difficult emotions without avoiding or numbing them.
It’s not linear. Some days feel like progress, and other days feel like you’re back at square one. That’s normal. Healing moves in spirals, not straight lines.
Starting Your Healing Journey
If you recognize yourself in these signs, therapy can help. You don’t need to have everything figured out or be at rock bottom to benefit from support. In fact, earlier intervention often means trauma is easier to process.
At Firefly Therapy Austin, we work with people navigating all types of trauma, from single incidents to complex developmental trauma. Our therapists are trained in EMDR, somatic approaches, and other evidence-based treatments that address how trauma lives in both body and mind.
Healing from trauma is possible. It takes courage to admit something is wrong when the world tells you that you should be over it by now. But your nervous system knows what it experienced, and it deserves the chance to finally feel safe.
Ready to take the first step toward healing? You don’t have to carry this alone anymore.