How Trauma Alters Your Sense of Time
Trauma can impact your life in a variety of ways, and it often feels like it never really leaves. Even if you experienced trauma in childhood, it can affect you years later as an adult.
In that way, trauma alters your sense of time. It disrupts your sense of continuity, often making you feel “stuck” or like you can’t fully escape the experience that happened, no matter how long ago it was.
Let’s take a closer look at how trauma alters your sense of time and what you can finally do to break the cycle and move forward.
Feeling Stuck in the Past
Trauma often comes with flashbacks, vivid memories, and even triggers that can carry you right back to the moment the experience happened. When that happens, it can create a warped sense of time, causing your brain to perceive things differently.
When trauma causes you to think about the past, you might start to repeat patterns or behaviors in an attempt to change or fix things. This can cause you to become stuck in a sort of vicious cycle that makes you feel haunted by your past. Unfortunately, the more this occurs, the more difficult it is to stay focused on the present.
Disconnected Experiences
Trauma can also be so powerful that it makes it difficult to connect your past, present, and future. Instead, those areas of life can seem disconnected. That makes it difficult to connect memories and experiences and live out a cohesive timeline.
This can create dissociation. You might feel like the trauma you experienced is separate from the rest of your life. While this can be a defense mechanism to help your mental well-being, it’s not sustainable and not a long-term effective way to deal with your underlying trauma. Your trauma doesn’t have to define who you are or dictate your past, present, or future. But acknowledging that it happened within the timeline of your life is a necessary step in the healing process.
Disconnecting yourself from past experiences can make you feel like something is missing from your life. It can also make it hard to form and foster healthy relationships and connections with other people. So, even if you feel like you’re dissociating from your trauma, it’s still impacting you in ways you might not realize.
What Can You Do?
People handle the impact of trauma differently, especially depending on when it occurred. For example, if you dealt with complex trauma as a child (i.e., repeated abuse or neglect), your mind might try to repress or “forget” about the things that happened in an effort to keep you safe.
But trying to stifle what happened to you simply doesn’t work. The effects of trauma will show up in your relationships, your behaviors, and even other mental health issues like anxiety or depression.
Feeling unsure of your own life’s timeline can be jarring. It can cause you to feel like you’re not in control, or that you have nothing to look back on with fondness, because you’re scared of what you’ll find when you go digging into your past.
Your life doesn’t have to be that way.
Trauma can feel very lonely, isolating, and confusing, so don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Therapy is often the best way to better understand underlying trauma and how it’s affecting your life and your sense of time. Therapy can connect the dots and keep the stages of your life from feeling so disconnected.
Is it easy to think back about what you experienced and how it’s affecting you today? Of course not. But it’s a necessary step in the healing process. If you’re ready to put your timeline back together and look forward to the future, consider working with a trauma therapist right away.
Trauma is especially challenging for all of us. Therapists at Wellness Matters specialize in dealing with the effects of trauma. Feel free to contact us today to set up an appointment. You can connect with the Wellness Matters Intake Coordinator by texting or calling (218) 616-1276
At Wellness Matters, the intake process is all on-line and can be done in less than fifteen minutes. On-line appointments make it possible to attend appointments from the comfort from your home or office. In-person services may also be available for people living in northern MN.
