Traumatic experiences affect far more than your mental health. They can have serious effects on your physical health as well. Thankfully, taking the time to process and recover from traumatic experiences can go a long way toward resolving your physical symptoms and help you achieve greater mental health and stability in the process.

Understanding Trauma

“Trauma” is a term used to describe the internal emotional response to extremely difficult or intensely emotional situations.

Contrary to what many people believe, trauma is not an external event. A car crash, combat experience, or abuse are not trauma themselves but are potentially traumatic experiences that could cause a person to experience trauma.

This distinction is incredibly important and plays a large role in understanding how trauma is understood and treated. Take, for example, the unexpected loss of a family member. This experience is a common potentially traumatic event that can lead to lasting emotional and mental health difficulties if left unaddressed.

You may experience this situation and develop trauma as a result, while a sibling or other family member will experience the same situation without developing trauma.

Trauma is the internal reaction to a traumatic event, which causes many mental and physical health symptoms, and internal work will help you overcome trauma if you seek treatment.

Signs of Trauma

Trauma is an unfortunately common experience. Signs of untreated trauma include:

  • Being easily startled
  • Experiencing excess anxiety or fear
  • Difficulty trusting others
  • Having intrusive thoughts or memories of the traumatic experience
  • Social isolation or withdrawal
  • Using substances to cope

If these signs of trauma continue for months or years and start to impact your daily life, it may be an indication that trauma has developed into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is a debilitating mental health condition with a wide range of symptoms and challenges that typically require professional intervention to overcome.

Yet, even if trauma hasn’t transitioned into a full-blown mental health condition, it can still cause undue stress and difficulty in your daily life. It can shape the way you interact with others, change your perspective of the world, or lead you to feel unsafe in objectively harmless situations.

Further, there are several physical health symptoms of trauma that can affect your body and mind.

Physical Health Symptoms of Trauma

Trauma is a mental reaction, but it has a substantial number of physical health effects. Leaving trauma untreated can contribute to a number of chronic health conditions, create undue stress that weighs on your body, impact your immune system function, and even change the way your brain responds to difficult situations.

The way trauma affects physical health is still being explored, but one of the key pathways clinicians and researchers have discovered is through the body’s stress response. People who have experienced trauma often have highly elevated cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone and works as a natural anti-inflammatory agent.

Yet, when people experience high levels of cortisol around the clock, their bodies become adjusted to these high hormone levels. In time, the anti-inflammatory properties of cortisol have less and less effect, leading to chronic inflammation and a higher risk of multiple physical health conditions.

There are several glaring physical health risks from living with trauma.

Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation is when people have prolonged inflammatory responses for no specific reason. Inflammation itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your body uses inflammation to activate the immune system in response to injury, infection, or disease, and it plays an important role in regulating your overall health and well-being.

However, when inflammation is present for months or years — not in response to a specific medical problem — it can have a number of harmful effects on the rest of your body.

Inflammation is essentially a release of immune system cells to attack germs or chemicals within the body. Yet, when they don’t have a harmful substance to attack, they can start to impact the function of healthy cells.

In this way, chronic inflammation can be a contributing factor to a number of physical health symptoms or diseases. It can lead to vague pains, fever, fatigue, more frequent infections, diarrhea, or unintentional weight changes.

Trauma and trauma-related disorders have been directly connected to immune system function, particularly in increasing pro-inflammatory responses and decreasing anti-inflammatory responses.

While the reason trauma affects the immune system in this way isn’t clear, the effect of chronic inflammation can cause cascading negative effects on your physical health.

Cardiovascular Disease

Trauma has been repeatedly associated with a number of cardiac risk factors. A 2021 study investigating 75 patients with first-time cardiovascular disease, when compared to healthy controls, had significantly higher rates of trauma and adverse experiences. Some of the most common traumatic experiences reported by these patients included:

  • Emotional neglect
  • Emotional abuse
  • Physical abuse

Scientists have understood for a long time the connection between stress and heart disease. Among countless other contributing factors, living with prolonged stress — such as untreated trauma — can lead to excess inflammation, high blood pressure, and lower levels of good cholesterol (HDL).

Diabetes

Stress from untreated trauma can affect your body’s ability to regulate its blood sugar, often contributing to a diagnosis of diabetes.

Stress puts undue strain on the pancreas, making it difficult for your body to produce enough insulin to control blood glucose levels. This shortage of insulin leads to heightened blood sugar levels, also known as hyperglycemia.

If these effects continue over a long period of time, they can lead to the development of insulin resistance, which is one of the first signs of type 2 diabetes.

The effects of trauma in regulating blood sugar are likely due to the pro-inflammatory nature of trauma and trauma-related disorders. Excess inflammation puts pressure on the pancreas, which, as a result, cannot perform its essential functions at its peak capacity.

Autoimmune Diseases

People who have lived through traumatic experiences experience heightened levels of autoimmune disease compared to the general population. This is, again, likely due to the chronic inflammation many people with trauma experience.

People who are living with untreated trauma are at higher risk of developing autoimmune diseases such as:

  • Rheumatoid arthritis
  • Celiac disease
  • Psoriasis
  • Crohn’s disease

These autoimmune diseases can severely impact your daily functioning and cause lasting health effects if left unaddressed.

Can Trauma Treatment Resolve Physical Issues?

If you’ve started to experience physical health problems as a result of trauma, it’s natural to wonder whether seeking mental health treatment can solve your physical health problems. Achieving a holistic recovery from trauma isn’t always a clear-cut mental health treatment plan, however.

If you’ve only started experiencing milder physical problems, such as increased inflammation or vague pains, working to resolve your trauma with mental health treatment may be an effective solution.

By starting trauma therapy, medication management, or alternative treatment options for overcoming trauma, you may be able to substantially reduce the risk of developing other long-lasting physical health issues.

In contrast, if you’ve developed a medical condition such as type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, mental health treatment alone may not be sufficient to reverse your medical disease state. It can, however, help stop your body from experiencing any further progression of disease due to trauma itself.

Regardless of whether you have physical health problems as a result of your trauma, seeking evidence-based trauma treatment options is an important part of achieving your own personal sense of recovery.

Trauma can have a myriad of negative effects, but treatment with a mental health professional can help you work past these challenges and live a healthier, more productive life in the future.

Trauma Treatment Options

The science of trauma therapy and treatment has been evolving for decades, with several different interventions showing powerful effects in helping people resolve their symptoms and achieve lasting recovery. Some of the most effective trauma treatments used today include talk therapy, ketamine-assisted healing, and stellate ganglion blocks.

Talk Therapy

Talk therapy has been the gold standard for treating trauma and PTSD for some time. A number of therapeutic styles have consistently shown improvement in trauma symptoms, with some of the most common including:

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • Dialectical behavior therapy
  • Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing

While each of these therapeutic styles has a different set of techniques and approaches for helping people process their trauma, deal with their symptoms, and build healthier coping mechanisms, all are effective for the ultimate goal of achieving a lasting and holistic recovery.

Talk therapy approaches are typically offered in both in-person and virtual formats. They consist of meeting with a therapist to talk about your challenges, learn healthier ways of approaching disruptive thoughts and experiences, and build your capacity for stress over time.

Working with a talk therapist helps you dig into the underlying causes of your trauma and how it continues to affect you today, and eventually, this can help you achieve a lasting recovery.

Ketamine-Assisted Healing

Ketamine-assisted healing is a new approach to talk therapy that incorporates the dissociative psychedelic medication ketamine.

By using ketamine in the talk therapy process, people can break through many of the initial barriers they experience when seeking mental health treatment, rapidly accelerating the healing process and helping them feel better faster.

The process of ketamine-assisted healing typically includes three steps:

  1. Meeting with your treatment team for an assessment and screening
  2. Taking the medication while under medical and clinical supervision
  3. Talking with your counselor throughout the ketamine experience

A ketamine-assisted healing session typically takes about two hours, and most people feel substantial improvement right away. Repeated sessions can further solidify your progress in treatment and keep you feeling your best mentally for years to come.

Stellate Ganglion Blocks

The stellate ganglion is a bundle of nerves located just above the clavicle. Its primary function is to carry signals for the sympathetic nervous system, which is largely responsible for your fight-or-flight response.

A stellate ganglion block is an administration of a local anesthetic to this bundle of nerves, which can provide dramatic relief from fight-or-flight symptoms seen in people experiencing trauma.

This procedure is not a permanent trauma solution, but it can rapidly reduce the physical effects of trauma people may be experiencing on a daily basis.

Start Treatment at Plus by APN

Trauma can quickly become a leading cause of both mental and physical health issues. Leaving these challenges unaddressed can lead to cascades of negative effects, but there is hope for recovery when you seek targeted and evidence-based trauma treatment options.

At Plus by APN, our team is dedicated to providing our clients with the best treatment options available. To learn more about our comprehensive mental health treatment options, reach out to our team by calling us at 424.644.6486 or filling out our confidential online contact form. You can start your journey to a better state of mind and body today.

References

  • Galli, Federica et al. “Psychological Traumas and Cardiovascular Disease: A Case-Control Study.” Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 9,7 875. 12 Jul. 2021, doi:10.3390/healthcare9070875
  • Pierce, Albert, and Jean-François Pittet. “Inflammatory response to trauma: implications for coagulation and resuscitation.” Current opinion in anaesthesiology vol. 27,2 (2014): 246-52. doi:10.1097/ACO.0000000000000047