How to recover from a traumatic event?

From global pandemic, Beirut blast to personal tragedies, traumatic events are at their peak this year. Overcoming a traumatic stress can affect your life and well-being. You may feel intense shock, confusion, and fear or overwhelmed due to any catastrophic event, and those feelings aren’t limited to the people who actually experienced the event.

Whether you’ve been affected by a traumatic event  directly or not, it’s totally normal to feel anxious, scared and stressed. In the following, we’ll introduce you to some traumatic stress symptoms and how to overcome the trauma.

Symptoms

If these following symptoms apply on you, then you might be having a traumatic stress:

Feeling shocked: You have a hard time accepting the reality of what happened, or feel numb and disconnected from your feelings.

Fear:  You worry that the same thing will happen again, or that you’ll lose control or break down.

Sadness or grief: especially if someone you know died or suffered from its consequences.

Feelings of guilt: some might feel the guilt that they survived when others died or got injured… or feel that they could have done more to help.

Anger: You may be angry at God, governments, anyone, whom you feel is responsible for the traumatic event.

Loss of appetite: you don’t want to eat or drink anything and some tend to consume more alcohol or smoke..

Unexplained pain and aches: when exposed to terrific event, you might feel unexpected pains such as headaches, also you will be unable to focus or concentrate on anything.

How to deal with trauma?

Limit media exposure

Checking constantly what’s happening in the world, will definitely expose you to more stress. Watching media coverage or anything related to the event will make your traumatic stress even worse. Also, avoid watching distressing images or videos spread on social media. The best thing is to switch off the TV or phone, especially before going to bed.

Accept your feelings

There’s nothing wrong in crying or mourning in every way. It is very normal to experience emotions of sadness, anger, guilt and shock, thus learn to accept those emotions and don’t rush the healing process. If you feel those negative emotions aren’t going anywhere, you can always seek a professional treatment.

Take positive actions

To overcome a traumatic experience, the best way is to keep moving. Positive actions will help you overcome negative emotions such as fear, anger, guilt… Positive actions include volunteering, donating blood or funds to a certain charity, helping or comforting others.

Boost your mood

Think of how to reduce your traumatic stress and prioritize it. Physical activities, practicing hobbies can highly boost your mood and relieve you from any negative energy. Just do anything that brings you pleasure, it could be through: dancing, painting, singing, cooking, exercising, meditating, breathing exercises…