The Connection Between Trauma and Difficulty with Emotional Expression

Over the course of my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve often noticed a connection between people who have experienced trauma and the challenge with emotional expression. This tends to go one of two ways for folks: either a difficulty accessing, identifying, and communicating feelings OR on the other end of the spectrum, emotional flooding and difficulty with regulating big emotions. 

Autonomic Nervous System 101

If we zoom out and take a look at what happens in the nervous system when we experience trauma, this connection might make more sense. The nervous system’s response to a traumatic experience is fight, flight or freeze. Fight and flight are considered mobilized defense responses. This might look like anger and resistance to unwanted physical touch (fight) or running away from a scary thing (flight). When the nervous system doesn’t have access to fight or flight as mobilized defense responses, it goes into freeze. This might look like collapse, withdrawal, shut-down, quiet, loss of words, or feeling physically frozen. 

Stuck in Freeze and How to Get Out of It

Sometimes our system can get stuck in freeze. Which is what can lead to a difficulty in accessing, naming, feeling, or describing an emotion. We can think of it as your system keeping you in a freeze state to protect you from potential harm. It may not yet realize there is no longer harm requiring the freeze response, even if we can intellectually reason that this kind of defensive response is no longer needed to protect you. Many of the people who I see in this kind of state really struggle to know what they’re feeling. They might describe feeling “nothing” or “blank” or respond to a curious question about what they’re feeling with a thought (and there’s a difference between thoughts and feelings). This can be incredibly frustrating for folks who are really trying to figure out their emotions. 

While it’s a slow process of waking your nervous system back up, it’s possible to restore the emotional awareness and present moment processing. This often looks like slowly beginning to tune in to the “nothing” feeling or the “blank” feeling and see what it’s like. Does it come with any kind of imagery or sensation in the body? Sometimes it can help to introduce a little gentle movement in the body when coming out of a freeze state. I might coach clients to push their feet into the floor or feel the base of their spine, to feel into these solid, grounding, and more mobilizing aspects of their body. 

Because there is so much activation underneath that freeze state (remember, your nervous system first attempted fight and flight, so that mobilization energy is still under there), it can feel really scary or overwhelming to begin to wake up from that state. It’s important to listen to the pacing and tolerance of your specific nervous system when doing this work. And having a trauma-informed guide to help do this is key.

Emotional flooding and difficulty regulating big feelings

With trauma, sometimes the effect on the nervous system goes the opposite direction from freeze. We can frame this as emotional flooding and high activation, with difficulty managing nervous system regulation. This might look like extreme tearfulness, agitation, despair, anxiety, hypervigilance, catastrophizing, dizziness, difficulty with executive functioning. This is the result of a nervous system that has been deeply affected by trauma and is kind of stuck in a high-alert mode, in an attempt to protect the mind-body system from further harm. 

How to manage high activation

When this kind of presentation shows up, the primary goal is stabilization. We need to first give the nervous system something solid and safe to orient to. Often with this kind of flooding, orienting to sensation in the body is too activating, so we want to shift awareness to something outside the body. This is where I might invite a client to look around the room, feel their feet on the floor, feel the couch beneath them, or find something in the room to rest their eyes on. Show your system something neutral-to-positive that it can orient to, and see what happens inside. Because a traumatized nervous system can be quick to go back into a trauma response (like getting sucked into a tornado), this can take repetition and practice to really see some stabilization start to take effect. 

These are two ways we might see a struggle with emotional expression for someone recovering from trauma. I also want to offer the reassurance that it doesn’t have to stay this way. It’s possible to recover from trauma and find both stabilization and a life rich with emotional awareness and engagement. If you find yourself reading this and resonating with any of these experiences, I encourage you to reach out about how trauma therapy can help.