Traumatic Incidents and Maintaining Your Mental Health

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Coping with a traumatic event can seem overwhelming, particularly if you don’t feel equipped to process the emotions you’re experiencing. When we don’t have the tools, we need to recover from a traumatic incident, it’s likely to manifest in various negative ways. Due to this, it’s important to find healthy strategies to help you recover from a traumatic event. 

No matter what you’ve been through, there are ways to rebuild your life and enhance your mental health. Take a look at these top tips for protecting your mental health following a traumatic event and take another step on the journey to recovery

6 ways to help overcome traumatic incidents for your own mental health

Acknowledge your trauma

Trauma comes in many shapes and sizes and there’s no universal assessment when it comes to determining what constitutes a traumatic incident. Often, people attempt to minimize their feelings by convincing themselves other people wouldn’t consider their situation to be traumatic or maintaining that, ‘other people go through worse things’. However, this only serves to make yourself feel worse about the feelings you’re experiencing. 

Accepting that an incident was traumatic for you is key to repairing your mental health. Once you acknowledge the impact an event has had on you, it becomes easier to accept help and seek out the assistance you need. 

Explore the help that’s available

The medical community has come a long way when it comes to helping people recover from traumatic events and there is a wider range of options than ever before. From counseling and talking therapies to eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and medication, professional help can give you the tools you need to protect your mental health following trauma.  

Although it’s natural to feel discombobulated after a traumatic incident, the symptoms you’re experiencing may indicate that you’re dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is an extremely common condition which occurs after trauma and often causes a range of symptoms, including:

• Flashbacks
• Anxiety attacks
• Insomnia
• Confusion
• Nightmares
• Guilt

While the symptoms of PTSD can feel scary, overwhelming, and disconcerting, there is a range of treatments that can help you to overcome them. By reaching out to your clinician or a reputable therapist, you can access the professional support you need following a traumatic incident. 

Understand your rights

If a traumatic event constitutes a criminal act or a civil breach of your rights, you may be entitled to take further action. For some people, enforcing their rights is a way of recognizing their trauma and working through it. If you were hurt due to a serious car accident, for example, you may be entitled to claim financial compensation from the person responsible. Injured in an accident? Click here to find out how you could take action. Alternatively, if you were the victim of a crime, you may want to report the incident to the police so that the person or people responsible can be brought to justice. 

Not everyone wants to enforce their rights following a stressful event, so don’t place unnecessary pressure on yourself. However, many people do find that the process is cathartic and helps them to address issues they may have previously been avoiding or unaware of. Learning more about your rights following a traumatic event will help you to decide whether or not you want to pursue any action and give you the choice about how you wish to proceed. 

Talk to others

It can be difficult to talk about a traumatic experience, particularly in the immediate aftermath of an event. Despite this, opening up to other people can help you to process your feelings and emotions. If you feel able to talk to someone about what’s happened, take the opportunity to share as much as you feel you can. 

Sometimes, talking to other people who were involved in the incident or who have been through something similar can be extremely helpful. In some cases, this might be your friends, classmates, or family members who were present at the time of the traumatic incident. In other instances, you might feel more comfortable talking to strangers who have been through comparable events. If so, there are numerous support groups that will gladly welcome you. In addition to attending groups in person, you can also find a range of support from respected organizations and groups online. 

Practice self-care

Dealing with a traumatic experience doesn’t necessarily happen overnight. For some people, it may take days, weeks, months, or even years to fully process a traumatic event. However, you can take steps to keep your body and mind as healthy as possible during this time. Moderate amounts of exercise, mindfulness, meditation, and yoga are all positive ways of practicing self-care and they can be surprisingly helpful when it comes to processing trauma. 

As you deal with the impact of a traumatic experience, you may find that you want to spend more time alone than normal. This isn’t unusual, so don’t feel compelled to spend all of your time in the company of others. Giving yourself the opportunity to process what’s happened alone is as valid as sharing your feelings with others, so trust your instincts and allow them to guide you on the path of healing. 

Recovering from a Traumatic Experience

Everyone processes trauma differently and everyone has varying tools with which they use to deal with their emotions. This means that there is no right or wrong way to recover from a traumatic incident or to protect your mental health in the weeks and months which follow. 

It is important, however, to find healthy ways to overcome the impact a traumatic incident can have. Denial is not uncommon after a stressful event but refusing to acknowledge what’s happened can make it much harder to overcome. 

By giving yourself time to recover, practicing healthy forms of self-care, and finding the best recovery techniques for you, you can successfully nurture your mental health in the aftermath of a stressful event and recover from trauma.