Can Trauma Affect You Years Later?

But That Happened Years Ago!

Sometimes people can experience difficult feelings or thoughts that seem disconnected from what is happening in their present life. They may have experienced something difficult many years ago and feel that they have “moved on”, only to be surprised when anxiety, other difficult emotions or memories emerge later.

A common belief is that because so much time has passed, it can't be possible that the experience is still affecting us. However, the passing of time and emotionally processing a traumatic experience are not necessarily the same thing.

Trauma isn't necessarily determined solely by the event itself. What matters is also how the person experienced it and what resources and support they had available. Something that one person processes relatively easily may have a very different impact on another. You can find out more about this in my previous blog post, Why Do People Experience Trauma Differently?

Why Is This Affecting Me Now?

It can be confusing and frustrating to feel like you have gone through a horrible experience and just want to get on with your life, only to later start to feel more intensely impacted by it. There are a number of reasons why this might happen.

At the time of the experience, you may simply have needed to cope and carry on. The circumstances of your life might not have given you the opportunity to go through the process of making sense of and healing from what happened.

An example might be someone seeing horrific things in a warzone but still needing to survive in that environment. Another might be someone who loses a loved one but has a new baby or young children whom they need to prioritise caring for.

There may also not have been the space or safety to process what happened. You may have felt that what happened to you was not only traumatic but shameful and therefore couldn't be brought up with family, friends or people in positions of authority whom you might otherwise have turned to for help. This can particularly be the case with experiences involving abuse or humiliation.

Difficult feelings may also have been pushed aside or avoided as a learnt way of coping. Earlier in life, we may have learnt to keep difficult experiences out of our awareness through downplaying them, distraction or humour. These ways of coping may in fact have been very helpful at the time and can still be useful ways of responding to difficult situations. The difficulty comes when we become stuck in a particular way of coping and begin to use it automatically, regardless of the situation we find ourselves in.

When difficult feelings continue to be pushed away, we may also find ourselves relying increasingly on other ways of managing or escaping what we are feeling. For some people this might involve alcohol or drugs, using sex as a way of escaping difficult feelings, self-harm, overworking or other behaviours that provide temporary relief or distraction. While these may help someone cope in the short term, over time they can begin to create difficulties of their own.

Sometimes difficult feelings or memories also seem to become more noticeable when life becomes safer or more settled. This can feel confusing, particularly when someone expected to feel better once the difficult circumstances had passed.

Other changes in our lives can also bring previous experiences back into our awareness. Getting into a new relationship, becoming a parent, experiencing a bereavement or illness, or going through a period of significant work or life stress can sometimes bring old feelings or patterns into the foreground.

Sometimes it is not until we experience another difficult or frightening event that the effects of an earlier trauma become more apparent. For example, someone who experienced a traumatic event many years ago may feel that they have moved on from it. They might rarely think about what happened and may have continued with their life without experiencing obvious difficulties. However, experiencing another frightening event — such as a car accident, an assault, a bereavement or another situation in which they feel powerless — can sometimes bring feelings and responses associated with the earlier experience back to the surface.

There is research suggesting that how someone responded to an earlier traumatic experience may be associated with their vulnerability following a later trauma. In a prospective study following 990 young adults over a ten-year period, Breslau, Peterson and Schultz (2008) found that people who had developed PTSD following an earlier trauma were more likely to develop PTSD following a subsequent traumatic event. Interestingly, simply having experienced an earlier trauma without developing PTSD was not associated with the same increased risk.

This doesn't mean that an earlier trauma was lying dormant waiting to emerge, or that experiencing trauma makes someone destined to develop difficulties following another traumatic experience. The researchers themselves suggested that an underlying vulnerability to developing PTSD could potentially help explain why some people developed PTSD following both the earlier and subsequent trauma.

A new experience may also evoke familiar feelings of fear, helplessness or lack of control and bring ways of responding that developed around an earlier experience into the present.

This can sometimes leave a person wondering why their reaction to the current situation feels so intense. Part of what they are experiencing may relate to what has just happened, while another part may connect with experiences from much earlier in their life.

Trauma as an Unfinished Experience

From a Gestalt perspective, trauma can sometimes be understood as an unfinished experience — something that we were not able to fully make sense of, respond to or integrate at the time.

Rather than thinking of trauma as being literally “stored” somewhere waiting to come out, we might consider how an earlier experience continues to influence the way we experience ourselves, other people and situations in the present.

A situation today that carries something of the original experience — perhaps helplessness, danger, rejection or loss of control — may bring familiar feelings and ways of responding into our awareness. The circumstances may be very different, but something about our experience of them can feel remarkably similar.

Gestalt therapy places particular importance on what is happening in the here and now. We cannot change what happened to us in the past, but we can begin to develop greater awareness of how those experiences may be influencing the way we respond to ourselves, other people and the world today.

How Might Past Trauma Show Up in My Life Now?

The effects of earlier experiences can show themselves in many different ways, and they will not be the same for everybody. For some people this might involve anxiety or a feeling of constantly being on edge. Certain situations might provoke a much stronger emotional response than they seem to warrant, leaving someone wondering why they reacted so intensely.

Anxiety itself can sometimes be difficult to understand, particularly when there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason for feeling this way. I explore this further in my article Why Do I Feel Anxious All the Time?

For others, the effects may become more apparent within relationships. Someone might find it difficult to trust other people, become particularly sensitive to rejection, avoid conflict or closeness, or find themselves repeatedly falling into similar relationship patterns without fully understanding why.

Others may notice that they disconnect from their feelings, become highly self-critical, avoid particular situations or feel a strong need to remain in control.

These experiences do not necessarily mean that somebody has experienced trauma. There can be many reasons why we develop particular emotional and relational patterns. However, becoming curious about when these responses developed and what purpose they may once have served can sometimes help us understand ourselves differently.

Rather than asking, “Why am I like this?”, we might begin to ask, “What happened that made responding in this way necessary or helpful to me?”

Can Counselling Help With Trauma From Years Ago?

Exploring trauma in counselling does not necessarily mean having to repeatedly recount everything that happened to you or being pushed to talk about experiences before you feel ready.

In my work, I aim to provide a calm and supportive environment where difficult experiences can be explored at a pace that feels manageable for you.

Part of this process can involve becoming more aware of how previous experiences may be affecting you in the present — the emotions that emerge, what happens in your body, the situations you find particularly difficult and the ways you have learnt to cope with them.

We can also begin to explore these responses with curiosity rather than judgement. A way of coping that causes difficulties in your life today may have developed for a very understandable reason and may once have helped you through circumstances that felt overwhelming.

Developing greater awareness of these patterns can gradually give us more choice. Instead of automatically responding in ways that developed around an earlier experience, it may become possible to recognise what is happening in the present and find different ways of responding that better fit our lives now.

The fact that something happened many years ago does not mean that it shouldn't still affect you. Time passing and processing an experience are not necessarily the same thing.

Equally, our past experiences do not have to determine how we experience the rest of our lives. If something happened many years ago but you notice that it still seems to influence how you feel, relate to other people or respond to situations today, it may be worth becoming curious about that connection rather than judging yourself for not having simply “moved on”.

If you are looking for trauma counselling in South London, I offer in-person counselling in Balham and Tooting, as well as online counselling. If you would like to explore whether counselling might be helpful for you, please get in touch by email, text or phone to arrange a free initial conversation.

Tel: 07445 551287

Email: enquiries@rmcounselling.org.uk

Reference

Breslau, N., Peterson, E. L., & Schultz, L. R. (2008). A Second Look at Prior Trauma and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Effects of Subsequent Trauma: A Prospective Epidemiological Study. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(4), 431–437. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.65.4.431