What is the Link Between Fear and Trauma?

aliyahcoaching
Jun 10, 2023
3 min read

Fear is an Emotion and a Link to Our Trauma

Fear is an emotion and linked to trauma. Trauma is the effect the experience of something has on the body - if it is left unresolved, unregulated and unhealed, it gets stored and lodged in the body and thickens like scar tissue. Things continue to trigger us and create trauma responses, like anxiety, between the nervous system and brain continues to get set off in moments of perceived or real threat based on a past experiences.

Woman covering laying on a rug, covering her face with her hands.

What Is Trauma?

Trauma is the effect the experience of something has on the body - if it is left unresolved, unregulated and unhealed, it gets stored and lodged in the body and thickens like scar tissue. Recurring trauma is an experience(s) that shows up in an emotional way in the body creating traumatic responses in the body. For example anxiety can be a trauma response in the body to an unresolved and unhealed experience. We have all experienced varying degrees of trauma since childhood (from being lost in a store, seeing violence or being physically or emotionally abandoned/neglected even when parents loved and cared). Things continue to trigger us and create trauma responses, like anxiety, between the nervous system and brain continues to get set off in moments of perceived or real threat based on a past experiences.

What Can I Do?

Guess, what? Anxiety is a fear-based emotion. Being unable to slow down and relax may spark other unpleasant fear-based emotions, such as boredom, loneliness, guilt. So what happens is it gets suppressed even more as we don't sit in the discomfort. The trauma like scar tissue thickens and emotional responses in the body is how we turn up in an emotional way in response to the anxiety. Emotions happen in the body and trauma is the way it shows up in the body in an emotional way. Emotional response something that gets lodged/stored and memories in the body. This becomes heightened when emotions from past experiences have been suppressed and left unhealed. It is a physiological response (fight, flight or freeze mode) happening in the body between the nervous system and amygdala in the brain to a perceived or real threat.

"Trauma is not what happened to you – it is what is happening inside" - Gabor Mate

It’s okay. It means you are not your experience; you are not what happened to you, you are not the emotional state you feel. IT MEANS you have the power and ability within you to heal and grow and live your life, your experience of being alive with joy and love.

It is a normal human emotion to feel anxious and depressed at times, but when we resist, avoid, numb or deny how we feel, we create more trauma in our body. Indeed if you were unable or scared to express your feelings in childhood, this was also trauma and anxiety is an example of a trauma response in the body.