Do you have anxiety, depression, or unresolved trauma?
Have you ever experienced a time or phase in your life where you suddenly felt more anxious than normal, or felt way more depressed/sad/overwhelmed than your usual and you had no idea why? Maybe there was a very stressful situation that triggered this response. A job change, move, relationship status change, an argument with parents, or even just realizing how mundane and boring everything felt in that particular time of your life. Or maybe there really wasn’t anything in particular that triggered it - but all the same, the anxiety or depression visits. You go to the doctor and they tell you that you have either: Generalized anxiety disorder or Major depressive disorder. Your doctor prescribes you medication, and off you go. You have a diagnosis. You feel better: the anxious thoughts and feelings subside and you feel more at peace; depressive thoughts and feelings are only just “blinks” in your mind’s eye and they don’t flood or overwhelm you anymore. This is wonderful.
And then a few months later, something significant happens and you feel that tension in your body again. The mind is running all the worst case scenarios, you can’t sleep well, or maybe you lose all the motivation to do anything, you’re sleeping too much, the house is a mess, you feel shameful for being totally “ineffective” - the medication isn’t helping like it used to.
What is going on?
Depression and anxiety can be a symptom/response due to neurobiology. Some of us are more prone to depression or anxiety because (to put it simply) of the way our brains are wired. Remember that our brain is an organ (a really important one, I would argue!) in our body and mental health issues/disorders can be passed down from our family, just like any other health conditions. There are studies that found that trauma can change the way our DNA is expressed, and therefore the change can be passed down in the next generation. Even though you may not have experienced the same trauma your grandparents may have experienced themselves, this means you might still experience the effects of trauma.
Anxiety and depression can be symptoms of unhealed trauma: Looking from IFS lens
So, while some of us may experience depression and anxiety due to biology, there’s others who may experience increase in anxiety or depression due to unresolved childhood trauma.
To best explain this, I’m going to use the lens from Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. All of us have different parts inside us and all of these parts’ intentions are good. We know we have different parts in us because we often say things like: “there’s a part of me that wants to get a take out, but there’s another part of me that says I should cook.” Their intention is to keep us safe and to not feel pain (emotional, mental, physical) as much as possible. There are “exiles”, “managers”, and “firefighters” and each plays a different role within us. Exiles are defined as young parts of us that have experienced trauma and often are isolated from the rest of the system. They’re the vulnerable, wounded, and can carry very intense emotions. Managers are the ones that help us run the day to day of our lives. They’re the ones that keep us motivated, organized, in control, and show up to our job. Sometimes they can show up as very critical and aggressive. Firefighters are the ones that react when exiles are activated in an effort to extinguish the exiles’ feelings (because exiles’ feelings are way too intense and uncomfortable to deal with). This means firefighters can look like addictions (drugs/alcohol), binge eating, sex binge, over-spending, and/or non suicidal self injury. Using this framework, it can be understood that symptoms of anxiety and depression are responses to the activation of exiles (AKA -unhealed trauma). When our exiled parts are not healed, the managers and firefighters continue to do their job, which is to protect the exiled part and making sure their feelings don’t overwhelm or flood you.
For example, let’s say you recently felt rejected by your boss because they gave you a pretty harsh criticism of your work. This experience of rejection especially hurts because you grew up with parents who were extremely critical of you and constantly made you feel like you were not good enough. This is your exiled part - the child that wanted their parents’ approval but were often met with criticism and rejection. After this encounter with your boss, you fall into deep depression. This is your firefighter saying “okay the exiled part [rejected child] is activated, it’s really uncomfortable and painful. Let’s make you depressed so you’re resting. You need more sleep. Don’t show up to work, it’s better to be in bed than at work.”
This is a very simplified and shortened explanation of the IFS model but I hope it helped you to understand how unhealed trauma can show up as anxiety and depression in our lives. Whether you experience anxiety and depression for a short period of time, not sure if you have exiled parts within you, given a diagnosis by your doctor, come from a family with history of anxiety and depression, or are currently experiencing it - I invite you to give yourself the gift of compassion and lean into the curiosity to explore further what this experience is trying to tell you.
You can heal. And you deserve to heal.
