Trauma is associated with pain, sorrow, agony, guilt, and sometimes shame and there is nothing more painful than reliving the trauma again and again. Only the person who has experienced it knows the severity of it, and how desperately they want to heal from the trauma.

Our mind is designed to save us from the pain, so it tries it by playing a traumatic event in a loop expecting you to resolve it or it pushes the traumatic experience away from our mental awareness and down in our subconscious. This is the reason why victims of narcissism report brain fog, where they can’t recollect the memories from the past correctly. The fact is that trauma stays in our conscious or subconscious or both if it’s not addressed and resolved.

Often trauma reminds you of its existence through ever-rising feelings such as shame, guilt and self-doubt. While sometimes it gives you nightmares, anxiety and stress, or flashes of the incident followed by other PTSD symptoms. If trauma stays long enough in one’s subconscious without getting addressed and resolved then one might develop psychosomatic illnesses, unexplained chronic pain, depression and also develop a self-sabotaging pattern (repeatedly getting into toxic/narcissistic relationships).

5 signs of PTSD you need to know

• A life-threatening event. This includes a perceived-to-be life-threatening event. For example — Physical/psychological/emotional abuse or an experience of violence by a loved one.
• Internal reminders of the event — These symptoms typically present as nightmares or flashbacks.