Dealing With the Emotional Consequences of Traumatic Injury

While it’s normal to focus on the physical consequences of a traumatic injury, it’s just as important to deal with the emotional consequences. These are less obvious than the physical consequences, but can be just as devastating, especially in the long term. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a huge risk for people in dangerous industries like soldiers and first responders, but also for those who suffer a traumatic injury, and fail to deal with the emotions that arise. While overcoming traumatic injury differs for each individual, here are a few of the steps that work more generally to help process the emotional consequences of personal injury.  

Tips to Dealing With Traumatic Injury

Communication, Communication, Communication

Emotional consequences have a tendency to quickly transmute into psychological issues when they are bottled up inside. When you suffer a traumatic injury, you are flooded with massive amounts of stimuli from both your mind and body. The immediacy of a physical injury often means that the emotional consequences of the incident are pushed to the side for the moment, and left alone until the physical issues have been dealt with. In the days, weeks, or months after a traumatic incident, it becomes time to start sorting through the emotional consequences of a traumatic injury. The best way to do so is to keep both personal and professional lines of communication open, so that you have many outlets for the things going on internally.

Address Your Feelings

In correlation with the above point of communication, having strong emotional openness in times of emotional trauma is key to processing your feelings in a healthy way. Whether this is through healthy internal dialogue, or conversations with friends or professional therapists, you need to recognize your feelings as both real and legitimate. By doing so, you prevent them from being sidelined, where they can fester, unaddressed, into more damaging psychological problems. Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the negative conclusions of unaddressed traumatic feelings, and it can be extremely harmful to both your health and quality of life.

Infuse Your Life With Meaning

One thing that strikes many people dealing with traumatic injury is a sense of helplessness. Traumatic personal injury often occurs due to an accident or chance incident, and this can give the world a cold, cruel feeling. This feeling of helplessness can eat away at you if you let it persist, so it’s best to cut it off at its roots by ensuring you fill your life with purposeful and meaningful activities. Choosing to spend your time pursuing a fitness, charitable, spiritual, or social pursuit, instead of just laying around watching Netflix, can help you process emotional trauma, and get back into a regular routine.

If you or someone you know has been injured in a traumatic incident, contact Evergreen Personal Injury Counsel today. Our team of personal injury attorneys will help you get the justice you deserve, and keep your life moving forward in a positive direction.