By Jenny Martin, PsyD
You are functioning just fine. You go through the motions of life with no problem, yet something might feel off. You might feel constantly on edge, disconnected from those around you, or stuck in patterns that you can’t explain. If this sounds like you, you could be dealing with unresolved trauma.
Contrary to what many people think, trauma doesn’t always look or feel like we are in a major crisis. As psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk has shown, trauma lives in the body and nervous system. It can shape our thoughts, behaviors, and relationships long after the original experience has passed. Many people carry unresolved trauma for years (even decades) without ever recognizing it for what it is.
In this article, we’ll talk about 10 common signs of unresolved trauma, explain why trauma doesn’t just ‘go away’ of its own accord, and share how trauma therapy in Chicago can help you move from surviving to healing.
What is Unresolved Trauma?
Trauma happens when our nervous system gets overwhelmed by an experience, or a series of experiences, and can’t process what happened. Instead of filing the memory away into the past, it gets stuck in our body and keeps running in the background.
We end up reliving those feelings over and over again until they are processed. Mental health conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and depression are often a byproduct of this unprocessed trauma.
Trauma is usually divided into two types: “Big T Trauma” and “little t trauma.”
Big T trauma refers to catastrophic, often life-threatening events. For example, things like a serious car accident, an assault, your house burning down, or a sudden, unexpected death of a loved one would all be categorized as Big T trauma.
Little t trauma refers to experiences that may seem less impactful on the surface but are still deeply painful. This would be things like ongoing criticism, emotional neglect, bullying at school, or chronic stress over a long period of time. Little t trauma is often underestimated. But repeated experiences can be just as damaging or even more damaging, than a single large event.
When trauma occurs repeatedly over time (especially in childhood), it can develop into Complex PTSD (CPTSD). Unlike PTSD, which usually follows a single traumatic event, CPTSD reflects the impact of prolonged or repeated trauma. It often affects a person’s sense of self, their ability to manage emotions, and their ability to form safe relationships. People with CPTSD frequently struggle with deep shame, difficulty trusting others, and a persistent feeling of being broken or different from everyone else.
Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) shows that early trauma has real, measurable effects on brain development, physical health, and mental well-being. These effects can last a lifetime. But trauma at any age can go unresolved if it isn’t processed with the right support.
10 Signs of Unresolved Trauma
Trauma shows up differently for everyone. Some might have intense emotional reactions while others might shut down or feel nothing. Others might develop anxiety and/or depression or turn to substances or people-pleasing. There are many different signs that someone may be carrying the burden of unprocessed trauma with them. Here are the 10 most common signs.
1. Chronic Anxiety
You feel like you never can relax and are in a constant state of fight or flight. It’s hard for you to feel safe and you always have a sense of foreboding, expecting something bad to happen. This is your body’s survival response that never fully turns off.
Hypervigilance is one of the most recognizable symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Complex PTSD. This isn’t anxiety for no reason but a readiness to keep you safe that your body learned from past trauma.
2. Difficulty Trusting Others
You have a hard time letting people into your inner circle and often shut down or back away when you feel people getting too close to you. If early experiences in life taught you not to trust people or that they’re unpredictable and unsafe, your brain learned how to protect you from that experience by keeping emotional distance from others.
3. Emotional Numbness or Disconnection
Feeling like you can’t access your emotions or feeling disconnected from your body or the world around you is a common trauma response. Dissociation is when you feel like you’re watching yourself from a distance or you’re not quite present in the experience that’s happening at the moment. This ability to numb yourself and disconnect is often born from surviving overwhelming experiences.
4. People Pleasing and Loss of Self
This is often characterized by saying yes when you want to say no, putting other people’s comfort above your own, and not standing up for yourself in order to avoid conflict. This often comes from childhood experiences when it did not feel safe to have wants, needs or preferences of your own. Even now as an adult when it is safe, your nervous system tells you otherwise.
5. Unexplained Physical Symptoms
Trauma isn’t all in your head. As Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, has documented extensively, trauma is stored physically. This is reflected through chronic tension, headaches, digestive problems, fatigue and other physical symptoms. The body holds on to trauma and it takes a toll on the body over time.
6. Trouble Sleeping or Recurring Nightmares
Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or experiencing vivid, disturbing dreams is extremely common with unresolved trauma. During sleep, the brain attempts to process emotional material. When that material is traumatic, this amounts to you reliving these experiences over and over again at night.
7. Self-Destructive Coping Behaviors
Alcohol, drugs, disordered eating, overworking, compulsive spending, gambling and other self-destructive patterns often develop as ways of managing the pain, numbness, or overwhelm of unprocessed trauma. These behaviors can be signs that the nervous system found a way to cope with pain when it had no other tools.
8. Irrational Fears or Triggers
Certain sounds, smells, situations, or words may send you into a spiral that feels completely out of proportion to what’s happening. This is what is known as a trauma trigger. Something in the present is activating the unprocessed memory of a past experience.
9. Shame, Self-Blame, or Persistent Emptiness
A deep, often wordless sense of being broken, bad, or fundamentally unlovable is a trait of unresolved trauma, and is more specifically a characteristic of childhood trauma and Complex PTSD. This isn’t the same as low self-esteem. It’s a core belief about yourself, often even formed before language, that something is wrong with you at the most basic level. It is not true. And it is a belief that can be overwritten and healed
10. Avoiding Memories, Places, or People
Avoidance is a common trait that trauma survivors have. Instead of facing certain triggers head on, they choose to avoid them. Certain places and people activate the memory of trauma and it makes sense that you would try to avoid that from happening. While this may provide short-term relief, it can solidify in your brain that this memory must be avoided at all costs. Avoidance is a sign that the trauma has not yet been processed.
Why Unresolved Trauma Follows Us Into Adulthood
One of the most important things to understand about trauma is that it is not a memory problem. It is a nervous system problem. Time does not usually resolve it, because the issue is not that you are remembering too much. It’s that your nervous system has not been able to reset and understand that the threat is no longer there.
Peter Levine’s work in Somatic Experiencing describes how animals in the wild naturally discharge traumatic activation through the body after a threatening event. Humans, often because of social conditioning or the complexity of our experiences, frequently suppress that discharge and the activation gets locked in.
Bessel van der Kolk’s research similarly shows that traumatic memories are encoded differently from ordinary memories. They don’t sit neatly in the past. Instead, they exist in a kind of everlasting present, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice in order to keep you safe. This is why talking about trauma alone often isn’t enough. Real healing usually needs to happen at the level of the body and nervous system, not only in the mind.
For people who experienced childhood trauma, the effects are compounded by the fact that early experiences literally shape how the brain develops. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), including abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, or growing up with a parent with untreated mental illness or addiction, have been shown to affect stress response systems, emotional regulation, and even physical health decades later.
This may sound discouraging and like healing is impossible. This isn’t true though. It simply means that healing requires the right kind of help.
The Difference Between Anxiety and Unresolved Trauma
Anxiety and trauma often look similar on the surface and do frequently co-occur. But understanding the difference is important when deciding what kind of treatment you need.
Generalized anxiety tends to be broad and is a worry that attaches to different topics over time. Trauma-based anxiety, by contrast, is often more reactive and more specific. It tends to be triggered by particular cues in your environment: typically sensory or situational that connect to the original experience.
Another big difference is in the body’s response. Trauma tends to produce more extreme reactions (fight/flight/freeze) in response to triggers that a person with anxiety might not react to. Trauma can also produce emotional numbness and dissociation, which are less characteristic of anxiety alone.
Many people seek treatment for anxiety and find that when the underlying trauma is addressed, the anxiety significantly resolves. If you’ve tried anxiety treatment without lasting results, unresolved trauma may be worth exploring.
How Trauma Therapy Can Help
The good news is that unresolved trauma is treatable. At Gemstone Wellness, we use evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches to help you process what happened and move out of survival mode for good.
Somatic Experiencing works directly with the body, tracking sensations and releasing the stuck survival responses that talk therapy alone can’t reach. Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you build a compassionate relationship with the protective parts of yourself, like the inner critic or the people-pleaser, instead of fighting them. And approaches like Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Trauma-Focused CBT help shift the painful beliefs trauma leaves behind, like “it was my fault” or “I’m permanently damaged.”
You can learn more about how these approaches come together in our trauma therapy in Chicago.
If anxiety is part of what you’re experiencing, it’s also worth exploring whether unresolved trauma is underneath it. Learn more on our anxiety therapy page.
Who Can Benefit from Trauma Therapy?
Unresolved trauma doesn’t look the same for everyone. It can stem from a single catastrophic event or years of quieter, repeated experiences. It can show up in your relationships, your body, your sense of self, or all three at once. Trauma also exists within context, shaped by identity, culture, and lived experience, and effective trauma therapy has to honor that.
If you recognize yourself in any of the signs above, that is often the first step toward understanding that what you’re experiencing has a name, a cause, and a path forward.
You Don't Have to Keep Living This Way
The signs of unresolved trauma are not personality flaws. They are adaptive responses that helped you survive something difficult. Your brain did what it had to do to protect you.
Healing from trauma means processing it deeply enough that it no longer runs your life. The nervous system that learned to stay on guard can also learn that the threat has passed. That kind of change is possible and it happens more often than people expect when they find the right, expert trauma support.
Our therapists at Gemstone Wellness offer trauma therapy for everywhere in Illinois, or if you live in another state we encourage you to reach out to a local therapy practice for support.
What are the most common signs of unresolved trauma?
The most common signs include chronic anxiety or hypervigilance, difficulty trusting others, emotional numbness or dissociation, recurring nightmares, unexplained physical symptoms, self-destructive coping behaviors, intense emotional reactions to triggers, shame or self-blame, people-pleasing, and avoidance of people, places, or memories tied to painful experiences.
What is the difference between PTSD and Complex PTSD (CPTSD)?
PTSD typically develops following a single traumatic event. Complex PTSD develops from prolonged or repeated trauma, often beginning in childhood. Examples include chronic abuse, neglect, or growing up in an unsafe environment. CPTSD tends to affect a person’s core sense of self, emotional regulation, and capacity for relationships more pervasively than single-incident PTSD.
How do I know if my anxiety is actually unresolved trauma?
Anxiety and trauma frequently overlap, but trauma-based anxiety tends to be more reactive and more specific — triggered by particular sensory cues, situations, or relationship dynamics connected to past experiences. If your anxiety feels disproportionate to what’s happening in the present, or if it hasn’t fully responded to standard anxiety treatment, unresolved trauma may be worth exploring.
Is it possible to heal from unresolved trauma?
Yes. Trauma can feel permanent, but it isn’t. Because trauma is held in the nervous system rather than just the mind, healing usually requires approaches that work at the level of the body as well as cognition. With the right support, the nervous system can learn that the original threat has passed and the patterns that formed around it can change.
How does therapy help with unresolved trauma?
Evidence-based approaches like Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) each work differently, but share a common goal: helping the nervous system process what it wasn’t able to at the time. Rather than simply talking about what happened, these approaches help the body and mind integrate the experience so it no longer dominates the present.