Have you ever noticed how situations that traumatize you can tend to take away your motivation and drive? Do you ever wonder how you’re going to be able to complete plans that you made before you got traumatized in the first place? If you answered yes to either of these questions then today’s offering is for you!
Trauma is Snowballing These Days
We find ourselves in an age of emotional dysregulation as one well-known clinician has put it, and this has served to amplify what others have experienced through the centuries as intergenerational trauma. That trauma tends to get visited on the future generations and can morph into all kinds of different struggles such as the ones we are living through in our current era.
Motivation, and Follow-Through Struggles are Very Commonplace
The fact that you realize you may be struggling with trauma is very important for understanding that it can have a serious impact on your motivation and follow through. Trauma is something that tends to upend people's worlds and shatter their world views, so it's only natural that it would affect your ability to carry on in any normal way in your everyday life.
The 3 Ways Trauma Can Affect Motivation and Follow-Through:
The Freeze Reaction: being affected by trauma can leave you in a state of feeling frozen, which is a very adaptive thing at the time because if you didn’t have that ability the trauma might have literally destroyed you. The problem is that going forward it’s very difficult to have any kind of normalcy if you’re remaining frozen by the experience that traumatized you in the first place.
Reactivity: people who are traumatized tend to be very reactive and can simply react out of hypervigilance to any new stimuli that might scare them or jolt them out of what they were trying to focus on before it happened. In this way, accomplishing long-term goals and completing tasks can get totally hijacked by something.
Depression: people who have trauma often wind up getting depressed in reaction to the one or more traumas that have accumulated to pull their mood down. In such cases, motivation can be totally lost if the ability to complete plans gets totally pulled underwater by the moods that people are in at any given time.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Zig Ziglar
How to Cope With the Loss of Motivation and Follow-Through
If you have feelings of depression that result from the effects of trauma, you can try starting small and adding some movement or exercise into your daily regimen. This can help to potentially regain some of the motivation lost by the effects of a traumatic experience or multiple experiences. If this helps to bring up your mood, then you may be more able to get things done. If you suffered from the freeze reaction, then this could be something that could require some clinical intervention. One of the trauma therapies that I practice is Image Transformation Therapy, or ImTT for short. This particular method is very good at getting people unfrozen so that they can start to take positive action to get back to some degree of normalcy.
What if Trauma Has Robbed You of Motivation and Follow-Through?
Many times people need to get professional help to overcome the effects of trauma in their lives and recover from it. I’ve been helping my clients for my entire social work career in overcoming trauma, and have at least two different methods that I can use to help you in your recovery process. I encourage you to call the number at the top of the page, click the schedule consult button above, or to fill out inquiry form below if you live in Maryland or Virginia, and I will get back to you ASAP to schedule a free 15 minute phone consult so you can get a better idea about whether I can help you with your particular experience of trauma. You do deserve to have a fully functioning life, and whatever you invest in your recovery will be pennies on the dollar compared to the results of not getting help going forward. So I encourage you to get help for your trauma as soon as you can.
Visit our page on trauma therapy to learn more about how Scott can help you with motivation and follow through.
About the author: Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW is a private practice therapist in Frederick, Maryland. He has an extensive background in working with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder at a clinic for older adults with these disorders in Austin, Texas. He now works with adults and adolescents 14 and up in private practice. His most recent book is titled The 5 Pillars of Addiction Recovery and is available for purchase on Amazon and in paperback on this website.