You may find yourself going into the fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn responses at what you think are minuscule things.
Your body can react in ways that it did back then which can be both new for you, and extremely frightening. This can then lead to isolation, avoidance, low self-care and a war within your mind and your body. It can make you see “safe” people as “unsafe,” and while you’re stuck in those memories, nothing and no one may feel safe – not even yourself. It can destabilize you and your life, and may be followed by dissociation, depersonalization/derealization and dissociative amnesia.
Having new memories come up can affect your current state of reality, your relationships, your perception of the world and of those around you, which can take you back to the past and keep you stuck there, making you feel as though you are re-living the trauma all over again. This can lead to feelings of denial, shame, guilt, anger, hurt, sadness, numbness and so forth. Repressed memories can come back to you in various ways, including having a trigger, nightmares, flashbacks, body memories and somatic/conversion symptoms. They have been repressed for a reason that reason being that when a person goes through significant trauma, the brain shuts down, dissociation takes over and as a survival technique, the trauma(s) get unconsciously blocked and tucked away from you and stored into disorganized files in your brain due to a high level of stress, or you were in a situation where you felt threatened and it was a matter of life or death – so your mind did what it had to in order to keep you safe, and therefore you could go on and have the ability to live your life and function in society. The impact of recovering memories that have been repressed for years can be a debilitating process in your trauma healing.