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  1. How We Can Help
  2. I am a young person

Understanding How I Feel

Lots of people who have had their images shared have told us they felt a lot of negative emotions and feelings. People have also told us that these feelings can be confusing and make them question themselves.  

Some have described:  

  • Lots of different emotions – Anger, sadness, shame, embarrassment.  
  • Getting angry very easily. 
  • Waking up at night or not being able to go to sleep. 
  • Worrying all the time about what has happened. 
  • Wanting to be alone or needing lots of reassurance.  
  • Not wanting to speak or hang out with friends, or not wanting to spend time with the family or go to family events. 
  • Struggling to concentrate 
  • Not interested in school or other activities 
  • There were lots more, but everyone feels differently about what has happened to them. 

How our body responds when it has experienced trauma can be confusing. This section will help you to understand your feelings and reactions.  

You may find you are responding in ways that you do not want to. This is normal, it is the body reacting to an event that was upsetting, worrying or scary.  It is your brain setting off a chain reaction that will make you behave in a certain way and feel certain things. It is often referred to as a trauma response.  

Annoyingly it can also happen when something different reminds the brain of an upsetting incident.  It can set off the same response as if it was happening now rather than being a memory. 

As you can see from the image above, parts of the brain help us interact and respond to day-to-day life. However, when we start feeling worried, fearful or reminded of a bad moment in our lives these parts of the brain start working differently.  

The front part of the brain that controls emotions doesn’t work well when we are worried. This can make us shout and become angry or upset. Sometimes this confuses other people as they don’t know what is happening inside your head.  

When we are scared or worried the part of the brain that stores our memories also doesn’t work as it should. This means that your brain is unable remember or process information in a way that you are used to.  Some people get cross with themselves for forgetting to ask questions they wanted answering in a meeting.  If you can, write down any questions you have before the meeting to help you remember and/or take notes during or after meetings to refer back to. 

Right in the middle of the brain is an alarm that warns us when we are getting worried or are in danger. This alarm makes us want to run away from the danger, fight off the danger or even make us freeze or faint. We often have little control over this, and it can take a little time after the alarm has gone off for us to start to calm down.  

A lot goes on in a person's body when all this is happening, or they are in a situation where they are ‘triggered’ by a certain experience of past harm. People don’t always understand that a person’s behaviour could be because of trauma and wrongly think the person is misbehaving. 

Watch this helpful video on the "fight or flight response"

* Video by Braive and is not affiliated with MCF.

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