The path back from serious emotional trauma is long but it can be greatly aided by having the financial means to access individualized professional support.
You are driving your car. You are going under the speed limit. And you are doing everything that you should as a good driver. And then suddenly, a car crashes into you.
Now, you not only have physical injuries, but you know that the experience has left you with emotional scars. What next?
Well, ideally, after a week or two, those feelings should gradually subside as the event becomes more distant.
So when do accident-related emotions qualify as trauma?
The distinction lies in how long the suffering continues, and how much it disrupts your life. And whether it alters your worldview, identity, and belief systems as well.
Some characteristic signs of lingering emotional trauma include:
- Re-experiencing the Event: Having frequent vivid memories or nightmares about the accident weeks or months later. Feeling like you are reliving it.
- Avoidance
- Hyperarousal: You have trouble relaxing.
- Struggling with depression, anger, guilt, or shame.
- Isolation: Pulling away from family/friends.
So how can you know for sure that you have emotional trauma?
Let’s explore some telltale signs.
Clear Signs You May Have Emotional Trauma After an Accident
Identifying accident-related emotional trauma on your own can be tricky. Symptoms often emerge gradually or come and go. You may chalk up reactions like anxiety or anger to other causes rather than the accident.
And so you should think carefully about whether you’re experiencing any of the following common emotional trauma indicators:
1. Heightened Anxiety
Do you feel on edge, jumpy, or fearful doing everyday things? Are you much more anxious riding in vehicles or avoiding them altogether? Heightened anxiety after an accident signals emotional trauma.
Fear and panic can suddenly resurface even when you are objectively “safe”, like when buckling your seatbelt or crossing traffic. Feeling like you have no control over your anxiety levels points to trauma.
2. Sleep Disturbances
Reliving the accident in nightmares or having trouble falling/staying asleep is very common with emotional trauma. Tossing, turning, and waking up in cold sweats or screaming indicates unresolved trauma.
Recurrent bad dreams happening weeks or months post-accident means your subconscious is still processing the event. And especially if this interferes with the restorative sleep necessary for physical and mental health.
3. Emotional Swings
Experiencing more frequent and intense anger, sadness, or crying spells after an accident highlights emotional instability. Irritability over minor frustrations or amplified grief over losses traces back to trauma.
When an accident leaves you grief-stricken, grappling with mortality, or stewing over injustice, traumatic expressions of these emotions endure.
4. Hypervigilance
Do car horns, screeching brakes, ambulance sirens, or construction noises leave you feeling uniquely unsettled? Lingering nervousness around reminders of your accident reflects hypervigilance stemming from trauma.
Relatedly, you may compulsively scan the road for potential threats or avoid highways where people drive over 65 mph. This heightened baseline arousal can disrupt your ability to relax and feel at ease.
5. Difficulty Concentrating
Struggling to concentrate at school/work after an accident can indicate trauma-related distress simmering below the surface. Distractibility, forgetfulness, and mental fog connect to overburdened working memory.
Preoccupation with flashbacks makes it hard to cognitively engage elsewhere. Poor concentration then fuels difficulties in learning efficiently, completing tasks, or following conversations.
If one or more resonated with your post-accident experience, trauma may be inhibiting your mental health and quality of life. But how do you go about demonstrating that to others?
Strategically Demonstrating Your Emotional Trauma
While emotional trauma indeed leaves distressing psychological imprints, conveying this harm to others poses challenges. Unlike physical injuries, outsiders cannot directly observe the depth of your mental anguish, sleeplessness, or panic attacks.
Still, several strategies exist to substantiate emotional trauma:
1. Seek Professional Diagnosis
Meeting with a licensed trauma psychologist or psychiatrist allows an expert to formally assess your symptoms’ severity. They can diagnose conditions like acute stress disorder or PTSD with specific criteria.
These professional diagnoses carry definitive weight compared to self-reports. Ask your mental health providers to document evidence-based observations of trauma’s impact on your functioning.
2. Record Ongoing Symptom Severity
Keep a detailed journal tracking trauma symptoms day-to-day including nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, emotional outbursts, and therapy insights.
Quantify symptoms like the number of panic attacks or nightmares per week. Also, rate subjective distress levels from 1-10. Meticulous records legitimize progress…or lack thereof.
3. Obtain Witness Statements
Ask loved ones how your behavior, moods, and outlook changed post-accident. They may cite worrying examples like social withdrawal, crying episodes, anger flare-ups or increased nervous behaviors.
Statements from those close to you put trauma effects into words from an outside observer’s lens. Their distress over changes they’ve witnessed further验证s trauma’s interpersonal ripple effects.
4. Highlight Functional Impairment
Focus statements on how trauma-related symptoms directly reduce your capability to carry out normal responsibilities and activities. Maybe you cannot complete homework, drive yourself places, focus at your job, or be left home alone like previously.
Stress how trauma seeps into and undermines key parts of your life. This demonstrates its pervasive reach across life domains. Back up losses with school records, employer statements, etc.
While making trauma visible has benefits, recalling accident details and attendant emotions tends to feel invasive for survivors. Fortunately, personal injury lawyers can help, especially when compensation is at stake.
Why Consult a Lawyer?
Pursuing financial compensation or negotiating with insurance companies over emotional trauma can prove frustrating without legal representation. Personal injury lawyers bring specialized trauma litigation expertise you lack as a layperson.
And so, why should you hire a lawyer? Well, you should because a competent lawyer can help by:
1. Determining Case Viability
Gathering police reports, vehicle damage assessments, medical records, and other evidence needed to initially evaluate potential settlement or court award options.
2. Valuing Trauma’s True Cost
Consulting with economics and psychotherapy experts to calculate both economic losses like missed wages and assign dollar amounts to trauma’s dreadful psychological impacts.
3. Compellingly Conveying Trauma
Strategically presenting emotional trauma evidence to insurance adjusters, mediators, judges and if necessary, juries in vivid, hard to dismiss terms.
4. Shielding You From Further Distress
Fielding invasive questions, disbelief, or disrespect shown towards emotional trauma. Protecting vulnerable clients from legal complexities and adversarial attacks.
5. Fighting for Maximum Compensation
Leveraging every resource and legal argument to demand fair compensation reflecting trauma’s frequently underestimated damage extending far into survivor’s futures.
With extensive trauma case experience, an experienced personal injury lawyer can help you figure out exactly what to do after a car accident so as to protect your rights. They can also help to alleviate your emotional burden by handling the legal complexities so that you can focus on your healing journey.
Available Compensation and Support for Emotional Trauma
Seeking rightful compensation for emotional trauma has tangible benefits beyond money itself including:
- Funding critical psychotherapy costs
- Replacing lost income if trauma hinders working
- Establishing links between the accident and mental health decline
- Deterring the at-fault motorist from repeating harmful behavior
- Compelling positive corporate changes like added driver safety training
- Restoring a sense of control and justice
With their future mental health at stake, trauma survivors deserve access to top-tier treatment services. And so seeking compensation is important because it can fund costs like:
- Ongoing Trauma-Focused Psychotherapy – Evidence-based approaches like cognitive processing therapy (CPT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and group talk therapy sessions.
- Psychiatry Medication Management – Doctor visits to find beneficial anti-anxiety medications, sleep aids, or antidepressants to regain stability.
- Inpatient Hospitalization Stays – For severe trauma, intensive inpatient programs provide round-the-clock psychiatric monitoring, counseling, and coping skills groups.
- Service Animals – Animal companionship has remarkable trauma recovery benefits. Compensation helps fund service animal training costs, food, accessories etc.
- Mobility Accommodations – Modifying vehicles and homes to increase feelings of safety if driving or leaving home alone has become difficult emotionally.
The path back from serious emotional trauma is long but it can be greatly aided by having the financial means to access individualized professional support.
Join the conversation!