Trauma, Elections, and Politics: Where do clinicians go?

My Thoughts

As a trauma therapist an observation that I constantly make is the fact that politics shows up in the clinical space more than I would like to admit. While the 2020 and 2024 election season came to be, many people were coming into the space distraught, frazzled, and frankly upset. Clients were stating things like "I feel helpless", "I feel out of control", "How could this happen to us?", what I would have liked to hear in my deluded mind would have been "we don't know the future, let's give it a chance", "good things and bad things are bound to happen, that's life", "Honestly, we're still really privileged and I will do everything that I can to honor that privilege".

Clearly that was not what happened.

However, as a clinician what was more frustrating was the inability to help guide people through this experience. I found that most people were not receptive to the "challenging" of their black and white thinking and had very little awareness or ability to connect how politics were effecting their nervous systems.

For example, I remember sitting in a session with someone (who identified extremely liberal) and providing insight into their political thought process and how it can actually lead to more anxiety-related spiraling, which in turn leads to not trusting others (which is what this person had come into session to work on); however when connecting the political to the personal this person completely disengaged and I remember seeing on their face their "lack of approval" because I was not 100% agreeing with their thought process. (Looking back I see now that I had activated their freeze response, which we will go into later).

I remember leaving that session thinking how did we get to this point? How did we as people start to define people as good or bad, trust-worthy, untrustworthy, not by interpersonal experience or but by political ideology and surface-level generalizations?

That's when I started to drift onto the path of understanding that people are really attuned to fear and control and that politics does a really good job in exploiting those feelings.

Now back to what I mentioned earlier with having a hard time finding resources, as I continued to ponder and challenge my clients to connect different views on political psychology and behavior, I found that most therapists and therapists with platforms were re-enforcing very polarizing messages as well to honestly... give people the sense of control.

"If you don't like someone's ideology, just cut them off and shame them for having their views", which is easy to do and does give you the ability to control your environment, but honestly, it doesn't really do anything but re-enforce the same thing that politics is trying to do which is to create divide and fulfill one-sided agendas.

There is no way that we can all get every single thing that we want and desire, but there sure is a way for most people to live a fulfilling life, but do we have to get there by demonizing and hating so many people in the process?

Through all of this pondering, it made me realize that this is what I want to study and examine for my dissertation.

This is the impact that I want to make in our society, to expand our understanding of how politics can impact our nervous systems.

Now, at times the vision seems really clear to me and at times it can feel very much so dilluded and honestly so far away, but I believe that there is something as humans that connect us all and its our shared experience of living and experiencing. That shared experience has commonalities and differences, but what I find easy for most people to do is write it off because it doesn't fit our own individual agenda.

So here's my intention for all of you readers as I go through my dissertation journey, I hope that you find the content of what I research and share with you of benefit and something that not only opens your minds but your hearts as well.

The Research

With that being said, here is my first article that we're going to unpack. Election-Related Post Traumatic Stress: Evidence from the 2020 Presidential Election.

So in summary this study utilized the PCL-5, which is a common PTSD screening tool and looked at its connection to affective polarization. Really big science words, I know.

Affective polarization is a concept in political science and psychology that describes how partisans (supporters of different political parties) increasingly dislike and distrust members of the opposing party, not just because of policy disagreements but because of negative feelings toward the people on the other side.

Core Idea

Unlike ideological polarization (differences in policy preferences or beliefs), affective polarization is about emotions, identity, and social distance. It reflects the way politics becomes personal—supporters of one party see members of the other not just as opponents, but as morally flawed, unintelligent, or even dangerous.

Some of the Key Features

• In-group vs. out-group dynamics: People identify more strongly with their own party (“in-group”) and develop hostility toward the opposing party (“out-group”).

• Social and emotional divide: It shows up in feelings of anger, resentment, and contempt toward out-party members.

• Beyond politics: It often spills into non-political domains—for example, being less willing to date, hire, or live near someone from the other party.

• Identity-based: Because party affiliation ties into identity, threats to one’s party feel like threats to oneself.

Why It Matters

• It can weaken democracy by eroding trust and cooperation.

• It encourages gridlock, since compromise feels like betrayal.

• It fuels political trauma, as people experience hostility and division in everyday life, not just in elections.

  
  

How the heck do I treat this as a therapist? Is literally the only thing that I can think about, but before I try to go into a solution, let's take a look at how this can show up clinically.

1. Emotional Intensity and Stress Responses

Affective polarization activates the fight–flight–freeze–fawn responses that mirror trauma reactions:

• Fight: Escalation of anger, protest, or aggressive rhetoric toward the out-group.

• Flight: Withdrawal from political conversations or even disengagement from voting to avoid conflict.

• Freeze: Emotional shutdown when confronted with hostile political identities.

• Fawn: Over-adapting or silencing one’s political beliefs in mixed company to maintain safety.

This means that political polarization isn’t just ideological—it feels like danger in the nervous system, creating a state of hyper-vigilance around political identity.

2. Identity Threat and Trauma Mechanisms

Since party identity is deeply tied to self-concept, an attack on one’s political group can register in the body like a personal attack.

• Repeated exposure to hostile political messaging can create chronic stress, not unlike trauma exposure.

• For marginalized or immigrant communities, affective polarization can exacerbate feelings of social exclusion and collective trauma, reinforcing generational wounds aka generational trauma.

  
  

3. Social Rupture and Safety Loss

Trauma research shows that safety and belonging are core needs. Affective polarization fractures these by:

• Making neighbors, family, and coworkers feel unsafe to interact with across political divides.

• Normalizing suspicion and contempt as part of everyday interaction, which mirrors trauma’s relational rupture.

• Creating “echo chambers” where the out-group is consistently dehumanized, amplifying perceptions of threat.

4. Cumulative Political Trauma

When affective polarization intersects with traumatic political events (terrorist attacks, hate crimes, violent protests, discriminatory policies), the emotional divide compounds into a layered trauma response:

• The event itself is traumatic.

• The hostile partisan framing of the event worsens stress, anxiety, and political disillusionment.

• People relive the trauma through continuous media exposure and polarized rhetoric.

  
  

5. Implications for Democratic Participation

Because trauma responses shape political behavior:

• Fight responses may increase activism and protest voting.

• Flight/freeze responses may lower voter turnout, especially among those already politically marginalized.

• Fawn responses may lead to surface-level compliance (showing up to vote) without genuine empowerment or voice.

This basically helps explain why affective polarization is not just a cultural phenomenon, but a psychological mechanism of political trauma that alters participation patterns. Now to the best part?

WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THIS SHIT?

Honestly, I am not 100% sure, but what my intuition is telling me is to find a way to show how politics impacts our neurobiology which in response impacts our behavior, which needs a lot more insight into how we as human beings process so people have the appropriate filtering tool to not go into such chronic symptoms from witnessing the political arena.