If You’re Reeling from the Results of This Week’s Election, Please Read This
When election outcomes bring genuine fear, grief, or disorientation, your nervous system is responding to real threat , not being dramatic. This post validates those responses and offers concrete, grounded ways to care for yourself and move forward without toxic positivity or paralysis. Written in the wake of the 2016 election, it speaks to any moment when collective shock collides with your personal history.
Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- When the Ground Shifts Beneath You
- What Is Collective Trauma?
- The Neurobiology of Political Shock
- How This Shows Up for Women with Trauma Histories
- Grief, Fear, and the Permission to Feel It All
- Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Take Action
- The Systemic Lens: Why This Isn’t Just Political
- What to Actually Do When You’re Reeling
- Frequently Asked Questions
When the Ground Shifts Beneath You
It’s Wednesday morning. Or Thursday. Or weeks later, and you still wake up and feel it , that particular bodily sensation that something has shifted in the world in a way you weren’t prepared for. The coffee goes on, the kids need breakfast, the inbox fills. And underneath it all, a low-grade disorientation that you can’t quite shake. Something happened that doesn’t make sense to your nervous system. Something that feels like threat.
I’m writing this in the days immediately following the 2016 presidential election. I had a completely different post scheduled for this week. And then the election happened. And everything shifted. What I wanted to share suddenly doesn’t feel pressing. The only thing that feels present , the only thing that feels honest , is this: many of you are reeling right now. And you deserve to have that acknowledged.
I can’t and won’t be neutral about what this election outcome means to my community of clients and readers. As a psychotherapist whose life’s work is dedicated to undoing the damage of abuse, neglect, and systemic harm, I take seriously what it means when the political situation signals danger to vulnerable people. And I take seriously what it does to your nervous system when that happens. This post is for everyone who is feeling afraid, grief-stricken, disoriented, or simply not okay , and for everyone who wants to understand why, and what to do about it.
Collective trauma refers to the psychological and physiological responses that occur when a group, community, or society is exposed to a shared event that overwhelms their collective sense of safety, justice, or stability. Distinguished from individual trauma, collective trauma is processed in a social context , meaning the way a community makes meaning of the event, supports one another, and moves forward shapes the depth and duration of the impact. Psychiatrist and trauma researcher Robert Jay Lifton, MD, professor emeritus at Columbia University, described collective trauma as producing a fundamental disruption in a community’s sense of continuity and shared meaning.
In plain terms: When something happens that shakes everyone around you, you’re not just dealing with your own reaction , you’re also absorbing the fear, grief, and disorientation of an entire community. That amplification is real. It’s not weakness. And it’s not separate from your own healing.
What Is Collective Trauma?
Collective trauma is a relatively recent area of formal study, though communities have always known its shape: the shared grief after a disaster, the communal shock of political upheaval, the particular weight that settles over a group when something deeply threatening happens. What makes collective trauma distinct from individual trauma is its social dimension , you are processing your own reaction while simultaneously absorbing the reactions of everyone around you. The friend who is terrified. The colleague who is celebrating. The family member who doesn’t understand why you’re so upset. These relational dynamics compound the original experience.
For women with prior relational or developmental trauma histories , and in my clinical work, this is the majority of the driven women I see , collective trauma events can be particularly activating because they echo earlier experiences of helplessness, danger, or the betrayal of those who were supposed to provide safety. When the political situation signals that certain people are valued less, are less safe, or are more vulnerable to harm, it isn’t an abstract political opinion for someone who has lived that experience in their own family or community. It’s a nervous system activation. It’s a re-triggering of something that was already there.
This is why what many people felt in the days following the 2016 election , and what many people feel after any political event that signals threat , can feel so disproportionate to someone who hasn’t experienced prior trauma. It isn’t disproportionate. It’s a layered response. The present threat is real. And it’s sitting on top of an older one.
The Neurobiology of Political Shock
When we experience something that our nervous system registers as threat , whether that threat is physical, relational, or political , our autonomic nervous system activates. The sympathetic branch mobilizes: heart rate increases, cortisol floods the bloodstream, non-essential cognitive functions are downregulated. We enter fight, flight, or freeze. This is not metaphor. It is physiology.
Grief is the layered response to loss, encompassing emotional, physical, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions that unfold over time in non-linear ways. Psychologist and grief researcher J. William Worden, PhD, professor emeritus at Rosemead School of Psychology, describes grief as involving four tasks: accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain, adjusting to a changed world, and finding a way to maintain connection while embarking on a new life chapter. In the context of collective events, grief often involves mourning not only what was lost but what was hoped for.
In plain terms: What you’re feeling after a political upheaval isn’t just sadness. It’s grief , real, legitimate, physiological grief for a version of the future you believed in. And grief doesn’t move on a timeline. You don’t have to be over it by Monday.
What we understand about trauma and the nervous system suggests that what’s happening in many people’s bodies right now is not an overreaction , it’s a predictable, physiologically coherent response to an event that the nervous system has registered as threatening. The key distinction: the thinking brain may be able to intellectually process the political situation, but the survival brain responds to the emotional and existential texture of threat. When that threat feels real, bodily, and connected to the safety of people we love or communities we belong to, the body responds accordingly.
Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma specialist and author of The Myth of Normal, writes that the mind-body connection means that emotional experiences of threat, grief, and helplessness do not stay in the field of the psychological , they express in the body, sometimes acutely and sometimes as chronic dysregulation. The elevated rates of physical illness, autoimmune flares, and somatic symptoms that many trauma survivors report during periods of political or collective distress are not coincidences. They are the body telling the truth about what it is holding.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes that the body’s response to threat is automatic and precognitive , it happens before the thinking brain has processed what’s occurring. (PMID: 9384857) This is why, in the days following the election, many people described feeling physically ill: nausea, fatigue, chest tightness, headaches, disrupted sleep. These weren’t dramatic overreactions. They were the body’s honest response to a threat signal.
For those who carry prior trauma , and particularly for those whose trauma history involves experiences of powerlessness, targeted harm, or the failure of systems that were supposed to protect them , the activation can be especially intense. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish cleanly between past and present. When current events echo the emotional texture of earlier experiences of danger or abandonment, the alarm system fires with the full force of both. This is sometimes called “trauma stacking” , the way present stressors amplify past ones , and it’s one of the most important things to understand about your own response right now.
How This Shows Up for Women with Trauma Histories
In my clinical work, I’ve observed very specific patterns in how driven women with relational trauma histories respond to collective shock events. It’s rarely just grief. It’s a complicated layering of present fear with older, deeply familiar feelings.
Jenny is a 36-year-old litigation attorney. She’s the kind of woman who is accustomed to being the most composed person in the room. But in the days after the 2016 election, she found herself unable to concentrate, cycling through catastrophic thoughts she couldn’t logic her way out of, and weeping in her car before walking into the office. “I know this sounds irrational,” she told me. “But I keep feeling like the ground isn’t safe. Like something that was supposed to protect me just showed me it wouldn’t.” Jenny grew up in a household where the people who were supposed to provide safety were unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. Her body knew this feeling. And the election had activated it with startling precision.
What Jenny was experiencing was exactly what the neuroscience would predict: a present stressor activating a nervous system that had already learned, early and definitively, that authority figures and systems cannot be trusted. Her response wasn’t irrational , it was entirely coherent, given her history. Working in therapy to understand this layering , to separate the present threat from the older one while taking both seriously , is some of the most important work there is.
Grief, Fear, and the Permission to Feel It All
One of the most important things I can offer you right now is this: your feelings are not the problem. Whatever you’re feeling , terror, rage, grief, numbness, a surreal disorientation that makes everything feel slightly unreal , these are legitimate responses to real events. You don’t have to rush toward acceptance. You don’t have to perform resilience. You don’t have to have a silver lining ready.
“For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.”
ALICE MILLER, PhD, Psychologist and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child
Emotional shock and grief consume physical energy. Your capacity is reduced right now. Your ability to concentrate, to regulate, to be as productive or present as you usually are , all of it is diminished. This isn’t weakness. It’s the normal physiological cost of genuine grief. Being gentle with yourself is not self-indulgence. It’s appropriate care for a nervous system that is working very hard.
What does gentleness look like? It might look like avoiding social media for a few days. It might look like stepping away from political news cycles and letting trusted people summarize the headlines. It might look like gathering with friends who share your grief , not to fix anything, just to be witnessed in it. It might look like chocolate cake for breakfast, and eight hours of sleep, and a walk outside, and saying no to the thing you were going to say yes to. It might look like connecting with a community that holds similar values. Whatever it looks like for you , do it. Without apology.
Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Take Action
Here’s a tension I’ve heard from many people: the pull between staying with their grief and feeling pressure to mobilize, to act, to channel fear into action immediately. These two impulses can feel mutually exclusive. In reality, they don’t have to be.
Both/And means: you can be genuinely grief-stricken right now and be someone who eventually takes meaningful action. You can take a few days to tend to your nervous system and be someone who engages with what comes next. You can acknowledge that you’re not okay and trust that you will be okay enough, eventually, to find your footing.
Leah is a 44-year-old nonprofit director who spent the first three days after the election unable to do much of anything. She sat with her grief, cried with her team, called her therapist. By day four, she was identifying specific, concrete actions she could take , donations, phone calls, policy work she could plug into. She told me later: “I think the action felt more meaningful because I didn’t skip the grief. I knew what I was acting from.” This is the Both/And in motion. Grief doesn’t preclude action. Done right, it fuels it.
The pressure to skip straight to action , to “get over it” and mobilize , can itself be a form of toxic positivity, a bypassing of legitimate emotional experience in service of productivity. When we know better, we do better. And knowing, in this context, requires that we first feel , really feel , what is actually happening. Building that capacity to tolerate and process difficult emotions is foundational to everything else.
The Both/And frame is also relevant to hope. It’s possible to hold genuine fear about what this political moment means and genuine trust in the resilience of the people and communities organizing in response. It’s possible to grieve what feels like a loss and to believe that loss is not final. These coexisting truths don’t cancel each other out , they make the picture more accurate. And in a moment of collective shock, accuracy matters. False positivity is toxic. But false totality , the belief that everything is lost, that nothing is possible, that there is no forward , is equally distorted. The Both/And is not optimism for its own sake. It’s a more honest map of a complicated terrain.
In my work with clients during periods of collective distress, I have found that the capacity to hold both grief and agency is one of the most important psychological skills available. It is not natural , it requires practice, and often support. But it is learnable. And the women I have seen navigate collective trauma with the most integrity are those who could feel the full weight of what was happening without becoming paralyzed by it, and who could move toward action without bypassing the grief. If you’re struggling to hold both, that’s not a failure , it’s a signal that you might need more support. Coaching or therapy can be the container that makes that possible.
The Systemic Lens: Why This Isn’t Just Political
What happens in the political sphere is not separate from what happens in the therapeutic consulting room. The cultural narratives that shape public life , about who is valued, who is safe, whose pain is legitimate, who deserves protection , are the same narratives that shape individual psychologies. The political is always also personal. And for women who have experienced relational trauma, the political events that echo those narratives of targeted harm aren’t just abstract , they land in the body.
This is why I believe it is not only appropriate but necessary for psychotherapists to name what is happening in the broader world when it has direct clinical relevance. The denial of political context in therapeutic work is itself a form of privilege , a luxury available only to those whose safety and value are not being contested in the public sphere. For everyone else, the political context is inescapable. And naming it , validating its impact , is part of doing clinical work with integrity.
The systemic forces at work in any given election , racism, sexism, xenophobia, economic anxiety, disinformation , are not separate from the relational patterns I work with every day. They are the water the fish swim in. Understanding them doesn’t mean abandoning clinical boundaries. It means bringing the fullness of the client’s reality into the room. And right now, for many of you, the political reality is very much in the room.
The political events that activate our nervous systems are also a mirror of the relational patterns we carry. The woman who grew up in a household where she was told her feelings were wrong learns to doubt her own responses when political events prove her fears well-founded. The woman who was raised by a chaotic or unpredictable caregiver recognizes the texture of collective instability in her body before she can name it in words. The woman who was taught that her job was to hold things together for others will feel, during a collective crisis, an almost overwhelming pull to be the one who comforts rather than the one who is comforted , to perform calm rather than acknowledge that she, too, is afraid.
These patterns are worth noticing. They are not character flaws. They are adaptations that made sense in the context they were formed. But during collective distress , when the entire cultural atmosphere is saturated with grief and fear , the usual defenses are under particular strain. This can be an opening. The times when our familiar patterns are most stressed are often the times when we have the most access to the deeper material beneath them. If you find yourself responding to this moment in ways that feel old, familiar, and disproportionate, that’s worth bringing to a therapist. Taking the quiz to understand your relational patterns is one place to start.
Finally: you are allowed to not know what comes next. You are allowed to be in the uncertainty without having to resolve it. One of the most destabilizing aspects of collective political distress is the radical uncertainty it introduces , the “we don’t know what this means yet” quality that makes the anxious mind spin. Sitting with uncertainty is one of the hardest skills there is. But it is survivable. You have survived uncertainty before , probably many times, in contexts that were at least as frightening as this. And you built something anyway. That is not nothing. That matters.
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of Trauma and Recovery, opens her landmark work with the observation that the study of trauma is perforce political, because those who hold power in any society have a vested interest in managing the stories the traumatized tell about what happened to them. (PMID: 22729977) Her insight applies with painful clarity to collective political trauma: the very moment of democratic rupture or political loss is a moment in which the dominant narrative about what just happened is actively contested, and in which those who are most affected by the outcome are often least positioned to have their experiences validated by the structures around them. When you are reeling from political results that feel like a direct threat to your safety or the safety of people you love, the gaslighting is often nearly immediate. The reassurances that it won’t be so bad, that you’re overreacting, that things will sort themselves out. For women with trauma histories, that reassurance pattern is intimately familiar.
What I want to offer here is not false comfort. What I want to offer is permission to feel the full weight of what has shifted without that feeling collapsing you into paralysis. These are not mutually exclusive capacities. In my clinical work during periods of collective political upheaval, I consistently witness that the women who manage most effectively are not the ones who feel the least. They are the ones who can feel the loss fully AND bring their regulated, resourced, connected selves to the question of what to do next. Grief and action are not opposites. In fact, the grief often clarifies the action. It tells you what you care about most clearly, and that clarity can be a form of orientation in a disorienting moment.
Vivian is a thirty-four-year-old immigration attorney who called her mother the morning after the election and cried for forty minutes. She describes the grief as “not just about the results. About everything the results represented. About whose safety gets taken seriously and whose doesn’t. About the proof that the things I’ve been telling myself weren’t true.” This is the specific texture of collective political trauma: it doesn’t just produce fear about the future. It produces a reckoning with the past. A confrontation with what you’d been telling yourself about the safety and stability of the world you live in. For women of color, for queer women, for women who have spent their careers building in the faith that their contributions would be valued. That reckoning can be particularly profound. The nervous system’s response to that reckoning is not overreaction. It’s appropriate response to a real rupture in the foundations of assumed safety. And that response deserves the same respect you would offer any grief.
What to Actually Do When You’re Reeling
When the ground shifts, the most important thing is to come back into your body. Not to think your way through it. Not to argue yourself into feeling better. But to literally, physically, return to the present moment and your own sensory experience. Here are the things that actually help:
Feel your feet on the floor. Literally. Press them into the ground. Notice the texture, the temperature, the weight of your own body. This is a grounding technique, and it works because it activates the sensory present rather than the catastrophic future.
Limit your media intake. Not permanently, but right now. The nervous system cannot distinguish between the emotional content of a news broadcast and a present threat. Every doom scroll is another activation. Set windows for when you check news. Protect the rest of your day.
Gather with people who understand. Grief is social. It needs witnesses. Find the people in your life who share your values, your fear, your love for the communities that are threatened , and be with them, even if “being with” just means a phone call or a group text.
Identify something concrete and small. You cannot fix the political situation. But you can make one phone call, donate twenty dollars, show up to one meeting. Concrete action , even when small , counteracts the helplessness that is one of the most destabilizing parts of this kind of grief.
Work with a therapist. If this event is activating old wounds , if what you’re feeling feels bigger than what’s happening right now , that’s a sign that there’s deeper terrain worth exploring. Trauma-informed therapy can help you separate the present from the past, and build the internal resources to navigate whatever comes next. Reach out here if you’re ready.
You’re not alone in this. That’s not a platitude , it’s the one thing I know for certain right now, and it will still be true tomorrow. There is a vast, grieving, determined community of people who care about the same things you care about. Grief shared is grief halved. And collective purpose, when it emerges from honest grief rather than bypassing it, is one of the most powerful forces there is. , it’s the one thing I know for certain. The people who are afraid right now are vast in number. The grief is shared. And shared grief, named and witnessed, is survivable in a way that isolated grief is not. Whatever is coming, we are in it together.
Warmly, Annie
Q: My body feels like it’s in shock. Is that normal after a distressing political event?
A: Yes, completely. Physical symptoms , fatigue, nausea, chest tightness, disrupted sleep, difficulty concentrating , are normal responses when the nervous system has registered genuine threat. Your body doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and an existential one. What you’re feeling isn’t an overreaction. It’s an appropriate physiological response to a frightening event. Be gentle with yourself. Your system is working hard.
Q: People around me seem fine. Why am I taking this so much harder?
A: The intensity of your response is often related to the degree to which this event activates prior experiences of threat, helplessness, or targeted harm in your own history. Someone whose safety and identity were not called into question by the outcome will respond differently than someone whose experience of being made to feel unsafe, “other,” or unvalued is being echoed. Your response isn’t disproportionate , it’s layered. It deserves to be understood, not compared.
Q: How do I manage my anxiety when every news cycle brings more frightening information?
A: Limit your media intake to specific, bounded windows , perhaps once in the morning and once in the evening, with a reliable source you trust. Avoid doom-scrolling, which is among the most reliably activating things you can do to your nervous system. Increase your embodied practices: walks, breath work, movement, somatic grounding. And invest in the relationships and communities that ground you. You can stay informed without being constantly activated.
Q: Is it okay to take a break from the news and activism, or does that make me complicit?
A: Taking care of your nervous system is not complicity. You cannot sustain engagement , meaningful, effective engagement , from a place of chronic activation and depletion. Strategic rest is not abandonment. It’s pacing. The most sustainable activists and advocates I know are also the most intentional about protecting their capacity. Tend to yourself so you can show up for the longer haul.
Q: How do I talk to my children about what’s happening when I’m barely managing myself?
A: You don’t have to hide your feelings entirely , in fact, age-appropriate emotional honesty can model healthy emotional processing. What children need is not a parent who is perfectly calm, but a parent who can acknowledge that something hard is happening while also providing a felt sense of safety. “I’m feeling sad and worried about some things in the news, and I’m taking care of it the way grown-ups do. You are safe. I’ve got you.” Your regulated presence , even when imperfect , is what matters most.
Q: When should I consider getting professional support?
A: If your response to this or any political event feels significantly more intense than those around you, if you’re having difficulty functioning after several weeks, if old patterns are being activated in ways that feel unmanageable, or if you simply feel like you’re carrying more than you can hold alone , these are all good reasons to reach out for professional support. Therapy isn’t just for crisis. It’s for anyone who wants to understand themselves more fully and navigate difficult terrain with more skill and self-compassion.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women , including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs , in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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