One of the hardest things about the holidays is how they bring up memories from the past. For those of us with developmental trauma from things that happened — or didn't happen — in our childhoods, this can be particularly challenging.

It’s easy to shut down and want to hide from the feelings of vulnerability, helplessness, and loneliness that can surface around the holidays. For those of us with developmental trauma, these feelings are flashbacks — signs of unresolved trauma, constellations of emotional states from the past still held in our nervous system.

If you find yourself having a stress response — going into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn — that makes it hard to stay present during intimacy, it’s an indicator of unresolved trauma in your nervous system.

It is almost impossible to live in our world without carrying false beliefs about sexual assault and intimate partner abuse that color our judgement and decision-making.

Often, unresolved sexual trauma is held in the body by layers of tension and fear. The body doesn’t want it to escape because it fears the traumatic imprint might affect our ability to function. We keep it — and ourselves — on lockdown. Consciously or unconsciously, we push it out of awareness.

We often try to push through a freeze response with numbing or mood-altering activities. But trying to push through is one of the worst things we can do with unresolved trauma. Pushing through a freeze response risks retraumatizing us and it just makes things worse.

I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with partners from women's human rights groups around the world. It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.

Trauma happens when the body's systems are overwhelmed and get stuck digesting the traumatic experience, so the impact of it stays in the system rather than being processed and discharged. This can be experienced many ways, particularly as fear, which is often described in self-help programs as "false evidence appearing real."