Political PTSD is Real and We are Experiencing It
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
By: Lisa M. Hayes
There’s a collective silence happening right now. A heavy, suffocating silence, and if you listen closely enough, you can almost hear it. It’s the sound of women—of people everywhere—holding their breath, pretending they’re okay, when they’re barely hanging on.
Let’s stop pretending.
The truth is, for many of us, Trump’s election in 2016 wasn’t just a political moment—it was a trauma. A deep, searing wound that ripped through our sense of safety, our sense of what’s possible, and left us questioning everything. For millions of people, especially women, life hasn’t felt the same since. It’s as if something fundamentally shifted that night, and we’ve never really found our footing again.
Political trauma is real. It’s the kind of trauma that changes you, that alters the way you see yourself, your country, your neighbors. And for so many of us, Trump’s election was the moment we realized that the ground beneath us wasn’t as solid as we thought. It was the moment we realized that the world we thought we knew, the world we believed in, wasn’t the same one our neighbors were living in.
Suddenly, we were looking around and seeing people—sometimes even the people closest to us—making choices, standing behind ideas, and upholding values that felt like a direct threat to our existence. Trump’s presidency didn’t just divide us politically. It ripped open the fabric of our lives, and for many of us, the world has felt irreversibly unsafe ever since.
It Changed the Way We See Our Neighbors
For women, for people of color, for LGBTQ+ communities, for immigrants—the stakes were always higher. The election of a man who thrived on division, on cruelty, and on the denigration of anyone who didn’t look like him or believe what he believed, felt like a declaration of war on our very identities. It wasn’t just a president we were watching take office. It was an entire belief system that said: You don’t matter. You are less than. You are other.
And that’s the trauma so many people are still carrying, quietly, under the surface.
It’s not just the policy changes, or the rollbacks of rights, or the relentless attack on our bodies and autonomy that have left scars. It’s the realization that millions of people stood behind it, cheered for it, voted for it. People we know. People we grew up with. People we thought we could trust.
For Many, Life Has Never Felt Safe Again
There’s something soul-crushing about realizing that the world you live in, the community you’re part of, doesn’t have your back. That realization shifted something fundamental in a lot of us, especially women, especially the marginalized. We’ve been on edge ever since, navigating a world that feels more hostile, more unsafe, more dangerous than it did before.
The trauma of Trump’s election wasn’t just about the man himself—it was about what he represented. It was about the fear and the hatred that surged to the surface and felt like it would swallow us whole. It was about the violation of trust—trust in our country, trust in our leaders, trust in our neighbors.
Political PTSD Will Define Generations of Women
This is more than a passing moment of anxiety. For many women, Trump’s election and everything that followed has led to a kind of political PTSD—a chronic, simmering trauma that has left us hypervigilant, always on edge, waiting for the next blow. And this trauma isn’t isolated to one generation. It will define three, maybe even four, entire generations of women.
Women who grew up believing in progress, who believed we were moving toward equality, are now raising daughters and granddaughters in a world where those same rights are under attack. It’s a collective wound that stretches across generations, a sense of betrayal that we all feel on some level. The fear, the anger, the anxiety—it’s all being passed down. And while some may want to pretend it’s just politics, for many of us, it’s our lived reality. It’s changed who we are, how we move through the world, and how we see the future.
For Many, Life Has Never Felt Safe Since
There’s a lingering sense of unease. A feeling that the world isn’t as safe as it once seemed. This isn’t just about the rollback of rights or the constant assault on our bodies and identities—it’s about the collective experience of having watched the world around us change in ways we never imagined. For many of us, the trauma of Trump’s election lives deep in our bones. It colors our decisions, our relationships, our sense of belonging. It changes the way we engage with people, with politics, with ourselves.
We’ve been living with this weight for years now, and with another election looming, it’s hard to ignore the fear rising again. People are triggered in ways they don’t want to admit, quietly unraveling while pretending to hold it all together. For many, the fear isn’t just about what happens next—it’s about feeling like they never fully recovered from what happened last time. They’ve been carrying the weight of this trauma for four long years, and the load is heavy.
Political Trauma Changes Us
Here’s the thing about trauma: it doesn’t just change what you feel—it changes who you are. It shifts your sense of self, your sense of what’s safe, what’s possible, and what you can trust. Trump’s election didn’t just change policies. It changed us. It changed the way we walk through the world, the way we interact with people, the way we see our own futures.
For many people, the election of 2016 was the beginning of a slow unraveling—a deep, personal reckoning with the fact that the world is not what we thought it was. And the worst part is, we were told to “get over it,” to stop overreacting, to accept it as just another election. But it wasn’t. It was never just another election. It was a massive cultural shift, and we’ve never been the same since.
Right now, with another election on the horizon, people are holding their breath again, hoping for something better but bracing for more pain. The trauma of 2016 is still with us, and for many, it feels like we’re hanging on by a thread.
It’s Time to Acknowledge the Trauma
We need to stop pretending we’re fine. We’re not fine. And that’s okay to admit. Political trauma is real, and it’s time we start treating it as such. The fear, the anxiety, the deep sense of unease—it’s all valid. We’ve been living with it for years now, and we’re still trying to heal from it.
If you feel like you’re unraveling right now, know this: you’re not alone. So many people are quietly holding their breath, waiting for the next blow, hoping they’ll have the strength to keep going.
But here’s the truth: you are stronger than you think. And together, we can weather whatever comes next. The trauma of Trump’s election changed us, but it didn’t break us.
We’re still here. And we’re still fighting.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.
