Bracing For the Other Shoe to Drop After Something Good Happens Is a Trauma Response

Your Trauma Therapist by Lauren Auer, LCPC is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For more content follow me on Instagram.

Something really good happens. A relationship finally feels stable. You get the job. A stretch of days passes without anything falling apart. And instead of settling into it, your brain goes somewhere else entirely. You start scanning. Waiting. Tensing up against whatever’s coming next.

Maybe you catch yourself mentally cataloging everything that could still go wrong. Maybe you get irritable in the middle of what should be a perfectly good moment. Maybe you just feel vaguely unsettled, like you’re waiting for the floor to drop out, even though nothing is actually threatening. The good thing is right there, and you can’t quite touch it.

This is one of the more exhausting things trauma does, and it tends to fly under the radar because it doesn’t look like a trauma response from the outside. It looks like pessimism, or anxiety, or an inability to be grateful. People spend years assuming it means something is fundamentally broken in how they’re wired. It doesn’t.