Meditation isn't always healing, article warns trauma survivors and women

Annie Wright’s June 11 piece for high-functioning women begins with Nadia, a physician leader who took up meditation after a doctor, a coach and a friend all urged her to try it. The practice seemed to help at first: her shoulders dropped, sleep improved slightly and the structure felt reassuring. Then the same breath-focused instructions started to make her chest tighten, her body feel distant and her sense of self turn unnervingly detached.

That pivot is the article’s central correction to the usual wellness script. Meditation can reduce stress, sharpen attention, support emotional regulation and build compassion, but it is not one uniform practice and it is not automatically trauma-informed. For trauma survivors, the wrong style or dose can intensify flashbacks, panic, shame, dissociation, emotional flooding, insomnia or feelings of unreality.

The larger research picture backs up that warning. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says meditation use among U.S. adults rose from 7.5% in 2002 to 17.3% in 2022, but it also notes that few studies have examined harms closely enough to make firm safety claims. In its review of 83 studies involving 6,703 participants, negative experiences showed up in 55 studies, with an estimated 8% adverse-effect rate; anxiety and depression were the most commonly reported effects.

A 2020 systematic review in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica found the same basic pattern, with 55 of 83 studies reporting at least one adverse event and an overall prevalence of 8.3%. Adverse events were far less common in experimental studies, at 3.7%, than in observational studies, at 33.2%. Anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies were the most frequent problems, and the review concluded that adverse events can occur even in people with no prior mental health history.

More recent work sharpened the trauma link. A 2025 PLOS One study found that childhood trauma and subclinical PTSD symptoms predicted worse depression outcomes and more meditation-related adverse effects across two mindfulness-based programs for active depression. Childhood sexual abuse predicted attrition in one of the trials, and the authors called for trauma-sensitive modifications, safety monitoring, participant screening and provider education.

That is why trauma-sensitive mindfulness, as David Treleaven frames it, matters so much. Inward-focused meditation can trigger flashbacks, dysregulation or dissociation, which means the first response to distress should not be to push harder. Shorten the session, adjust posture, change the anchor of attention or seek clinical support if the practice starts to produce panic, unreality or emotional flooding. For practitioners who turn meditation into another performance metric, the most useful test is simple: if the nervous system is tightening instead of settling, the practice needs to change.