A man plunged to his death in front of me. I can’t get it out of my mind.

One day last spring as I was driving to work in downtown Atlanta, a man plunged headfirst from a highway overpass and landed in the lane next to my car.

Traffic suddenly slowed, and, moments later, I saw him lying motionless on the asphalt. Other drivers sped up to put the dreadful scene behind them, but I steered my car into the right emergency lane and, phone in hand, walked briskly toward the man’s crumpled body.

As I started to call for help, a police officer arrived and blocked one lane of traffic with his cruiser. Then, a firetruck pulled up and maneuvered to block other lanes. The officer paced uncertainly for a moment, then began shouting at people walking on the overpass: “Did you see anything? Did someone push him?” No one had pushed him, I later learned.

With first responders on the scene, there was nothing for me to do but return to my car, which I’d forgotten to turn off. Easing back into traffic, I called my wife. My voice cracked as I relayed what I had seen, and then I cried. In my rearview mirror, an impatient driver shook his fist. I wasn’t going fast enough for him.

Since that horrible day, I’ve learned a lot about trauma and how it can affect your life. I’ve found out that the response of the drivers who sped off after the incident wasn’t unusual.

“The normal reaction is like a dog shaking his head,” said Charles Figley, a professor and psychologist in the Tulane University School of Social Work. “There is a lot of shaking off that all of us do. That willful blindness is the way we can live with horrific, hellish, terrible things.”

But I have not been able to shake this off, which Figley said also happens. “Not being able to let it go is common,” he said. He also noted that although I was traumatized, I wouldn’t develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Living through trauma does not always cause PTSD, but it can.

Emotional and physical effects

Trauma can result in both emotional and physical reactions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anxiety, irritability, inability to concentrate, loss of appetite, headaches and sleep disruption are common.

In my case, I ruminated obsessively over what I had seen, and my anxiety spiked, as I approached the same overpass four days a week. When I looked further into the incident, I found out that the man had jumped from the overpass and that he died days later. Learning more about him only deepened my despair.

Primary trauma comes from a direct brush with a traumatic experience. It’s what I’m living with.

“When you are directly impacted, all the senses come alive,” said Figley, who is also director of Tulane’s Traumatology Institute, which conducts research and education. “When people see someone in distress, they wonder afterwards: What was the so-called ‘right response’? You do what you did. You wait with the body until a cop or someone of authority shows up and you’re, in effect, dismissed.” Then, the internal questions begin. “We’re debriefing ourselves, thinking it through and wondering if there is anything I could have done, asking, ‘Did I do the right thing? Am I a good person?’” he said.

The questions are an important part of moving on, Figley said. Avoiding them isn’t healthy. People coping with trauma should “talk to someone, friends or family, and if that doesn’t work, see someone like a therapist,” he added.

In my case, the trauma on the highway was the first in a cascade of bruising events that pushed me back into therapy 35 years after my father died of cancer. They included managing my mother’s worsening dementia and suffering a near-fatal “widowmaker” heart attack.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, I asked my therapist, “Did I ever tell you about the body in the road?” I said it almost as an aside, but the concern that washed over her face made clear I had buried that trauma under an avalanche of other worries.

“Hearing that you experienced that was shocking,” she told me later. “Sometimes, it will take a long time for people to open up about traumatic things that have happened. … There is also the experience where people do not recognize something as trauma that has impacted them.”

In treating clients, Figley has found that progress comes slowly sometimes and that positive results are almost immediate other times. It depends on how willing a client is to accept the truth of what they have experienced. “Men are very good at pushing things aside, holding problems at arm’s length. Some drink — they get an immediate relief. They start breathing and sighing and creating a separation between themselves and what is troubling them.”

Appropriate self-care can take the form of doing something relaxing: going to a movie, taking a walk or reading a book, Figley said. “Writing about what’s bothering you can also be very therapeutic,” he added.

I’ve found that long, solitary walks along a nearby river are restorative, but I’ve also learned a movie can be an unforeseen trigger. Gory roadside violence depicted in “Ferrari” jolted me and prompted a vivid flashback to last spring.

More media exposure, more toxicity

Doctor, nurses, first responders and therapists can suffer from what is known as secondary trauma.

“Often, they feel guilty that they haven’t suffered as much as the person they are treating,” Figley said. “They don’t have the vivid memories of what took place to contend with. They ask themselves, ‘Who am I to lose sleep over this?’”

Even those who follow violent or upsetting news on their phones or other media can fall victim to secondary trauma.

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science at the University of California at Irvine, has extensively studied mass violence and its effects on those who watch coverage live or over and over again.

Three major findings have emerged from her research.

“With increasing exposure, and this can be the number of hours people stay immersed in the story, the more they exhibit mental health symptoms, symptoms of acute stress and post-traumatic stress,” Silver said. “And in some of our studies, we have seen effects on physical health such as cardiovascular outcomes like hypertension.”

Silver called the second important finding “quite unexpected.” In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, people who immersed themselves in several hours of media coverage of the attack had worse symptoms than those who had been at the marathon.

“Repeated hours of media exposure had more potent effects than having actually been at the marathon oneself,” she said.

The third finding was that more media exposure was associated with greater distress and worry over time, and greater distress and worry led to more media exposure.

Set limits, don’t doom-scroll

There are steps you can take to limit your exposure to violent imagery, Silver and Figley said.

“I encourage people to monitor the amount of time they’re exposed to graphic images,” Silver said. Avoid doom-scrolling or repeatedly engaging with bad news. “One can stay up on the news without immersing oneself in gruesome images,” she added.

Figley concurred. “That’s why there is an off button.”

Of course, sometimes there is no off button. I still think about that cruel spring morning and that dying man I never knew but cannot forget. In my mind, his tragedy often resurfaces unexpectedly, like a ghost, unbidden and forlorn. And that’s the thing about trauma.

“It eats at us,” Figley said. “We keep thinking about it. That’s what therapy is about.”