This is felt as tension and stress. To relieve this tension, sex frequently becomes an arena for acting out, either by circumscribing sexual behavior or by being promiscuous. Both these sexual strategies temporarily lower stress levels without helping to resolve the trauma. The useful molehills of psychological knowledge are often obscured by the mountains of psychological claptrap now available. Stress may appear later as fear, anxiety, jumpiness, insomnia, panic, or pain in the body such as a headache or backache.
Stress is a major factor in most such psychosomatic complaints.