[listen]
[read, with compassion]
It seems like everyone is "triggered" by everything these days. It's hard to go 5 minutes without offending someone, especially in the current social and political climate. Tensions are high worldwide, and collectively, we are all feeling a bit more on edge than usual.
Maybe you're triggered by how triggered everyone else is; maybe you're triggered by everything that everyone else does. I've been on both sides of this - PTSD tends to put you in a low-key version of hell where everything reminds you of your greatest hurts and most horrifying life experiences. I get it.
If you're experiencing a trigger, it's humiliating on a level that's hard to describe. They often come out of nowhere, and feel impossible to control. Triggers are mentally invasive and physically painful. They usually also have the awesome ripple effect of being misunderstood by everyone around you - causing others to dismiss, blame, make fun of, or direct anger towards you. This leaves you feeling alone, misunderstood, and guilty - ON TOP of the crushing weight of re-living a traumatic experience.
Triggers fucking suck, and I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy.
If you're witnessing someone else get triggered, it often feels disruptive, attention-seeking, and immature. Watching someone go through a trigger - especially if you don't know that they're going through one, or you're not familiar with what a trigger actually is - can be a little awkward, as they often come out of nowhere. Triggers often seem like an overreaction from the outside - but it's important to remember that we have no idea what someone else is going through on the inside. A little compassion can go a long way.
If you haven't read "Is Everyone Traumatized?" yet, I highly suggest opening it in a new tab and reading it first - think of this article as Part 2.
What is a trigger?
A trigger is anything that reminds you of a traumatic event. Sometimes, they're obvious - if you're a combat veteran and hear fireworks or engine sputtering, the connection between "sudden loud noises" and "gunshots" is pretty easy to make. In my experience, they tend to be completely random - depending on what you focused on during the event (and what you remember about it), your trigger could be anything from a news story/movie scene of a similar incident to a smell (like cologne), a type of car, a song, a breed of dog, a location or date (especially the "traumaversary"), a temperature or season, the feel of a certain textile on your skin, a specific food or type of drink, a word or phrase, or even the mannerisms of a complete stranger.
External triggers usually relate to a sensory experience (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing). These are the easiest to discover. The more insidious triggers are the internal ones related to feelings - which isn't something that's talked about very often. Often, we remember how we felt during the incident - and that feeling becomes a massive flashback trigger whenever we feel it. For example, say you're exercising and your heart starts pounding. That sensation might remind you of a time you were running from an attacker or an abusive partner/parent. That would be considered an internal trigger. Other common internal triggers include: Pain (especially in certain parts of the body), muscle tension, memories tied to a traumatic event, anger, sadness, loneliness, or anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, vulnerable, abandoned, or out of control.
Triggers create a closed neurological feedback loop - it's like a glitch in your mental software that causes your brain and body to zoom out of the present and nosedive directly into the past.
Sometimes, the triggering feeling is actually happiness - we become terrified to feel happy, because we're convinced that if we do, it will lead us to experience another trauma. We break our own hearts so that no one or nothing else can.
How to recognize a trigger in yourself
Triggers almost always manifest as a combination of physical and emotional symptoms, even if they're not obviously connected. Encountering a trigger can make your body quickly switch into fight-or-flight mode, because it believes it's encountering the danger right now instead of realizing that it is remembering the past.
A trigger literally re-wires the nervous system - instead of sending sensory information through the parasympathetic branch (rest/digest/calm) of the vagus nerve, it flips to the sympathetic branch (fight/flight/freeze), sending us immediately into panic mode.
Physical symptoms of being triggered can be a combination of:
Zoning out/dissociating
Feeling frozen or numb
Heightened senses
Elevated heart rate - often feels like your heart is beating out of your chest
Shallow, rapid breathing (notice if you're chest breathing!)
An overwhelming craving for a cigarette, drink, drug, or vice
Coldness in the extremities
Being startled easily / jumpiness
Crying (especially suddenly)
Tunnel vision / blacking out
Having a hard time focusing on what's going on around you
Hyperventilation/shortness of breath
Physical shaking (the "trauma shakes" are a real thing!)
Confusion or difficulty concentrating
A tightness in the chest or throat
Sudden onset nausea / stomach upset
Clenching of the jaw, hands, shoulders, and/or back
Full blown panic attacks
Compulsive behaviors - cleaning, organizing, hand washing, etc
Snapping in anger / overreacting
Throwing things/punching walls/any kind of violent outburst
Racing, looping, intrusive, negative thoughts
Feeling disconnected from your physical body
Trouble hearing (because thoughts/memories have taken over)
Bodily twitches/rapid blinking/fidgeting
Hypersexuality (using sex as a distraction)
Insomnia or nightmares, chronic fatigue
Digestive issues
Depending on your current state of healing and the dominant emotions you feel throughout the day, your reaction will be different. Your response to triggers might change along the way - mine certainly did! Early on, I dissociated and blocked out/numbed everything, pretending like nothing was wrong. During the mid-point of my healing, I cried A LOT and felt overwhelming sadness, hopelessness, grief, and fear. Towards the end, everything triggered anxiety, rage and explosive anger - all of the hurt I had suppressed and ignored came bursting out at the slightest provocation.
Going through stages like this is normal - in a lot of ways, healing from trauma is a lot like healing from grief. You lost a part of yourself with the trauma, and in a lot of ways, that's actually more painful than losing a friend or a family member.
An emotional trigger is also:
The guilt you feel when you set a boundary
The frustration you feel when you are misunderstood
The loneliness you feel when you are not heard or seen
The anger you feel when you are not treated fairly
The jealousy or ineptness you feel when you compare your progress to others
The shame you feel when you fail to meet expectations
The pain and sadness you feel after rejection
The fear you feel when you anticipate the worst outcome
The stress you feel when you are unable to accomplish your goals
How to recognize a trigger in someone else
When someone you know is experiencing a reaction that is not typical or seems a bit "much" for the situation, pause and observe their physical behavior. Trauma triggers often aren't obvious at first, but recognizing them can make the person feel seen and cared for in a very profound way.
Some things to look out for:
Shifting eyes/lack of eye contact
Playing with their hair/face (self-soothing behavior)
A glazed over expression (like they're not really there)
Contracted body positions (crossed arms/legs, hunched over, hugging the knees)
Chin dimpling and upturned eyebrows ("Fear Face")
One-word answers
Rhythmic, repetitive body language (rocking back and forth, ringing their hands, tapping their feet, unconsciously fidgeting)
Anger, irritability, or sudden mood swings
A deep desire to people-please/avoid conflict
Black and white language (always/never, all or nothing statements, everything is either good or bad, using words like impossible, perfect, ruined, disaster, furious, etc)
Catastrophizing (assuming the absolute worst, phrases like i suck at everything, no one will ever love me, etc)
How to help someone else through a trigger
Start by acknowledging what they're experiencing. Phrases like "Are you ok?" and "Hey, you're safe right now!" mean a lot. If the person is experiencing a true trigger and not just emotional discomfort, they will probably have a hard time forming words until it passes, so don't force them to talk. Ask them questions that can be answered with yes/no, or head nods and shakes. Some people love to be hugged, whereas in others, physical touch makes everything way worse. Saying something like "You don't have to say anything, just nod if you'd be comfortable with a hug right now" can help to gauge where they're at and what their comfort level is with physical touch.
Some people really need to talk and be heard when they're triggered - if you know how to hold space in a situation like that, offer to listen (for tips, read Heard!). Others just need to not be alone. Offering tea or chocolate can help bring them back into the present. Try not to offer unsolicited advice or fix the problem for them - as hard as it is, it's important to remember that it's not your battle to fight - it's theirs. Be their supporter. Remind them that they're safe and loved. Get them a blanket. Put on some upbeat music. Help them change their state. Make them laugh, bring up cute animal videos, or engage them physically in spontaneous dance (only if consent has been established for physical touch!). Validate what they're going through by saying something like "It must be really hard to have these memories over and over again."
How to help yourself through a trigger
Often, the advice we get from therapists and doctors centers on managing symptoms - these are usually referred to as "grounding exercises."
Some of the more common grounding techniques are:
The 5-4-3-2-1 method: Name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.
Alternate nasal breathing: Place one hand on your face, with your thumb on one side of your nose, your pinky on the other, and your three middle fingers resting between your eyebrows. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in through your right nostril while plugging the left; hold, then exhale through the left nostril while plugging the right. Repeat for 10 slow breaths, or until calmed.
Holding an object: Take an object like a crystal or a paperweight or your favorite plating spoon and hold it in your hand. Really feel it as if you were inspecting it for flaws or looking at it for the first time. Focus on the temperature, the texture, the curves or angles of the material, etc.
Pick a color: Choose a color and name as many things as you can see in the room that happen to be that color. If there's only a few, pick another color and repeat it.
Vagal nerve toning: Send the breath all the way down to the diaphragm, bypassing the chest. Hold for a count of 4, then slowly release to a count of 6. Hold for a count of 4. Repeat as long as necessary. (this is my personal favorite - for a detailed explanation of why this works, click here and scroll halfway down to the section called "Polyvagal Theory")
Exercise/move: Triggers bring up a lot of old, stuck energy in the body, and it's important to find ways to release it. Shaking your body (like you're literally "shaking out" the negative feelings) is incredibly helpful - it's what animals do! Other forms of exercise are also helpful, like dancing, running, or lifting weights. I have been fencing for most of my life, and I can say with certainty that stabbing people is the best form of therapy ;)
Grounding exercises are meant to bring us out of our heads and back into our physical bodies - out of the past, and back into the present. During the beginning of our healing and in a crisis, grounding exercises are a necessary first step - but they're more like a band-aid than an actual solution. They calm the fire, but they don't get rid of the flammable objects.
I dealt with complex PTSD for 12 years, and learning grounding techniques helped - but they always left me feeling empty afterwards. Confronting my triggers, while super painful in the moment, was the only thing that actually worked. Confronting a trigger sounds terrifying because we have a tendency to build up this insanely catastrophic idea of what it's going to be like in our head before we ever actually do it - we essentially scare ourselves out of healing. It's an incredibly annoying catch-22 - what we want the most becomes the very thing we convince ourselves that we cannot have. The idea/possibility of "healing" morphs into a psychological dragon that guards our memories - something we don't even want to go near, let alone confront, despite knowing deep down that the life we truly desire lies right on the other side of it.
Triggers are messengers. Triggers show us where we need to heal, what we need to heal, and how we need to heal. Unfortunately, we live in an emotionally phobic society and we're not taught how to listen to them.
Think of triggers like "check engine" lights for our mental health. They are mental alarm bells that ring whenever we encounter an old hurt that we have yet to fully analyze, accept, or heal.
What happens when you ignore your dashboard lights? The whole car starts to fall apart, and the repair gets more intense and expensive each time. To use a kitchen metaphor, it's like going home without properly cleaning, taking out the trash, or labeling anything. What happens when we come in the next day? It's a shitshow. The first night might not be so bad, but eventually, rats and insects show up. It starts to smell. It's a mess and you can't find anything. Instead of starting fresh each day, you have to furiously clean items one at a time in a filthy kitchen as you need them, all day long. It turns into a crisis. No fucking thanks.
Our brains are like this, too - when we continually ignore our internal alarm bells, problems begin to compound. Our relationships suffer, our quality of life goes down, and our grasp on hope slips further and further out of reach. Take care of the problem when it comes up - the longer you put it off, the more stress and drama it will cause you in the future.
Healing sucks - but staying in that state sucks even more. We cannot ignore our triggers and hope they magically go away one day (they won't - believe me, I tried).
When you're triggered, after grounding yourself in the present moment and calming your heart rate/breathing, ask yourself these questions in this order:
What am I feeling?
Where am I feeling it in my body? (touch/point to it!)
When have I felt this before?
What am I making this mean about me?
Feel free to write them down and keep them in your wallet (or screenshot them and keep it in a folder where it's easy to find) so that you can reference them when you need them.
Here's why these work:
What am I feeling? This question forces you out of your past, out of the memory, and into the present.
Where am I feeling it in my body? This question takes you out of your head and into your body.
When have I felt this before? This question helps you begin to find the patterns in your own life - it helps you identify what situations tend to trigger you. Knowing that you might get triggered in certain situations or by certain places or people will give you more control over your state and your situation - if you know the chance for a potential trigger is high, you can choose to avoid the situation or you can choose to employ protective techniques to ground / emotionally distance yourself from whatever it is that upsets you.
What am I making this mean about me? This question helps you discover the emotion attached to the trigger. It's often not what we initially believe it is - this question is the most uncomfortable because it requires radical self-honesty and deep introspection.
I find that seeing examples of how this might play out helps immensely, so here's an example from my own life.
One of my biggest triggers for a long time was seeing or hearing about people doing cocaine. When I was 19, I was nearly murdered by someone who was high on cocaine, so this one was pretty obvious. I would start shaking - violently shaking - followed by hyperventilation so strong that sometimes I'd actually black out, and I'd often spontaneously burst out into tears. It was an almost instantaneous chain reaction. Let me just say, as a cook and as someone who spent most of her free time at metal/punk shows, this one was really fun. I cannot even tell you how shitty it is to be having a great time after work or at a party, only to run to the bathroom and have a full-on meltdown 4 seconds later because someone decided to cut a line on the table. Yeah. Anyway.
Unpacking this one was a bit of a mind-fuck, but here's how it went:
What am I feeling? cold, shaky, scared. alone. my extremities are numb. my whole body feels tense and tight. It's hard to see.
Where am I feeling it in my body? mostly in my upper body. there's a pain in my chest, my throat feels like i'm being strangled, and I can't feel my limbs. My head is pounding and my heart is racing. It's hard to breathe.
When have I felt this before? many times. almost every day that he was in my life.
What am I making this mean about me? At first, I thought "I am going to die. I am not safe." With further questioning, I realized I was thinking "I am unlovable because this has happened to me. I am not good enough because I cannot control this." Digging deeper still, I realized that the big underlying fear was "I am afraid that I will never be happy again." My realizations tend to come in 3 parts - first, the obvious/ surface level thoughts about the incident; second, the meanings I have assigned to them; and third, the fear lurking underneath.
BONUS: After you've gone through all of these questions, after you've gained some clarity and begun to re-regulate your nervous system, ask yourself: Is this helping me or hurting me? Do I believe these things about myself?
Do this process every time you're faced with a trigger. One day, you won't need to any more.
How to identify the core emotion that’s upsetting you
If you're having trouble digging deep into self-inquiry, that's totally normal - it's weird at first for everyone. The first step to organizing your feelings is to list your problems or worries. That might sound like a negative thing to do, but sometimes just writing them down will ease anxiety. Identifying the underlying thought or belief, evaluating it for its helpfulness and truth, and then changing it if it’s not serving us well can be incredibly powerful.
List your concerns or problems and assign the emotions, thoughts, and beliefs attached. If you’re unsure what those thoughts are, a “So what does that mean?” exercise can be super helpful.
The “So what” exercise example:
Problem: Everyone expects me to rearrange my schedule to fit theirs.
Feelings or emotions: anger, resentment, hurt
So what? So they think what they have going on is more important than what I have going on.
So what? So that’s selfish of them to not even think about how this inconveniences me.
So what? So if I want to see them or be part of the event, I just have to suck it up.
So what does that mean? It means that if I don’t make the effort, I’ll never get to spend time with them…
Possible conclusion: …which means that I’ll be all alone, and they’ll eventually forget about me. I’m afraid I’m forgettable, or they don’t care about me.
The meaning we uncover in the exercise might feel brutal. But that’s when the true work comes into play. Challenge yourself to look for exceptions. Ask yourself, ‘Is that really true? Or can I find evidence that contradicts that belief?’”
In the example provided, the person might think of times when others have gone out of their way to see them or expressed having a blast after hanging out. They’ll know that the conclusion they arrived at is false.
You will too, when you do this. Our brains lie to us all the time, and the Trauma Brain is the worst culprit.
Stay on top of your mental check engine lights. You are stronger and have more control over your reactions than you realize.
If you're struggling with triggers or trauma related stuff and would like some guidance from someone who's been in the trenches and made it out, send an email to consciouschefs@gmail.com and I'll personally get back to you asap. 💜[go further]
Recommended reading:
[absorb]
The cave you fear holds the treasure you seek. Slay the dragon, get the gold.
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