We hear many people talk about how they are triggered. What is a trigger?
In short, a trigger is a reminder of a past trauma that makes a person feel overwhelming sadness, anxiety, or panic. Depending on the intensity and gravity of a trauma, a trigger may also cause someone to have flashbacks.
Now let’s get more in depth with understanding what a trigger is. Psychology says that triggers are stimuli of any kind, that we perceive through any of our 5 senses, that cause us an intense emotional and physical reaction to a specific memory from the past that the present circumstance brings to surface. Basically, your brain has associated that event with negative emotions, conditioning you to react a certain way to similar situations in the future. And usually, the intensity of the reactivity in the presence of the trigger is a indicator of the degree of severity of the impact of that particluar traumatizing event. And this leads me to my next point.
How bad must an incident be in order for us to be traumatized and consequently triggered whenever in a similar situation? Well, it doesn’t have to be a literal life-threatning event. Actually the meaning we assign to a occurence weighs heavier than the occurence in and of itelf. And so in short, it doesn’t matter how objectively bad a situation you were in was, as long as your brain construes it as harmful for your well being. The younger you are, the more impactful an event is, even if objectively it may not be that way. A child’s brain is not fully formed and if anything happens to them, they don’t have past experinces to compare and contrast these events against, nor can a child grasp, process and detach from a traumatic event without external support. Hence, children are easily traumatized by incidents that are not obviously harmful to the naked eye and they can be wounded by the most insignificant remarks. Children take everything personally. And so they form their wounds and negative core beliefs about themselves based on the feedback they receive from their parents and what is happening to them and around them. For instance, if a child is chronically criticized and blamed, they develop the belief that they are flawed, not good enough, worthless etc. When parents argue, the child makes it mean that it is because of him/her (‘My parents argue because I was bad’) and they fear losing their parents. When the mother tells the child jokingly `If you’re not a good boy/girl, I’m going to give you up for adoption`. The adult knows it is a joke, but the child doesn’t and this is how abandonment trauma and rejection trauma are formed. These are all examples of serious trauma right there, even if psychology calls them micro-traumas because they are not considered severe and serious life-threatening events. I personally don't believe in a hierarchy of trauma - having big traumas and smaller traumas - because everyone internalizes, perceives and processes things differently and what is extremely traumatic for somebody might bear little meaning for someone else. For instance, if someone gets bitten by a dog and their brain asosociates dogs with danger, in the future, anytime this persons sees a dog, they will obviously get scared. But another person who was also bitten by a dog can have a reaction as strong as to literally lose their consciouness upon seeing a dog. And each perspective is just as valid. But now going back to the unfolding of triggers.
Upon being triggered, what happens chronologically? First, the feelings crop up (fear, anger etc.) and then the thoughts that will reinforce the feelings, come later. So say you have a wound around being criticized, your parents criticised you when you were a child and made you feel not good enough, powerless or angry. As an adult that is unaware of this trauma, when you are being criticized or you perceive something as a criticism, you instantly get triggered because your brain remebers the times you were criticized and it brings back the beliefs you had back then that formed your trauma, beliefs about not being good enough, accompanied by anger or frustration, all of this being translated into physical reactions as well, such as muscle tension or others. And these feelings will then give rise to the inner monologue, such as `This person is right, I am worthless, I can’t do anything right’. And these thoughts feed into the wounding more, reinforcing it. It’s a cycle , a subconsious pattern that shows up until we are ready to become conscious of it and heal it. With these types of traumas, many times (not everytime, though) you can access the memories pretty easily, once you manage to backtrack your feelings to the initial wounding done in your childhood. Up until this point, I talked about the so called micro-traumas, the wounding done by non-life-threatening occurences. But what about the real life-threatening events? The traumas caused by catastrophic and extremely harmful incidents are a whole different story. When a horrendously traumatizing event or series of events happen to us when we are too young to understand and we do not have the means to deal with it in a healthy way and process the event, because it is technically a matter of survival, our brain doesn’t know what to do with the insurmountable sorrow and so, in an attempt to protect us, it is likely (not always) to take the memory and the pain associated with that memory out of our conscious awareness and cram it into our subconsious mind, so that we do not have immediate access to it. It represses it to help us survive that situation and forget about it. It blocks it out. But even though the memory of the incident/incidents is not available to our conscious mind, the pain of that trauma doesn’t disappear just because it is out of our immediate awareness.
For instance, a person whose brain has blocked out the memory of them, as a child, being battered by their parent who used to come home drunk and slam the doors on their way in, will be startled by any door being slammed. How does the triggering happen in this case? First, the person hears the door slam. Chronologically, because the subconscious mind of the person associates the sound with the beatings, an intense fear crops up in a split second. This then sets the amygdala in the person’s brain that perceives the potential danger, to signal it to the hypothalamus, which then stimulates the autonomic nervous system that is responsible for the flight, fight and freeze response, to activate this response that then shows up in the body. This person will feel a sudden tension of the muscles, a constriction in their chest, their palms may get sweaty, they may start hyperventilating, heart racing, all accompanied - in this situation - by staggering feelings of impending doom, terror and despair. They may even faint (or may freeze, also called reactive immobility). This person gets into a survival mode everytime a door is slammed and they don’t even know why. This person growing up may have been a match to similar abusive relationships because the brain is looking for anything that is familiar to re-enact it and bring resolve to the unresolved repressed trauma in the subconsious. So if violence was a norm in a houselhold,like in this example, the person is subconsciuly going to be attracted by people who are aggressive and remind them of their father, they may engage in risky behaviour, they may have all sorts of addictins, everything meant to cover up the deep pain they’re feeling. They will likely say in physically abusive relationships because chaos, conflict and pain is what they are familiar with. But let’s never forget for a second that all of this is going on without the awareness and conscious choice of the person, nobody is consciusly choosing to be hurt and battered by anyone. Triggers can be our most important teachers, if we allow them to be. Spiritually speaking, from the highest perspective, triggers are new chances that are given to us by our higher self or spirit guides or God to start becoming more conscious, more present with ourselves. If you ask me, a trigger is not a happenstance, it's not a coincidence or an accident. I believe everything on the outside is a mirror to what's happening on the inside. I believe that nobody actually hurts you per se, they just awaken whatever was already hurting within you and was a match to them. And so if someone triggers you in some way, even though in the moment you may despise them for making you uncomfortable - and you have every right to feel that way - from the higher perspective, this person is sent to help you see you where it hurts. Any event that brings back painful memories is sent to help you see where it hurts and why it hurts. Triggers are reminders of a pain that is not healed and with any occasion you are triggered, you are called to go inwards, bring light into the aspects in you that were crammed in the dark and take a look at the grief that has risen in your body and soul. You are actually called to raise your vibration and raise above your current awarenss by dissolving the dense energy of your past hurt.
There is nothing wrong with triggers. There is nothing wrong with you if you feel triggered. We are all triggered because we all have traumas that we carry around. And so the only question you need to ask yourself after you have noticed your triggers is: Do I choose to look deeper into these triggers or do I choose to stay blind to them? Whatever you choose to do is fine. It's your choice and it's your life. You don't have to heal that pain. It's perfectly fine if you feel like you cannot handle it. But know this: healing makes life easier and more beautiful. Healing enables your true self, the one you were when you came onto this Earth, come alive.
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