On my blog entry entitled Living in the Present to Dismantle Triggers, a reader posted the following question:
I have a question about triggers. I have only recently begun to uncover memories as vague pictures in my head, so there are not many of them. Whenever I read or hear about people being triggered by something they usually refer to memories or flashbacks that come with them. I feel triggered by things all the time since I was young—objects, specific words, actions, etc.—but I have no memories or flashbacks that come as a result. Instead, I feel a strange sense of panic, shame, and arousal. Are these technically still triggers? If not, what are they? ~ Brynn
What Brynn describes is very common for child abuse survivors who have not begun or are early into the healing process. Child abuse survivors react to different triggers without knowing why. They only know that they are phobic of different triggers or have unexplained reactions to them. Child abuse survivors might even find that they suddenly feel a negative shift in their mood without having any idea why. It might take them years to connect the dots to a particular trigger.
A trigger is anything that connects the dots in a child abuse survivor’s head between a present day reminder of a past trauma. For example, I have always had a phobia of Russian nesting dolls but never knew why. Whenever I saw Russian nesting dolls, particularly if they were “opened,” I would feel shaky and lightheaded. Even writing the words now causes a panic reaction in me. My blood pressure rises, my breathing becomes shallow, and I feel a tightening in my private areas. This is a common reaction to a severe trauma, and you don’t have to remember the “why” to have this reaction.
I used to get triggered by being around my mother/abuser (Go figure!) even though I had no conscious memories of her abuse. Whenever I visited with her, I felt very lightheaded and dizzy. This was being triggered, but I didn’t know it. I had trouble staying focused around her. It was like looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope or trying to communicate through a fog.
Whenever I was with her, I would feel very strong emotions (including anger – something I rarely felt otherwise), and I would make mental notes about things I wanted to tell my friends about the visit later (all things to mock her). However, when I left her presence, I had trouble remembering the visit. I would go straight home with the intention of making fun of my mother to my husband, but I couldn’t access those memories. I simply couldn’t remember much about the visit, even though it had just happened.
The triggers are already in place because the trauma has already happened. Whether or not you understand the connection does not factor into your reaction – you will still get triggered whether your have accessed the memory or not. The difference is that, through healing, you can dismantle the trigger as you understand the origin. That is where therapy comes in as well as other alternative methods such as EMDR.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
I don’t know how helpful this is, but I will comment. I’m currently reading a book called “Parts Psychology” by Jay Noricks. I’m reading it for a variety of reasons. One is that I am a therapist and I am used to working with people with all levels of trauma, so I read a lot of things like this anyway. But a more personal reason has to do with my need for my own healing from past stuff, and more recent stuff. I have a lot of triggers. I thought I had them managed, but i think it was just because it was an uneventful period of time where I just didn’t happen to get triggered. But with the old stuff combining with the newer traumas I have gotten to feeling like the triggers run me. I have learned that I am multiple, but do not have DID- meaning that I don’t lose time. But when triggered, feelings, behaviors, etc almost seem to take over me. It is a very uncomfortable and dysfunctional way of being because I never know how I am going to be in the next minute or the next day. So I am learning to connect the mood states, behaviors, etc to memories that belong to other parts of me, and sort of “come into me” when the triggers happen.
There is nothing unusual about this being multiple, but not DID in that we have all had other ego states develop in response to certain situations in life, and it tends to be those ego states that continue to be the ones to handle that kind of similar material.
Anyway, this is what I am suggesting. If what I just said makes any sense to you, you probably already have the first key to finding the parts of you that hold the memories that react the triggers. So it really doesn’t matter at this point that you don’t have the memories. Other parts of you do. It begins with finding the part of you that holds particular sets of memories and working with that. Now the book that I just mentioned is quite clear that in that it is not meant to be a “self-help” book. It is meant to be informative, and perhaps offer some new tools to therapists. If I had anyone who could do this work with me I would love it, but I don’t have anyone like that, so since I am a therapist, I am trying to do it on my own.
But even if you are not a therapist you know your own experience. Reading this type of book might lead you to something that feels familiar to you. If you can find a therapist who does this kind of work it is generally referred to as “parts therapy” or “Internal Family Systems Therapy.” I am finding it very useful in theory as well as in practice because it really helps focus in on the triggers and the attached memory sets with a very powerful way of “unburdening” the part from the intensity of the memories- and therefore no more triggering.
This is the way I see it;
“Triggers” are normal it is the experiences that are not. Associating them only with past trauma does not work for me.
I think that “triggers” are from the reptilian brains and that is why they are so strong and automatic.
If I find out why my reptilian brain has the reaction that it does, process that, give my reptilian brains a new experience than the trigger does not go away it is now associated with the new experience.
For me the telling the reptilian brains what they should be feeling is frustrating at best and always temporary.
A trigger can be the reptilian brain expressing a need to do something, to avoid something or to be watchful ect. based on the reptilian brains experience.
The reptilian brains are not all about survival as some people think. They will seek the sun and warmth as that is good for them ect. The reptilian brain will seek comfort and it is the reptilians brain experience of what seeking comfort means that “drive” them.
I had triggers and flashbacks my whole life including pre-verbal. My flashbacks and triggers are not verbal. For me turning them into verbiage helps only superficially. Having a name for them is how I understood that I have always had them. I would have told you 7 years ago I did not have triggers or flashbacks as I was used to them they were not connected with a word. Once I had a word then I started to cognitively “remember” them.
Part of my CPTSD is from having to cognitively override my reptilian brain the real base of my CPTSD was when my “upper” brains were not yet joined and other people continually overriding my reptilian brains.
The concept that the cause is not being nurtured or comforted was the cause is not credible in my case. That is why the CPTSD continued not why I experienced it in the first place and is why knowing about the trauma is necessary.
I personally do not use the word trigger other than when it is a necessary convenience as in this comment. I use the word reaction or experiencing.
As a multiple we do not always have the same reactions or experience things in the same way. Our reactions and experiences are related to who is conscious and how they are connected to the reptilian brains. The reptilian brains more consistent and follow more what state the body is in,
Taking extreme liberties will use Faith as and illustration of how I see it. When she was with her mother her reptilian brains were telling her she should not be there as that was their experience. By being there she was cognitively overriding her reptilian brains. When she left her cognitive memory of what she planned was gone as it was disconnected from the experience her reptilian brains where having.
Reptilian brains are all about the immediate. Always present unless exhausted.
Yes, definitely. In fact it was being strongly triggered by otherwise normal or even nice things that helped to convince me to seek therapy.
Also, Faith, your description of visiting your mother and then not being able to access the memories normally is very much what happened for me as well. It’s like I have the ‘frame’ of the memory. I remember *that* I spent however many days visiting my mother, and objectively I know *that* I spent a great deal of time with her and I can suggest the various social activities we must have done, but the actual memories are gone, or are totally focused on other people I saw while there. Intense.
Brynn,
Yes, they are triggers! It’s much worse when you don’t understand what is going on…that a current experience is firing off a set of emotional reactions laid down in a traumatic past.
Hearing your story reminds me so much of my own. I, too, KNEW that being with certain people was highly distressing. Certain situations…such a entering puberty. With all the expectations around dating and sexual experimentation – my reptilian brain went straight to terror.
The physical sensations are what clues you into the fact that you are being triggered. As Faith says, panicky feelings, nausea, tunnel vision, derealization, depersonalization (out of body type experiences) all tell you that you are being triggered.
I had only flashes…a picture here or there…and feelings. Sickening, horrible feelings. I only started having my memories come back this year and I have been in therapy for a long time.
So be gentle with yourself and you come into a more full awareness. You will be okay. Yes, it happened. Something happened. The other thing that happened is that you made it – you creatively survived by splitting off those feelings and memories until you were ready to handle them.
You are not alone.
Blessings. Laura
Even though I’ve always had triggers, understanding them was one of the more difficult things for me to learn in therapy.
I had been trained to believe that any time I became upset by somebody, my reaction was wrong – everything was just fine until I went and got upset.
When I started to see that my emotional reactions were based on events that happened in the past rather than in present time, it made it even harder to accept that my feelings were valid. I had a lot of black and white thinking that made it very hard to negotiate the relationships in my life – I thought that if I was triggered, then the other person must be right after all!
It turns out that although a person might trigger me through no fault of their own, a person could also trigger me because they were pulling a power trip of some kind. It’s the difference between a man who triggers me because he’s larger than me, and a man who triggers me because he uses his size as part of a power trip.
I finally had an “aha” moment that allowed me to see that the state of being triggered didn’t automatically make me wrong and the other person right. Once that happened, I could view being triggered as a clue into my past and a tool to better explore what was going on in my current situation. I’ve found that a spirit of curiosity in regard to my triggers has served me well.
I’ve also gotten better and better at recognizing the early stages of being triggered. Usually, I can catch it and work to ground myself, de-escalate the situation, and/or leave the situation. That’s so much better than the days where I had no idea I was deeply triggered until my therapist pointed it out to me. I still count the first time I was able to see in real time that I was triggered as a huge milestone in my healing journey.
I had always thought my triggering was me just being unbalanced and messed up. I was verrry hard on myself and also thought I was wrong and “over-the-top,” emotionally unstable, etc. I relate with Brynn in that at first, I didn’t have memories or flashbacks attached. I would just be having some kind of “irrational” reaction, with nothing associated with it and then would come the hailstorm of self-abusive thoughts- “What’s wrong with you?? Why can’t you function like a normal person! You’re feeling like you want to die because you saw a child crying from dropping his ice cream cone?? Don’t you think that’s a little RIDICULOUS? You’re a complete messed up loser case.”
Those types of thoughts were very harsh and hurtful. In therapy I’ve been able to have far more compassion for the triggering, and just like Sarah said above- curiosity about it! The triggering isn’t irrational. It’s trauma- it’s old stuff that didn’t get a chance to process out, so of course it’s going to pop up in the present. I try to make more room for the curiosity so that judgment doesn’t sneak in. If I start to experience panic, my body going numb, a heaviness, acute depression, shutting down, etc., and there isn’t a clear “reason,” I know that I’m being triggered by something. I try to be present with it, recognize, “this is old stuff coming up” and get somewhere safe or take care of my needs as best I can.
While I wish I didn’t have triggers to “normal” things that don’t trigger other people, I guess I can be grateful that these triggers are clues to healing my past. What is this telling me? What is the essence of the thing that triggered me, if I can figure it out? Was it what that person just said? Is there some kind of family dynamic that’s triggering me? Is it the visual of that child? The answers are becoming clearer, and my past memories are too.
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Recently, I’ve realized that ALL of my earliest memories involve my grandmother in some way. I found this very weird, because I never thought she was abusive. Careless maybe, but not abusive.
Mostly, it was little things. She put me in a crib, and hung a motion-sensitive shrieking gorilla stuffed animal over it. (I was terrified of the gorilla, and she thought leaving me there for an hour would cure my fear.) She made me touch a Christmas tree I was afraid of. (It was huge. I thought it was going to fall on me.) When I ran away from it, she left me outside the bank in the cold, with my coat unzipped, hood off, and mittens off until she finished with the teller.
I have dozens of other memories similar to those two. I wouldn’t describe what happened to me as abuse, specifically… It was nothing serious. She never hit me, or touched me sexually. I think the worst was when I fell off a chair and hit my head. She told me to pretend it didn’t happen because I’d get in trouble. (I was at most two when this happened. My brother wasn’t born yet.)
And honestly, I was not an easy child to deal with. I was allergic to like, 20 different things. I could start to bleed just from sitting on a cement side-walk. I had such poor coordination I was nicknamed the “Chevy-Chase baby”, I was terrified of loud noise, and a lot of other things that made no sense to everybody but me. (Wind was one of them. Wind hurt my ears, so it scared me.) My brother, sisters, and cousins had no problem with her, and she pretty much acted the same way around all of us.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t think what she was doing would hurt me, and I know she thought I wouldn’t remember any of it anyway. She used to tell me things, like that my cousins broke her guitar, because she thought I wouldn’t remember. (I did tell my grandfather when he finally noticed the guitar was missing. Fifteen years after it was broken, and my grandmother was long dead.)
But was this abuse? Aside from my intense hatred of motion-sensitive stuffed animals and the room where the crib was, I don’t think I have any serious side affects.
There may be some things that you would more clearly identify as abuse that you just don’t remember. Even if there aren’t, the things you describe certainly sound traumatic- even if there was no intent at being abusive. Sometimes I think that we just end up being the unintended “victims” of other people’s really poor way of handling things. What I do know is that whether something is traumatic for a person is very specific to the individual. If you experienced it as traumatic then it was. As far as whether anyone had the intent to abuse, that is a different story. What is useful is to work on dealing with any place you feel traumatized. Often one memory leads to another. Even if you find nothing worse than you already remember, it is worthwhile to heal from the things you did find traumatic.
I do not consider myself to have been abused, but I do have a lot of trauma stuff that I am dealing with. It is all worthwhile work.
most of my triggers only give me an emotional resopnse, very very few require me to step back and let the flashback happen. I tend to find the latter easier to put off. I believe, faith, that you said in an earlier post that you could stop a flashback if you made sure you carried on the next day. I find i can’t stop one but can avoid it for a little. Some i can eave for a full day until i go to bed, these tend to be flashback ones, whereas some i literally have to run to find the nearest pace i can be alone to ort myself out as i feel incredibly vulnerable while i feel triggered. these triggers might come with flashbacks later but i tend to think of them as just a different kind of memory!
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