Living with trauma means that we will be triggered. It is part of the definition of PTSD. If the question is not “if” but “when”, we need to find a way to deal with it.
Step 1:
Notice that something inside you was triggered and understand your current experience as a reaction to the trigger. It takes some practice. Usually the reaction is not a full-blown visual flashback but a sense of unease, anxiety, helplessness or aggression that is hard to place. Often our body will be tense, we hold our breath or feel pain, without connecting that to a trigger on a cognitive level. (5 steps to stopp flashbacks)
Step 2:
Withdraw from the situation, person, object, picture or other stimulation that has triggered memories. You can withdraw by changing the room, closing the tab on your computer, or turning around to look into a different direction. If that is not possible you can try to create distance by taking the position of a distant observer. You might want to add a discrimination exercise.
Step 3:
Regulate yourself. Use your orientation and grounding exercises, DBT Skills, breathing exercises, imagery, mindfulness, distractions or whatever strategy works for you. It is important to regulate yourself before you continue. When you are in hyper- or hypoarousal your brain isn’t functioning properly (learn more)
Step 4:
Decide what to do.
- Maybe you do nothing, the situation is over, it was out of your control and nobody elses fault. You can just move on.
- Maybe you can take action to actively remove the trigger from your life by avoiding it. That could mean deciding not to watch certain TV shows anymore, avoiding certain places or people, pressing the mute/block/unfollow button on social media. Avoidance always costs you freedom but it is often the best way to deal with things until we can work through them in therapy. Don’t avoid working through them in therapy!
- Maybe the situation is out of your control but it is in someone elses control to change something for you. It needs some practice to communicate about triggers.
If you are talking to a friend:
Your friends have a personal interest in protecting you. They are probably more than willing to change things, if they hear that they are triggering you. Share with them what happened, how it feels when this memory gets triggered and ask them, if they could imagine changing something to make it easier for you. They usually look for ways to help you, even if those won’t look exactly like the idea you had in mind.
If you are talking to strangers, online or in real life:
You need to make very sure to OWN your experience and your responsibility for your own mental health. You cannot walk up to a stranger and tell them that they need to change things for you. You cannot expect them to regulate you. It is ultimately your own struggle to regulate yourself. And that is what you can communicate. “In the face of this trigger I struggle to regulate myself.“ Speak in I-messages and make it a point to tell people what YOU will do, not what they are supposed to do. You cannot expect people to post trigger warnings for you. You cannot take their freedom of speech because you are struggling. But you can tell them about consequences of their actions, e.g. that you will mute them to help you stay regulated.
If you are talking to a fellow survivor:
A lot of survivors decide to mark difficult topics with a trigger warning. But some are not even aware that what they are sharing is triggering. Usually it’s also directly related to trauma and abuse, so the triggering potential is huge.
For some survivors, especially when they are just starting their journey into healing, it is incredibly important to be allowed to speak up and share their pain. It seems like they are exploding with the things they have never been allowed to say. And they say a lot of things that naturally trigger other survivors.
If you try to communicate about this act-of-liberation-from-being-silenced and tell someone that it is triggering and that they shouldn’t do it, you end up in a similar position like their abuser: you try to silence them, again.
As a result they might get triggered, thrown back into their old experience of not being allowed to share their trauma, thrown back into the helplessness, powerlessness and silence. The feelings can get overwhelming and might even be paired with shame and the sense of not being allowed to be free, to live, to breathe and be themselves, feelings like the trauma will never stop. Just the simple comment that they are triggering others can get them there. And they will probably try to break free even harder and scream things out even louder, confusing you with their perpetrator, telling you that you can’t control them.
But because you are a survivor yourself you might suddenly feel overwhelmed. It took you a lot of self-control to express yourself after being triggered and to set a boundary the best way you could, but it is not getting respected. The opposite is true, you are getting attacked because you spoke up. You yourself might now fall into the feelings from trauma time, your needs ignored, boundaries crossed, being silenced again, helplessness, powerlessness and someone who is forcing painful experiences on you…
There is a greater risk to enter this cycle when it is early in our healing journey or when we have younger parts who carry the trauma and who are not yet oriented in time and space. Trauma „veterans“ have often learned to stay out of it.
If we somehow end up in this dynamic between survivors, we will stress each other out. I have personally experienced this cycle going on until both parties entered a suicidal crisis.
If you are a survivor talking to survivors, I want you to be aware of the possibility of the cycle of being triggered because someone else is triggered because you were triggered….
Personally (and after years of trying to find my way through this maze) I avoid telling other survivors when I am triggered. I go through the steps I listed above and then I shut up. If consequences are needed I make extra sure to point out that it is because of my own struggle to regulate myself. I don’t feel silenced because this is my choice. I choose it because I understand the need to speak freely and the devastating dynamic I could start.
I only add trigger warnings when I am actually sharing about abuse or self-harm. I don’t feel a responsibility to protect others from my expressions of thoughts and emotions or personality. I believe that it is not helping people to keep them in a bubble that doesn’t call things by its name (like “ab*se”). The world is no bubble and we all need to build up some tolerance for uncomfortable situations.
Leave a Reply