Triggers, Trauma, and Trying Our Best

We have triggers if we are human. Learn to use them to your advantage.

Far from being a privilege and bratty disposition of the snowflake libs, or a condition that only terrifies rich CEO’s about to experience tax hikes, triggers happen to everyone.

Most of us do not live in either of these two extremes, but all of us have triggers.

The term began with war veterans. When PTSD finally became understood as a normal reaction to insane and unreasonable, violent trauma, we began to say a battle vet was “triggered.”

Yet, a traumatic war-reenactment debilitation of the mind is possibly the rarest kind of triggering. As a term, it is widespread only because it provides a useful metaphor: anything that sounds like gunfire and feels like helplessness would remind a battle-scarred soldier of life and death trauma that churn in the mind, creating vulnerability.

The individual will experience some form of flight, fight, or freeze mechanism. Most of that momentary visitation to flight, fight, or freeze, happens internally, in the mind. It doesn’t always surface in awareness. It doesn’t usually last but a fraction of a second. That’s enough time.

That said, it also very much affects our bodies and overall health.

Where do your triggers come from?

The terminology may have originated in those subjects we derisively call psycho-vets, but that is entirely misleading. We do not live, generally, in live-action combat, but in daily stress.

The triggers you will feel this week are not about life and death, but very much about the quality of your life and how you cope with everyday destabilization.

We are unsettled by our triggers, and that is key to identifying them.

We have triggers because as small children we did not have sufficient tools to fight, or argue, our way out of discomfort, neglect, or even pain. If we were teased, or bullied, for traits beyond our control such as gender, race, income, religion, or language, we have built up coping mechanisms.

We learned to survive our peers and our place precisely because our minds created maps as to where the land-mines are. These memory bombs go off according to what our senses tell us.

A trigger is when one of the self-protective memories is jarred.

For example, if you were consistently rejected as a playmate by others, one of your strong triggers will be any sense of rejection.

Your mind, in trying to be helpful, will turn a sometimes imperceptible “rejection” from someone into an internally identified trigger. You may be — but usually are not — conscious of its nagging destabilization.

We very often feel “rejected” without fully comprehending why that feeling is there. This can compound the feeling when we see others ignore the insensitivity, or slight. We begin to think: “Maybe no one likes me.”

Then we unconsciously seek confirmation clues. These can be our race, gender, faith, or whatever. That we really do live in unequal cultures reinforces our strongest triggers.

To identify triggers and cope with the reality of them you must pay attention to your body and what discomforts, unsettles, or confounds you.

Try to learn what triggers are most common in your life.

Maybe it’s rejection, maybe it’s inadequacy, maybe it’s feeling ignored. Maybe it’s a feeling of being humiliated, or victimized. If there was neglect, poverty, rage, or any other elements of your early environment (We all have varying degrees of each) try to link your body and mind “unease” with each subsequent trigger.

When we check in with our body and thoughts, we can usually hone in on a trigger we need to address.

Having identified our triggers, we become much more capable of employing our fears and vulnerabilities into knowing, strength, coping, and resilience.

Look within and beyond

In Ecopsychology, we move far beyond the five basic senses, to note that there are triggers of internal sensing: foreboding, urgency, mental tension, feeling disoriented, and so on.

Do not try to link every trigger you have to one of your five senses because that leaves out the internal cues of our entire body within the entire environment in which we live.

Certainly, your basic memory of scent is a trigger, as is vision and hearing, say — a trigger pulled by seeing an unsettling display of anger, hatred, or cruelty in the news.

However, there are also internal cues you can learn to identify and link to knowing yourself and your triggers.

Think for example of the internal sense you learned about affection and/or sex, between your care-givers. We each have an internal sense of fairness and reciprocity with which we evolved. But, you may have had a sense that one partner felt more rejected, or alienated, than the other. This may not always be brought to mind by an external stimulus (from your five basic senses) but due to an inner intuition that you began to formulate, even as child.

Another example today is that many people feel a sense of loss as climate crisis and loss of biodiversity increases. Certainly, this assaults our basic senses, but it goes much deeper than that.

For hope, examine things like Dr. Jane Goodall’s hopeful vision about personal power from Earth Day 2021, or look toward the indescribable feelings you can tap into when spending time connected to nature.

To deal with a sense of helplessness, the best treatment is helping another, be it lending a shoulder, marching for justice, or planting a tree.

Souls to the poles

We can be unsettled by a mere comment that is thoughtless.

We live in the age of outrage machines. Our attention has become a commodity that keeps people in a cycle of constant triggering and response. It’s not a healthy place to make peace in the community — think race and gender — for instance. It is also not a good format to create harmony in the biosphere — think climate injustice, unfair poverty, classism, etc.

Domination of any by a privileged “other” is triggering.

Polarization, in fact, is another trigger in and of itself. Belonging, is first and foremost, one of our most basic and often unrealized “senses” beyond the basic five.

That is, without a sense of belonging to the in-group, we are unsettled, hurt, helpless, and often, outraged.

When you feel yourself being polarized, feeling like your oppressors’ dwell on an opposite pole than the “good people.” you have been triggered by the outrage machine and have to examine it.

We all have emotional reactions to words that remind us of two things:

1. People are REALLY misinformed.

2. People are very open to being misinformed to support their sense of self

That said, I have begun to wonder lately why we allow ourselves to be triggered so severely when most of us already know that this is the reality of the situation.

These days, we are pulled in opposite directions by our media and social bubbles. Please know you are Earthling first. You do belong.

We also know, from basic psychology, that our defensive feelings win no arguments, and most of all, being in any way impolite or disagreeable will shut down any possibility of helping someone to see that we may have a valid point to make.

If I were to say something glaringly racist: “Black people should be grateful we gave them equal rights.” Or something horribly sexist: “Feminists hate men, and men should stop their evil cancer.” You, (I should hope) would react in a visceral discomfort in your gut that screams:

“That is wrong on so many levels!”

If you are human, you are automatically emotionally involved (triggered!) whether you agree or disagree.

And, yet, although we already know the whole point of media is to wring reaction by outrage and to get more clicks to engage readers, we fall for it every time.

Getting our souls to the actual polls — to have a voice — is far more helpful than choosing opposite poles of humanity. Another race of humanity, after all, does not exist.

The best way to cope with our lives lived in a perpetual outrage machine, then, is to find our triggers, give them whatever legitimate weight they deserve (there’s always some) and then work harder to find our inner essence of beautiful child deserving of our self-love, attention, and ability to connect to others.

Give your inner, traumatized child a hug. Then move on to find the other traumatized children, (disguised as adults), walking around out there that also need it. Find common triggers — often simple validation through listening — and work toward mutual healing.

We all want to be “good” people. We all want to belong, and live on the right side of history. Finding and knowing our triggers, is one way to know ourselves.