Trigger Unhappy
A Way to Sort Through the Confusion of Distress
In my last post I asked the question: “When trouble strikes, do you strike back, or do you wilt?” A natural first response to distress is to reject and refuse to deal with the trouble. I highlighted two common ways people tell their disrupters, “This can’t be happening!” or “I can’t handle you! Just go away!” Some people get engulfed in their feelings and can’t see their way out of the pit they’re in. I called this way attachment because there is no space between them and the disrupter, and they are too attached to the disrupter’s power. Others mobilize coping strategies to avoid falling into a pit. They put off experiencing the full impact of what’s happening. I called this detachment because there is a sizable space between them and the disrupter. They are detached from the disrupter’s power. Both responses are efforts to condemn or reject disrupters. The point of the last post was to examine your stress response (link below). This post uncovers another layer, which muddles the movement toward acceptance and growth.
Disrupters often unearth subterranean and unresolved issues from the past. Just when you think you are aware of your distress response, these dormant forces create further chaos and confusion. A life disrupter is like a tornado, picking up everything in its path and scattering large and small debris in wild disarray. Destruction dots the landscape. Disrupters function in a similar way: they remove the things you rely on for security. Their scatter-force not only takes objects on the ground but also just below the surface, like a downed tree revealing its roots. Disrupters pick up debris from the past–unresolved problems, pain, and trauma–and leave you confused and in disbelief. You ask yourself, “What triggered that?”
In the case of “trigger-ability,” as my Clinical Psychologist husband, Rick, calls it, there are three universal reactions to trauma: numbing, hypersensitivity to danger, and re-experiencing symptoms. These secondary reactions complicate the process of dealing with a disrupter. That such memories have a physiological basis compounds the challenge of understanding them. As psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk advances, symptoms of PTSD “have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma.”[1] Research reveals that “reliving a strong negative emotion causes significant changes in the brain areas that receive nerve signals from the muscles, gut, and skin–areas that are crucial for regulating basic bodily functions.”[2] Some people reexperience the physical sensations of the original event. The body remembers.
People with PTSD are often unaware of this connection–as well as the connection between now and then–but they feel like their whole life is affected. They ask themselves, “Weren’t those issues distant and settled?” or “Why does it feel like my feet are tangled up in trip wire?” What is true for survivors of PTSD is also true for anyone who has experienced a life disrupter, especially in the formative years of life, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Everyone has different snares, but each person must watch out and not be surprised if old stuff comes up.
Dealing with disrupters requires understanding your losses, but a first step is to be aware of your triggers. My cancer disrupter forcibly initiated me into the cancer club, a club no one wants to join. It’s a club of insecurity and loss of control. This experience unearthed memories of other insecurity-clubs I was thrust into as a child. The connections were invisible to the mind but vivid to the heart and body. What do you do when this happens?
I developed a framework or a scaffold I call an Acceptance Scale as a tool to navigate the chaos. It applies to diverse circumstances. There are five parts to the scale starting with condemning the disrupter—the subject of these two posts—and moving toward acceptance in four phases, which I will share in future posts. There is much more in my book (link below & home page), but for now let’s look at moving beyond the condemning/rejecting phase. The first step is to identify if you are an attacher or detacher, as discussed in the previous post. The second step is to delve more deeply into traumas and triggers the tornado has unearthed.
To illustrate the fresh memory of old wounds, take my mom’s experience of people making a wide berth around her on neighborhood walks during the COVID pandemic. As a Holocaust survivor from Berlin, my mom carries the tattered load of past trauma around with her every day. She remembers Crystal Night and the yellow Star of David with Jude (Jew) sewn on her lapel by her Gentile–cultural Christian–mom. Her dad is Jewish. Hitler’s 1935 second degree law of Mischlinge (mixed-race children) declares that she belongs to the Jewish race. Her parents dote on their only child, but her Jewish father flees Germany with the rest of his family on February 22, 1938, Washington’s birthday. My mom is twelve, and she and her mother are left behind to care for their linen shop in East Berlin, an essential business, particularly during the war. He plans to send for them when he finds work, but the war breaks out. There is little opportunity for my grandma to nurture her daughter under Hitler’s edict of destruction; she can only try to protect her.
Small events trigger my mom’s memories. The well-meaning gesture of moving away from the elderly in public during the pandemic touches a raw nerve pulsing just below the surface despite eighty years of dormancy. She remembers the yellow Star of David with Jude sewn on her lapel. My mom is an impressionable girl–barely a teenager–in the streets of Berlin. Pedestrians do far more than provide a wide berth; they taunt, jeer, and threaten her very existence with their furtive stares of seething anger. The star gives them license to release their vitriol on an innocent child.
My mom’s debris is worse than mine and probably yours, but the same question prevails: What is being uprooted just below the surface? Understanding the connections between now and then is important. Why? You disentangle the deep roots from today’s circumstances and deal with them separately. By reminding yourself that today is not the same as yesterday, you diminish the power of the past trauma, which in turn helps you pay attention to what’s needed in the moment.
What are your triggers? Working through your debris is a difficult process, but the rewards are worthwhile. Being aware of why you react the way you do sets you on the scary, unpredictable but ultimately life-giving path of acceptance and growth.
https://lifeafterwhy.com/blog/improve-your-lousy-stress-response
https://www.amazon.com/author/lawauthpg
[1] Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score, 11.
[2] Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score, 97.