How To Explain Trauma Triggers

***TRIGGER WARNING***

This article discusses trauma, including sexual references that may not be appropriate for all.

How do you explain trauma triggers to someone who hasn't been traumatized? 

What do they feel like? 

When do they happen?

In this article, I will explore triggers. Most trauma survivors will say they hate triggers because of how they make us feel when we flash back into a traumatic memory.

Can triggers be good for us in our healing journeys?

Have you ever thought of the possibility that triggers can be both good and bad?

My name is Lizzy, and I am a survivor of unimaginable trauma. I've lived through a childhood of sexual torture, and witnessed several murders. 

Yet here I am, I survived, and I got a second chance in life. I feel that the world today is full of ignorance about true suffering due to trauma.

I've lived with trauma triggers all my life, and I want to share my experiences with you because triggers happen - all the time.

Trauma triggers are memories that resurface often suddenly and without reason. They are often horrifying and feel real like your very own three dimensional movie starring your worst moment in your life. 

Trauma triggers are highly sensual, leaning heavily on complex emotions that are terrifying. 

Trauma triggers feel real when they happen, and it can take a while to "return" to what you were doing.

Trauma triggers can happen anywhere at anytime. A sound, a word, music, a feeling, an argument, a place or even a smell can cause an horrific trauma trigger for a survivor.

People turn a blind eye to trauma when they have the means to help. Most people have never experienced being profoundly hungry, neglected, and deeply hurt, physically and sexually. 

Most people do not have any idea of what it is like growing up in an abusive home. 

How could they possibly know what it is like, if we (trauma survivors) don't speak up?

People who don't know, often get their thinking wrong, because they haven't experienced the worst life can throw at you. 

People have an expectation that a trauma survivor just need time to "get over it" or "snap out of it," and then, voila! You have been cured from a life of trauma. (Yeah, I call it bull feathers)

How I wish I could do just that!

Triggers are everywhere

Survivors of abuse and trauma see the world in a more intense way, than others who had a good childhood. It's like living a life through the lens of a magnifying glass. 

We have experienced so much hurt in our past, and because of this, when life throws a curveball, it feels like living on a knife-edge. 

Even a boring task like slicing bread with a knife, can be a trigger, and make an entire day go in a completely different direction than we expected. 

I remember a colleague had a birthday and was cutting her cake in the teacher's lounge. She was stood in the middle of the room talking to my colleagues but all I saw was that cake knife being twisted in her hand. 

I was lost in a trauma trigger in that moment. I had to leave to be physically sick in the bathroom because that knife took me back to my past where my so-called father forced me to eat a raw piece of meat at knife point. I was shaking for hours after that trigger and ended up going home sick. 

How would you explain that kind of trigger to someone? 

The answer is most often, that you can't. The trauma triggers are simply too horrific. 

Is the world ready to handle this raw truth? 

I say yes. People need to hear it so that attitudes to trauma can change.

I know, because I'm living this kind of life. For me, there are triggers everywhere, and they can happen at any time. 

I have come a long way in my healing, and I am no longer living in constant fear. I can brush off most triggers because I've had them before, and they don't affect me as much. 

But I'm still triggered - often. 

My triggers are more like painful memories that I have dealt with in therapy. They have not gone away completely, but they are not hurting me on a deeper level anymore.

I speak about my triggers to my husband because he lives with me. He needs to know what I'm living with and he is amazing. He understands my triggers.

If you live with someone who you trust and who loves you. Talk to them. Tell them how your triggers make you feel. Help them understand.

I can only speak for myself when I say that, for me, triggers have been both good and bad, but our healing journeys are unique. 

My childhood was so riddled with abuse and trauma that when I finally admitted to myself that I needed professional help, I was a mess. 

I didn't know what was up or down anymore. I was in bad shape, and I bounced from therapist to therapist.

My husband was suffering through my never-ending nightmares. Each of the therapists tried to help, but none of them really saw the big picture. 

I wasn't ready to let anyone in. 

The memories were just too horrific, too terrifying, and too encompassing. 

Some of the therapists started to focus on how to handle triggers with various techniques like grounding and breathing. They worked to some degree, but the deep hurt was still shielded by my own layers of protection. 

I was a bit like an onion, shielding my most painful memories deep inside a series of layers. I was still not ready to go "there" yet.

Painful triggers are un-processed trauma memories.

There are times when I do feel completely terrified when I'm triggered. When I get to this kind of fear, I pay attention to my breathing, grounding myself in the present until the shock, and pain subside. 

This kind of trigger feels horrifying, like being suddenly immersed in fire, or having an ice bucket thrown over you. The pain feels real, just like it was in that traumatic moment. 

Tell someone about this fear. Help them understand you.

Un-processed trauma memories have not been put into the correct part of the brain yet. They are raw emotion fragments of memory, floating around in the wrong place, like shards of glass that resurface sometimes. 

These memories will keep "bumping" you, until you have dealt with them, processed them, and your brain has recognized them for what they are. 

The brain can then process them into their rightful place. This process is not an easy thing to go through. It can take years of processing memories with professional help, but it can be done. 

I am living proof.

Have you ever been in a situation where you get so triggered that you cannot escape it no matter what you do?

This is what happened to me when everything changed. I had the mother-of-all triggers. It was all-enveloping, and consuming me. 

The trauma memory was floating in my mind like a glaring red light at an intersection. I couldn't escape it, no matter what I did - it was right there glaring at me to go back "there." 

The place I just couldn't understand was so terrifying for me that I couldn't process it either. I was stuck in a past trauma memory, and I couldn't move forward.

Even if you haven't got it figured out, try and talk to someone about it. Maybe that person can help you.

Getting professional help is a necessity.

I searched for a new therapist, and I happened to mention it to a friend. She knew someone who had been to see a good therapist.

I decided to give it a fair shake and made contact with the new therapist. This time I hit the therapist jackpot. We instantly clicked, and I laid out my history, and what I was looking for. 

From there, we agreed on a plan to move forward in my healing journey. If you haven't met the right therapist yet, then keep searching. 

Remember you are in charge of your own healing journey.

The right help is out there.

My new therapist opened my eyes to my reality, and made me recognize the hurt and pain I was living with every day. 

Through therapy, I began to see myself in a different light than I used to. I was made aware of how much I suffered during my childhood, and that the abuse was not my fault. 

Most importantly, my therapist made me see that I had to start to take care of myself. This was not easy because I had to make conscious decisions to put myself first. 

My therapist gave me "homework" like a school kid, and then every step forward was celebrated, no matter how small. 

Our healing journeys are not a race to the finish line. They're more of a hike with mountains, and valleys in the way. The journey will take as long as it needs to, but believe me, you will get there eventually.

Taking stock and recognizing the trauma that you have endured, is a huge milestone for survivors. It is also painful to do. 

My trauma was dealt with in such a way that my brain could process it, for what it was. With my therapist's help, I made sense of what had happened in my triggers, and why I was reacting the way I did. 

I was guided through the trauma slowly at my own pace, and I realized that this was my body telling me that it was time I put the demons at rest, and moved away from the past. 

A good therapist will be able to guide, and support you through this process. It is worth the time and effort to do it with a professional because they will know when to stop and when it is time to push on.

Learning to recognize and process a traumatic memory always feels out of reach at first. It's way too much to handle. 

Healing from trauma feels like the childhood riddle:

How does a mouse eat an elephant? 

The answer is: in small bites. 

If you think of it this way, suddenly the situation is a lot more positive. 

Instead of telling yourself, "I can't do this," tell yourself; "Yes, I can do this," and "I've got it."

From Darkness to Light: My Experience

My most painful trigger came out of the blue after watching the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie a few years back. I was with my friends, and we were curious about the movie everyone was talking about at the time. 

I felt weird after seeing the movie when a flash of darkness hit me, like a developing migraine. For days after, I had the same vision of darkness, where I saw more and more flashes of things I had buried deep within. 

My trauma triggers were giving me physical pain from events that happened to me decades before. I experienced them again and again.

These trauma memories were so terrifying that I wanted to run away from my own head. I didn't know what they meant, and I was in denial that I could have experienced such things as a child. 

I couldn't understand the visual of "The Red Room" from "Fifty Shades" in my own life. I saw it through the eyes of my four-year-old self, a different red room with people in it who were familiar. 

In my head, I was back in a sex warehouse full of items, the same as those in the movie: whips, handcuffs, rope, and different types of sex toys. 

The people in the room were using them on each other and on me. Those memories have haunted my unconscious mind for decades, deeply embedded in my brain.

My therapist was brilliant at guiding me through the horrific trauma memories that were raw and child-like. 

I was guided to expose my memories, and go back to the child I was, turning everything I knew and narrating the triggers into comprehensible trauma memories. 

Through therapy, I was able to understand what had happened to me from an adult point of view. I replaced the childhood trauma memories with a mature understanding of what had happened to me.

Rewriting my horrific trauma memories in this way was life-changing for me. As traumatizing as my memories were, I could now move on. 

I accepted that it was my own past, and that it was not my fault. There was nothing I could have done at the time to get away from my abusers. 

I couldn't stop the murders that I witnessed because I was a child. I was able to think about my past without falling apart. 

Nowadays, my memories are still painful, but they do not hurt me as much anymore. I have moved on because I understand them.

By looking back and rewriting the most horrific trauma memories with new narratives, I exposed the pain and hurt. I turned this huge negative piece of me, into something real. 

I was no longer scared. The nightmares subsided, and the flashbacks slowed down. I could talk about it, and it was a huge relief to do just that. I was devouring my "trauma elephant" piece by piece.

Do not be afraid to seek help with your triggers. 

It was the best thing I did. Remember, you do matter. Be kind to yourself and follow your heart.

My name is Lizzy. I'm a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

If you like reading my posts, then please follow me.

For more about me: www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

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