Why Do I Get So Easily Triggered?
I recently saw this old-timey phone in a museum.
What does it make you think of?
As soon as I saw it I instantly thought of visiting cousins at their home in Louisiana as a child. I thought of Thanksgiving. I thought of eating about a thousand homemade yeast rolls until I felt positively sick. I thought of this same phone on the wall in their kitchen, serving as the backdrop to all of these memories.
That seems so random, right?
But this particular phone is wired into one of my memory networks based on my unique experiences.
What did it make you think of? Probably nothing even close to what it brought up in my own mind, right? Maybe it made you think of something entirely different if you've had your own experience with this type of phone. Or maybe it made you think of nothing at all if you've never used a phone like this.
The things we see, hear, and experience day to day affect us based on our associations with them
People often come to me baffled by the things that trigger them. They have questions like... Why do I have so much anxiety during (insert any number of situations)? Why do I react with such strong emotion when certain things happen that intellectually don't seem like that big of a deal? Why do I feel so much tension or nervousness in my body at the sight/sound/smell of certain things? Why do I sometimes feel like I'm in fight, flight, or freeze in the course of normal day to day life?
The simple explanation is that our experiences get wired into our memory networks, and then become filters for each new piece of information we take in.
I haven't seen this phone in probably 25 years, but within half a second of seeing it in a totally different place at a totally different time, this memory was instantly at the surface of my mind, along with a bundle of connected images, thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. See how that works?
Sometimes when this happens it can feel completely overwhelming, and kind of crazy making. Here's why...
Let's say we add to this process that there exists a trauma memory that's incomplete or vague, or even one that's been disassociated... And then let's add on top of that there's other things connected to that memory, like intense emotions, frightening sensory experiences, uncomfortable body sensations, high anxiety or panic, or the feeling of entering a fight or flight state... It seems a little easier to understand how very strong triggers can arise from seemingly harmless situations and very quickly cause a sense of disturbance before there's even time to think.
Strong triggers can arise from seemingly harmless situations and very quickly cause a sense of disturbance before there's even time to think about what happened
The good news is that memory networks can be rewired, and the trauma that's stuck in them can be healed. Our brains innately know how to complete this process, but for especially disturbing memories or very overwhelming experiences this innate process can get interrupted, keeping trauma and triggers feeling very alive in the present even when the event happened in the past.
