But what is trauma?
Trauma can be summed up as being the experience of a distressing event or series of events that have caused us harm. Trauma impacts our sense of safety, sense of self, our ability to feel emotions and our ability to connect relationally with others. Trauma cannot be defined by the event itself, but by the impact it has on each individual.
What are triggers?
A trauma trigger is when we experience something through our senses (smell, taste, touch, sight, sound), that reminds our brain of that first traumatic experience. Despite it belonging in our past, our bodies experience our trauma as if it were in the present and our brains react accordingly.
It could be that a particular smell of perfume, or the sound of someone’s voice takes your mind back to something that you notice impacts your body and thoughts. You may, for example, start feeling panicky or may notice yourself ‘phasing out’ and disconnecting from the world around you.
Triggers can also be associated with happy experiences. The smell of a friend’s cooking may trigger you back to happy memories of your own childhood home, in this scenario you are living in the present but transported back the memory and feelings associated.
Triggers can vary greatly in severity. You may go through life having not experienced a trigger, only to find it becomes a regular occurrence depending on what you are processing at the time. On the other hand, triggers may be a daily occurrence for you, but may become less and less over time as you start to practice compassion with yourself in dealing with them.
For example, someone can happily attend a prayer group for years of their life and then a memory of a negative experience, relating to prayer, may come into their awareness (their thoughts, memories or conversations). Suddenly the person feels anxious and sweaty at the idea of going to the prayer group, of being around others associated with the group, experiencing being ‘triggered’ back into an experience previously not in their thoughts or memories. This may develop as a total inability to attend or be near that group until the individual has been able to establish a sense of safety, helping their brain calm, get back online and rationalise the existence of the present rather than the past.
What are flashbacks?
Triggers can sometimes lead to flashbacks, where someone is not only reminded of a memory linked to the trauma and the sensations that come with it, but they experience it again in their own reality.
A flashback is experienced as if it were time-travel, where the brain re-enacts a traumatic experience or an individual is transported in their mind back to a particular traumatic place. An individual’s thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations all respond as it were taking place now in the present moment, making it extremely difficult to stay in contact with reality.
Ways to help
Whilst triggers and flashbacks can feel debilitating, particularly when experienced frequently, it is absolutely possible to work with your triggers to lessen the impact they have on you. This is particularly true in relation to our senses. Just as they are the avenue by which we get triggered, they can also be our way out and of regulating* ourselves.
Helpful tools- take directly from Let’s Talk About Triggers & Flashbacks
*Regulating is basically the word used to describe your nervous system’s way of calming down. When you are regulated, your breathing becomes more natural and normal, your heart rate stabilizes, you feel more in control and able to think. Essentially, when dysregulated, your back brain takes control, it’s fighting for your survival so all your body’s energy is going into that. Once regulated, your front brain becomes reactivated, it starts to take the reigns and help you start thinking clearly and rationally again enabling problem-solving, staying present in the moment and connecting with people.