Do we all have triggers?
Virtually all of us, unless we’ve done a lot of work on ourselves. No matter how loving and responsive our parents were, most of us drew some conclusions from our childhood experiences that don’t serve us. And there were bound to be times when you experienced something that was overwhelming for you. Because it was so overwhelming, your brain wasn’t able to process that experience in the way that we usually process experiences — by incorporating the memory into a neural network that stores related memories. Usually when we process memories — which happens during sleep — the emotions associated with the memory are stripped away.
That’s why once we sleep on something for a few nights, it isn’t usually so upsetting.
But any time the memory was so upsetting that your brain wasn’t able to process that memory as usual, the memory was stored unprocessed — with all the emotions you felt at the time. That’s why when you experience something similar to that event — maybe not in actual content, but in the way it makes you feel — you are suddenly swamped with body sensations that are an over-reaction. Those feelings aren’t actually from the present experience. They are stored with that earlier unprocessed memory, which is getting triggered by the current experience.
Your psyche does this for a reason. If you had a bad experience with a snake in childhood, you’re more likely to stay alive later in life if you remember that experience with all the fear you felt initially. So there may have been a time when some mild form of PTSD was beneficial to survival.
But this doesn’t work so well if the experience was being humiliated by a teacher, which might make you quake when you have to speak up at a staff meeting. And it really gets in your way if the original experience was being frightened of, yelled at, or hit by a parent.
If those memories were stored unprocessed, then when your child yells at you or hits you, it triggers all those feelings of fear and feeling victimised that you felt as a child.
You can’t think clearly. You freeze, or you lash out, either verbally or physically.
So most of us have some unprocessed emotions from childhood, which is another way of saying we’re lugging these unprocessed feelings and memories around in our emotional backpacks. This unconscious “baggage” will inevitably get triggered as we go through life. It sends us right into our unconscious, which means we do and say things that we would never do if we were fully conscious and aware. And because these are childhood experiences, our children have an uncanny ability to trigger us.
Can we heal our triggers? YES!
Find the original article here.
Dr. Laura Markham is the founder of AhaParenting.com and author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings and her latest book, the Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids Workbook.
