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What Are Your Options When You Are Feeling Triggered?

In counselling and psychotherapy, the word “triggered” refers to the intense emotional distress you may feel suddenly when you're faced with something that reminds you of a past traumatic experience. At its worst a trigger can cause you to react as if the trauma were happening again. 


There are milder forms, where you feel a sense of unease, disquiet, overwhelm, and an adrenalised state. I call it ‘feeling bejangled’, which is not medical terminology but describes the feeling well.


A trigger is any word, person, event, or experience that causes an immediate emotional reaction. It’s like being startled by a noise: The noise is the trigger; the startle is the response.

 

Our reactions to our emotional triggers are often excessive, lasting longer than what makes sense for the event. It’s as if we’re still jumping at the sound of that slammed door hours later.


When we’re triggered, our bodies engage the survival response: Fighting, fleeing, fawning, or freezing. Our hearts might race; we break into a sweat; we go cold. The sympathetic nervous system is activated to 'save us' from perceived harm.


Yet we often flee too fast, fight too hard, fawn too much, freeze too long. These reactions can start to interfere with our ability to live our lives. When a trigger leads only to a survival reaction, it’s a dead end.

 

But they can lead us to healing, too. They can point us to where we have personal work to do. When a trigger accomplishes that nudge toward self-reflection, it can be a true boon.

 

Still, triggers are tricksters. Our reactions can happen so fast that they erase the distance between stimulus and response, making us feel like they’re the same thing.

 

Triggers thrive on the illusion that we can’t trust ourselves. But once we have access to inner resources, we can learn to catch ourselves instead of reacting blindly. Then we can trust that we can handle what we feel.

 

As we become more self-assured, the arrows don’t penetrate so deeply. We develop a thick enough skin to cope with our world and its shadow side rather than hiding from them.


Your body experiences an automatic change in heart rate, breathing, pulse, brain synapses. This is not something to be avoided, nor is it healthy to try to control it.


When we react this strongly to a less significant event, though, it’s likely that the past is invading the present and hijacking our nervous system.

 

A trigger hurls us into the bodily memory of trauma before we’re ready to face it consciously. This is why we often feel such a childlike powerlessness when we’re triggered.

 

Fortunately, in the present moment, we can learn to notice and then question the intensity of trigger responses — when we’re reacting to a perceived slight as if someone is trying to undermine us, or to feedback from a coworker as a full-scale judgment of character. We can stop and say: "Yes, it is this way", and "What is going on with me?" This allows us to explore ourselves rather than blame others for our reaction. The more we become able to accept reality with an unconditional “Yes,” the less apt we are to be triggered.

 

The word “triggered” has become a popular term to describe anything that causes emotional discomfort. But for people who have experienced trauma, triggers can be terrifying, all-consuming, and can seemingly come out of nowhere.


When you encounter a trigger, memories and thoughts associated with the trauma come back without warning. You cannot stop the intrusive thoughts, and in response, you feel a turn in your emotions and begin to react.


A trigger might make you feel helpless, panicked, unsafe, and overwhelmed with emotion. You might feel the same things that you felt at the time of the trauma, as though you were reliving the event.


The mind perceives triggers as a threat and causes a reaction like fear, panic, or agitation. Think of the reaction to triggers as a defence mechanism: The memory of the traumatic event places you right back into the experience, which causes your walls to go up against the perceived threat in an attempt to protect your Self.


After encountering a trigger, it can take some time for your nervous system to recover and return to baseline. This is partly because trauma reduces your window of tolerance — the emotional zone in which you feel grounded, balanced, and calm. A smaller window of tolerance means stressors are more likely to cause greater emotional upset.


Know your triggers


Put down a boundary

Someone may be triggering you because of what they are saying. As people pleasers we don’t like to tell people to stop talking! But it is ok to be open, honest and vulnerable and to say “When you/say this it makes me feel…” Try it. It’s not accusatory: It’s authenticity, and by showing your vulnerability, you are actually showing your courage.


Reacting always makes the situation worse. It always leads to conflict and drama. Most people react to reacting by upping the ante. It’s a vicious cycle which ends in a punch up (think road rage) and war at every level: Click here for my article on 'Responding Versus Reacting Versus Creating":



Notice hyperarousal signs

When we’re triggered, cortisol and adrenaline course through us — so we might feel fragile, disorganised, and disoriented. We’re unable to self-regulate in that moment, so the first order of business is to focus on calming ourselves down.

 

To do this, have some favourite relaxation techniques at the ready such as breathing and meditation.


Breathing is the one thing that we all have in common and which is a universal panacea for anxiety, worry, fear, and feeling triggered. There are many simple breathing practices that you can do at any time. You don’t have to be a spiritual Jedi Knight to breathe. Click here for my article on 'Breathing':


Meditation is one of the most powerful tools in your toolkit to regulate your stress levels and for well-being in general. Click here for my article on meditation:



Mindfulness is meditation as you go through your day. You have opportunities throughout your day, especially when you are doing repetitive tasks such as walking upstairs, doing the washing up, and travelling to work, where you can practise mindfulness. Take deep slow breaths and focus entirely on the present moment.


Go to your safe space

For me, my safe space involves being in nature in the woods with my two dogs. It drops me into total presence. But I don't have to be there physically. I can go there by closing my eyes for a moment and imagining being transported there, where the sun is always shining, and I feel totally at peace.


Choose your Higher Self over your ego

Your ego loves a fight. It loves to prove that everyone else is wrong and can only see life through the perspective of “I, me, mine”, tipping you into feeling triggered when the Universe is not bending to your will, which it never does for anyone.


Attempting to control the Universe is futile and sets you up for a fall. Letting go and trusting the process are essential tools in your daily spiritual practice.


Stop listening to the news

24-hour news feeds are poison. The news media focuses almost exclusively on negative, catastrophising, anxiety-provoking stories which are largely irrelevant to you and make you addicted to negativity and stress. I find it incredible how many of my coachees state that what is happening in the world is their main source of triggering. Most of it has nothing to do with you and will never affect your life. Until the mainstream press take responsibility for how unwell they are making people and completely change their practise, I would advise minimising your exposure to the click-bait news. You literally don't need it. You will see your life change for the better almost immediately.


If it's hysterical it's historical

Realise deeply that most of the things that make you feel triggered are simply reminders of things there were two overwhelming as a child to deal with. Most of those things (if not all) had nothing to do with you. All of your trauma had nothing to do with you. If you are feeling triggered it is simply something in your current environment reminding you of how you felt during childhood. These relate to mortal fears and survival responses which are no longer appropriate or real.


It's as if you had to get through your childhood by creating a life raft to cross a turbulent set of rapids: You are still carrying that raft, but you no longer need to. This is the basis of the book 'The Invisible Lion' by Benjamin Fry, which is in my 'Suggested Reading' list. There is no lion.


The bottom line of the book by Susan Jeffers 'Feel the Fear And Do It Anyway' Is that you can handle it. This is also the basis of our entire spiritual practice to life. When something happens that you don't like, your ego mind goes into overdrive to try to control everything, in order to bend the Universe to your will. This never works. You are the observer and the witness. You are the actor, not the reactor. If you realise this, this will help you with the practice of surrender, And will be the entire foundation for your sense of peace and joy.

Remind your Self that this is a common reaction to a traumatic event, and you can get through it.

 

Seek the source

Identifying the source of a trigger reaction — a specific event or trauma — is central to freeing ourselves from it. Triggers based on past trauma show us where the past invades the present. But they also allow us to look directly into the hidden world of who we are. When I accurately locate where a trigger comes from in myself, for instance, I notice that I can usually reduce its wallop substantially.


Be aware of projection

Trigger reactions are about projection. For example, if one of your parents was angrily violent toward you, you might be triggered by anger in others today. This is because your body fears a repetition of that original sequence, even though anger and violence aren’t inevitably linked.

 

Or maybe your first love left you for someone else, and now you’re unsure of your attractiveness in every new relationship. We predict outcomes based on past experience.

While it’s always possible that anger will lead to violence, or your new love interest will fall for someone else, that would be a coincidence, not a given.


Know that you’re not alone

We become easy victims of our triggers when we believe that everyone else is able to control theirs. Triggers lose a lot of power when we realise people we trust and admire are affected in the same way we are.


Practice acceptance

As upsetting and challenging as triggers can be, it can help to remember that they are one of the body’s ways of pointing us toward our own healing and wholeness. And every one of us has them. Similar triggers happen to all of us; they are simply part of life.

 

A practice of accepting what we cannot change — knowing that people will say or do things that set us off, for instance — is a way to be kind to ourselves. We don’t have to accept abuse, but we can learn to take in stride that triggering events will happen.


Our attitude of “Yes” toward that fact goes a long way toward reducing the power that triggers have over us and regaining our ability to be consciously and calmly ourselves.

Focus on what is happening in the here and now: Be present.


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have a number of other higher qualifications in science and surgery. I have published over 50 peer reviewed PubMed cited scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.




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