What triggers me?
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- I felt excluded
- I felt powerless
- I felt unheard
- I felt scolded
- I felt judged
- I felt blamed
- I felt disrespected
- I felt a lack of affection
- I felt uncared for
- I felt lonely
- I felt ignored
- I felt like I couldn’t be honest
- I felt like the bad guy
- I felt forgotten
- I felt unsafe
- I felt unloved
- I felt that was unfair
- I felt frustrated
- I felt disconnected
- I felt trapped
- I felt a lack of passion
- I felt like I couldn’t speak up
- I felt manipulated
- I felt controlled
Here are 24 reasons I can get triggered. Note that out of the 24 triggers, I was triggered by 11 of them around a family related situation late last week.
So what’s a trigger and was there any way that I could have prepared myself to not be triggered last week or any other time I am triggered?
Simply put, a trigger can cause someone to feel upset or frightened because they are reminded of a negative event that happened in the past. The stimulus doesn’t have to be frightening or traumatic, it may only be indirectly or superficially resonant of an earlier traumatic incident. The thing about triggers is that their subtlety makes them difficult to anticipate and ‘prepare for’.
Hence my feelings of being excluded, unheard, judged, uncared-for, lonely, ignored, forgotten, unsafe, unloved, disconnected and controlled. All ugly feelings.
These triggers are only about how I get my feelings triggered. I’m not even going into certain smells, sights, dates, memorials, people, places, things, colors, times of the day, times of the year, sounds, sensations on the body or even taste that can also trigger us.
Even understanding childhood origins as well as being re-triggered acutely two years ago did little to ‘prepare’ me from being blindsided. I felt like Will Clark getting blindsided by Ozzie Smith back in July 1988.
I have no panacea for my triggers. I work hard at keeping boundaries and telling the truth. Life just throws me a curve ball at times. When this happens, as I have for the past week, I have to feel the feelings, talk about them, process them, write about them, and basically know this too shall pass.
Yes! Reading you is like reading me on my own triggers. Reminds me a lot of what I had to do 2017 in my own processing of the Florida experience.