6 July 2019 – Triggers

What triggers me?

1. 1. I felt excluded
   2. I felt powerless
   3. I felt unheard
   4. I felt scolded
   5. I felt judged
   6. I felt blamed
   7. I felt disrespected
   8. I felt a lack of affection
   9. I felt uncared for
   10. I felt lonely
   11. I felt ignored
   12. I felt like I couldn’t be honest
   13. I felt like the bad guy
   14. I felt forgotten
   15. I felt unsafe
   16. I felt unloved
   17. I felt that was unfair
   18. I felt frustrated
   19. I felt disconnected
   20. I felt trapped
   21. I felt a lack of passion
   22. I felt like I couldn’t speak up
   23. I felt manipulated
   24. 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.