Triggers

Often, our triggers are experiences, situations, or stressors that unconsciously remind us of past traumas or emotional upsets. They “re-trigger” traumas in the form of overwhelming feelings of sadness, anxiety, or panic.

For many people triggers can be different things, it’s not always going over an event that hurt you, for me it’s …

• Tastes
• Smells
• Conversations
• Sounds
• Actions
• Seeing/hearing specific events

It can be challenging to identify what exactly our triggers are, but this process of getting to know and understand them can help us heal, and learn how to cope better in response.

I’m easily triggered, I suffer with very high anxiety and am constantly on edge. For example,

Im in the kitchen making food with my back to the door, a normal day to day thing right? Someone walks in to go in the fridge or just check on me, I turn around and almost have a heart attack jumping out of my skin. This triggers me because I can’t trust when or how someone might hurt me, it’s very hard to build relationships with people because I aslo can’t trust that they won’t be another person to hurt me.

I’m at my grandma’s funeral and as a 17 year old kid experiencing her second funeral I was heartbroken. I cried all day, and this was the worse possible time for me to be triggered. You know when your tears sometimes catch your lip and you taste it in your mouth? This caused me to flashback mental images of my rape which had only happened 4 months before. This flashback was so strong I could feel the pressure on my body again, I ran out of the funeral and angered so many of my family members. “Making it all about yourself” “attention seeking” but i couldn’t control it, I barely even know what was going on.

So today me and my friend were having a conversation about selling drugs, (I’m clean, he’s clean, it was just a conversation about our past) he raised the fact he used to sell to prisons. Harmless conversation. I immediately thought of my attacker, I thought about which prison he might be in, if he’s selling/doing drugs, even if the drugs could kill him. Even though it didn’t cause a flashback or massive distress this is still a trigger, this still hurt and reminded me of what happened, even though its been almost 3 years.

Everyone know the marvel tv show, Daredevil? That tv show was on the whole time I was trapped. Now I can’t even watch my favorite movie franchise.

I have quite 2 jobs because of how certain builds/looks of men trigger me. I can’t be around ‘bigger’ men, or men that wear those old cowboy style hats, or men with colored lower arm tattoos, or older looking men like my attacker. I had a breakdown in work because I swore he was there. I became completely delusional and believed the court and CID lied to me and he was actually out and walking around, when in actual fact it was just a tall fat guy standing at the bottom of the isle. I’ve also had flashbacks because I was selling phones and a guy pulled up his sleeves casually and he had a tattoo similar to my attackers. I ended up throwing up all over the customer and being completely embarrassed, not even being able to face my co-workers the next day.

Anyone suffering with BPD or PTSD had at least one trigger, what’s yours? How do you cope?