Do Mental & Emotional ‘Triggers’ Keep Us Safe?
Learn the truth about a damaged psyche and the surprisingly simple road to sanity.
One of the very first lessons I learned when starting my healing journey in traditional talk-therapy was the concept of a Trigger—a smell, sound, or sight that stimulates a traumatic and painful memory, accompanied by the potential for physical discomfort or panic. When triggered, the body begins responding as if it were back in the very situation that caused the trauma to begin with by producing hormones and recalling memories related to stress, adrenaline, danger, panic, and defense. Because of this response, individuals who are triggered often lost “conscious control” of their actions and may act out verbally or physically.
The truth is, it is downright impossible to prevent a trigger from ever being disturbed, we cannot bend the ways of the world to accommodate each of our most vulnerable sensitivities.
What we can do is remove the triggers altogether.
And before you call my bluff, as a former defender of far too many triggers that originated from a decade of familial dysfunction, abusive relationships, sexual assault and so much in between, believe me when I say—there is a better solution than building a mountain of boundaries around your scars, and it’s actually quite simple.
Here is the premise…
Imagine your trigger is a tiny splinter that has gotten stuck in your foot. Facing this predicament, you have two choices: 1) recognize that because it is so painful when anything touches the splinter that you must learn to go through life without the use of your splintered foot, or 2) recognize that because it is so painful when anything touches it, you need to take the splinter out.
Sure, the process of poking and prodding at the splinter, then pushing it back up through the skin and sliding it out is going to be uncomfortable. But if you choose to leave it in, you will spend all of your energy for the rest of your life making absolutely sure that nothing ever touches the splinter. You will fail, and it will hurt, so you’ll build even more defenses around the wound until the only thing you’ll ever spend energy on for the rest of your days is keeping the splinter from ever being touched.
I’m fairly certain that most of us would opt to remove the splinter and endure a few moments of discomfort rather than waste our lives away protecting it. But when it comes to our mental and emotional wounds, we seem to think that it’s easier to manipulate everyone and everything around us, rather than the one and only thing we have any true control over—ourselves.
If you attempt to arrange people, places, and things so that they don’t disturb you, it will begin to feel like life is against you. You’ll feel that life is a struggle and that every day is heavy because you have to control and fight with everything.
The alternative is to decide not to fight with life. You realize and accept that life is not under your control…
Here is what you can control…
There is only one thing, and it’s not your thoughts, emotions, healing process, or even a rigid set of boundaries. It is your awareness, your focus. The ability to direct your energy.
To best understand the power of focused awareness, take a moment to imagine a stream of random objects floating through your mind: a cat, a horse, a word, a color, an apple. Now pick one object to stand out above the rest, give it your attention. Immediately, you become so focused on the one object that everything else falls away and you’re left imagining a single, random item. Immersed in the thought, you find yourself trying to derive meaning from the item—why did you pick it, what’s special about it, how do you feel towards it, what does it say about who are?
This is called clinging. When you focus your energy on certain thought patterns or emotions and allow them to stay in place long enough, they become the building blocks of your self image. If you cling to the depressing parts of life, you begin to wholeheartedly believe that you are simply a low-energy, gloomy person. You’re not the cheery type, you don’t like house music, and festive social gatherings are your greatest nemesis. Because you clung to the depression and gave it all of your awareness, you built yourself around it.
Whether these building blocks are a pattern of emotions, thoughts, or system of beliefs, we allow our life experiences and judgement of life itself to help us develop and present who we believe we are. We pull these things around us in an attempt to define ourselves, hoping to establish a sense of internal stability. As long as we behave according to who we believe we are, and everyone around us does the same, nothing can fall apart. We are in control, we are safe.
We do the very same thing with traumatic experiences. The bitter truth is, we create our own triggers and blame the mystical complexity of the psyche when we refuse to let go of our traumas.
How long have you been hiding in there struggling to keep it all together? Any time anything goes wrong in the protective model you built about yourself, you defend and rationalize in order to get it back together. Your mind does not stop struggling until you’ve processed the event or somehow made it go away. People feel their very existence is at stake, and they will fight and argue until they get control back.
The problem is, there is no way out that way. There is no peace and there is no winning that struggle. You were told to not build your house upon sand… [then] you built your house in empty space. If you continue to cling to what you built, you will have to continually and perpetually defend yourself.
Now, swallow that pill so we can talk about the solution.
Here is the surprisingly simple road to sanity…
Let it go.
No, seriously. Let it all go. The events that happen in the moment belong to the moment. They do not belong to you. They have nothing to do with you. You must stop defining yourself in relationship to them and just let them come and go.
Don’t cling, don’t claim. Don’t analyze or rationalize, don’t try to fit every happenstance into your mental concept of what should and shouldn’t be. Accept that whatever is, simply is. Let your feelings, reactions, opinions, and disturbances float by like clouds. You cannot control them, but you don’t have to claim them as your own.
Think about it like the native parable of the two wolves fighting for control; there is the wolf of darkness and the wolf of light—the one that wins is the one that you feed the most. But here’s an idea, don’t feed either. Let them snarl and howl, let them lunge and attack, let them cry. Because just like any other stray dog, if you feed them they’ll never leave you alone. So don’t feed them, just watch.
If your mind becomes hyperactive, just watch it. If your heart starts to race and your temper is flaring, let it go through what it must. But remember that the very moment you give the disturbance your attention or attempt to alter the outside world to comfort the disturbance, you are building a reality that feeds a disturbed mind. As terrifying as it will feel to release this illusion of control, the moment that you successfully watch as your thoughts and emotions cycle through a disturbance and quickly fade away without needing so much as a second thought, you will see the beauty of centered awareness.
The entire reason you began building this self-concept was to avoid pain. If you let it fall apart, you’re going to feel the pain that you were avoiding when you built it. But just like removing a splinter, enduring the discomfort of releasing the wound is so much easier than living a life imprisoned by it.
This article was inspired by the practices and lessons learned from the book Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, by Michael A. Singer. As this is but one of many epiphanies I found in these pages, I encourage anyone who wants to continue down this road of conscious awareness to follow me on Medium, Twitter, & Instagram. And of course, buy the book! I will continue to break down my personal epiphanies in easy-to-digest articles such as this, so stay tuned and we’ll all heal together.
