How Understanding Memory is the Key to Helping Your Triggers
Taking a look at how our brains respond to trauma
In my early twenties, I didn’t know that what I was experiencing were triggers. I often found myself in emotional flashbacks or in situations where my body responded by fawning or ready to flee. Things such as a clipped tone could send my anxiety spiking through the roof.
These things were connected to my childhood, but the how often evaded me. I knew my father used angry tones, often going into verbally abusive cycles, but at the time I couldn’t see how my mother fit into my triggers. The feeling of not being worth anything, not being enough, always having to change to please others would haunt me and be another trigger, although I couldn’t name it.
And then there were moments that would completely trigger me, as in black out but still functioning where I would be swamped with heavy emotions but not understand their connections to any experience of memory I had.
As I went to therapy, I remember being able to tell the therapist very vivid moments I had in my childhood, but for the most part regarding the abuse, it was more of a feeling rather than one specific memory after the next. For prolonged abuse, this is considered normal because we are in survival mode and believing that it’s…
