Show Notes:
Today we are getting trigger happy and we’re kicking off a new series for the month of February all about triggering.
What exactly is triggering? At the most foundational level, triggering is an emotional, psychological, and/or physiological reaction to stimuli that is outside of our control. Triggering usually feels unexpected, automatic, and like it takes over. It can feel unconscious, and difficult to consciously override and regain control of ourselves. It can be a feeling, like sadness or fear; it can be psychological, like flashbacks or intrusive thoughts; it can be physiological, like racing heart or difficulty breathing; and it can be, and more often than not is, a combination of these things all rolled together.
Being triggered is more than just getting worked up about something. I was watching something on the news recently and the commentator used the word triggered to describe someone who was worked up about a topic, and while I can appreciate that the term can feel useful to mark the significance of someone’s reaction – it’s not quite the same thing. What the newscaster was identifying was someone taking offense to something and expressing their sense of being bothered. While it can be reactionary to get offended, it is usually connected to our beliefs and values, which we have some ability to look at, choose, and change if we want to.
Meanwhile, triggering – true triggering – doesn’t feel optional. It is connected not to beliefs or values that we have some say in developing or altering, but to how our brains have interpreted, internalized, and held onto events that we didn’t get a vote in choosing. Triggering isn’t about getting upset by something or someone – it’s more like being held hostage to a brain that had to face something hard and continues to feel subjected to that experience.
What’s worse is that for many who experience triggering, they don’t always know what they are triggered by or even what experience that trigger connects back to. And this is where it really feels like being held hostage – because we can feel swept up in reactions that take our bodies over, turn our day upside down, impact our ability to focus or function effectively, and we might not be able to even really know why.
So let’s break down the mechanics of what is happening when triggering occurs. Your brain, while highly complex and interconnected, is also segmented into regions and areas that do different kinds of jobs. For example, we’ve talked a lot on the show before about the pre-frontal cortex which is the part of the brain just behind your eyes and forehead, and how this part of the brain is responsible for things like language and executive functioning which really means our ability to make decisions, problem solve and manage complex information. The pre-frontal cortex is essentially the manager of your brain. It takes information from other areas, like memory and values and so on, and funnels these pieces into how we want to choose to engage, respond or interact with things that are happening in our lives now and into the future. Being in your pre-frontal cortex, having this part of your brain actively turned on and working, is pretty much the opposite of being in triggered mode. This part of our brain helps us to feel grounded, present and in control. It feels regulated and capable.
So where does triggering live in your brain? Well, it’s pretty interesting actually. There are studies, and I actually had the chance to do my master’s thesis research on just such a study, where researchers use EEG or other brain-scan data to see what happens in the brain when we trigger the crap out of someone. How do we do this, well, depending on the population we’re studying, we might use images of something scary or associated with a traumatic event they’ve experienced, or we can use something called script-driven trauma provocation where the participants actually write the story of a traumatic event, which gets narrated and turned into an audio that they listen back to while hooked up to whatever brain-scan tech is being used. I know it sounds cruel, but it has been a significant tool in understanding exactly what happens inside the brain when people get triggered and the results are genuinely fascinating and informative in terms of how we go about thinking about triggering as well as how we go about trying to treat triggering.
When a brain is exposed to a trigger – something that your brain feels is in some way directly or vaguely tied to a traumatic or stress-inducing event that left a mark – your brain perceives this trigger as a threat, just like the event that your brain believes it represents. Essentially your brain has this background system running all the time that is scanning for risk and threat and looks for it through the lens of what it has already known to be fear inducing. When it picks up on any small reference to something that aligns with its previous experiences, it sets off an alert system in an effort to batten down the hatches to self-protect from anything even remotely like your previous experiences from ever happening again. When your brain perceives something that seems affiliated to risk, it quickly activates your limbic system. What is the limbic system? It’s a region in your brain that is near the back of the brain tucked up right above your brain stem at the base of your head and top of your neck. Your limbic system is the area of your brain responsible for your stress response including fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn response.
Before we keep going, I’m going to pause here for a moment because there are some really important things to know about your limbic system.
First off, your limbic system is highly connected to a ton of your physiological responses. You know how your heart beats without you consciously thinking about it? Same with your breathing, your temperature regulation like sweating or shivering, your blood pressure and other unconscious moment-to-moment physiological basics? Your limbic system, when it perceives stress or a need to protect, automatically exerts influence over all of these systems. It’s why your heart will speed up, your breathing will become more shallow, it even shifts blood flow away from your extremities and into your core. It does all of this to prepare you to be able to fight back, run away, or manage the risk in whatever way best leads to survival.
Second, your limbic system has its own version of memory storage. Because it is so highly responsible for altering your physiological state, it tracks events and stores memory like a muti-sensory movie. It believes that it needs to recall all aspects of a traumatic or stress-inducing event in order to be able to effectively prevent it from recurring in the future. So it takes note of additional information that regular memories, non-traumatic memories, wouldn’t normally care to remember. Things like smells, body positioning, vague sounds, lighting…all kinds of things that are way over and above what normal memory systems care to give strong attention to.
Third, your limbic system doesn’t own a watch. While other parts of your brain have access to a clock that lets it know whether something was past, present or future, your limbic system only deals in the now. It doesn’t care if your heart beat 10 seconds ago, or frankly whether it will beat 10 seconds from now, it only cares that it is beating. The tricky thing about this is that memories connected to this area and stored as a multi-sensory movie, aren’t stored as memories from something that happened (past-tense) but rather as something that is continuing to be happening whenever it gets…you guessed it…triggered.&nb...