How to Process Pain in an Era of Trigger Warnings
By: Emsey
Tags: Trigger, Trauma, Healing, Mental Health, Psychology

I’ve studied trauma from a psychological, neurobiological, and philosophical perspective for 10 years. I’ve published papers and, most recently, a book on the topic. By all accounts, I’m a trauma expert.

When I started this work, no one talked about the concept of “triggers” — neither those in the health community nor in the public at large. Today, we hear about “triggers” all the time — the feasibility and necessity of “trigger warnings” is debated at universities and news publications.

Triggers are real. They’re everywhere. Many of us can identify triggers in our own behavior. We also see them in the stories around us — in film, TV, and the behavior of those closest to us.

But here’s the problem: Often, when we discuss triggers, we don’t actually know what we’re talking about.

Triggers are real

Let’s start from the beginning: Our brains process events in different ways. In our day-to-day lives, events occur and they basically make sense. We go to work, have conversations, trip over stuff, tell jokes, get frustrated, and get un-frustrated. Our brain encodes all of it, allowing us to organize, relate to, and access memories of our behaviors later in life.

If someone tells a joke at work, for example, you may come home at the end of the day and retell it. Or you might forget about it that night and tell the story three days later, or you may do both. In both cases, you’ll retain full cognitive control over the memory.

The trauma response is borne of strength, not weakness.

When you experience something overwhelming, the recording mechanisms in your brain go a little haywire — and for good reason. Your brain recognizes a threat and reprioritizes its normal processes to help you prepare for that threat in the future. Have you ever heard a crash in the middle of the night and shot up in bed? Do you pause to notice your heart racing and the fact that, all of a sudden, you are really, really awake? That’s because stress hormones are coursing through your body. Your brain recognizes danger and wants to keep you alive.

It’s very important to note: This is biological proof that the trauma response is borne of strength, not weakness. Not how we typically think about triggers, is it?

But there’s a somewhat inconvenient upshot of the recording mechanism going “offline”: You don’t get a neat and tidy memory to organize, file away, and then resurface whenever you want with full cognitive control. Instead, you get tiny little fragments — sounds, colors, smells, phrases, tastes — that are filed away in disorganized ways. Your brain will remember those things at all costs because they represent threat or danger. Again, this is a strong and positive survival tactic.

The only hitch? Your memories are fragmented and shattered.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you get mugged by someone wearing a shirt that is a deep maroon color. Your brain records that color and saves it — but it’s just sort of thrown into a cabinet, not organized and filed away. If you’re at work and someone walks by wearing a shirt of that exact same color, you may feel all the adrenaline rushing back.

But because the signal is so subtle, you may not consciously connect it with your trauma. Instead of thinking, “Oh, Fred is wearing the same color shirt as the person who mugged me, that reminds me of how scary that was,” you’ll probably think, “Oh jeez, I’m panicking for no reason. Why am I panicking? I’m at work and I’m totally safe. Am I losing my mind?”

Nope! You’re not losing your mind, you’re just triggered. Your brain doesn’t stop to rationalize — it sees a maroon shirt and shoots stress hormones through your body to help you better adapt to the threat. Of course, the threat doesn’t exist, and now you’re panicking. You’re also probably blaming yourself.

Today’s societal narrative says that, if you have a trigger, you should cope by simply avoiding it whenever possible. Most of the time, that won’t work.

There are all sorts of different kinds of triggers. They get in our way because they alter our behavior. They make us panic, dissociate, or freeze. Our brain is trying to protect us, and it’s inconvenient.

I’ll give you a personal example. I’m bad at conflict, especially in close relationships. If things get too intense, and if someone is really angry, I check right out — I completely dissociate. I would not be able to tell you what we were arguing about if my life depended on it. Checking out can be an amazing, life-saving coping mechanism (and it has been), but our brain’s survival-at-all-costs bias has significant downsides when it comes to, you know, everyday living.

Triggers are opportunities — not excuses

Today’s societal narrative says that, if you have a trigger, you should cope by simply avoiding it whenever possible. Most of the time, that won’t work. You can’t avoid the color maroon, and I can’t avoid conflict for the rest of my life (though, in all honesty, I do sometimes hide). More importantly, avoidance is not great for your brain.

Think back to the filing cabinet. Most of your memories are neatly organized in a metaphorical cabinet, and you’re able to take them out whenever you want. Traumatic memories are like little pieces of ripped paper thrown all over the cabinet. When you go to pull out the funny memory from work, you’ll need to push aside all of these random papers. Sometimes, they may fall out of the cabinet. They may get lost and reappear years later, like an old keepsake you can never quite track down. Your goal, obviously, is to have a cabinet that is as orderly as possible (within reason). Trauma interferes with that.

Today’s culture of trigger avoidance worries me. I notice people hiding behind their triggers. They make excuses for themselves, e.g. “I treated you badly because you triggered me,” or “I can’t do that even though I want to because it will trigger me.”

This kind of avoidance is unproductive for everyone.

Here are three sentences that are all true:

Triggers are real. Triggers don’t have to run your life or ruin your relationships. You don’t get to hide behind your triggers.

We have an opportunity here to reframe our triggers. To face them, instead of running away. In my case, for example, my intense response to anger is a sign. It signals that I’ve had some scary shit go down in the past. There’s some trauma there. And it’s an opportunity for me to both deal with that past trauma and to get better at dealing with conflict overall.

How do you deal with trauma triggers to start making progress? You must reorganize your filing cabinet.

Reorganize your file cabinet

You know the feeling of getting ready to leave the office at 4:45 p.m. on Friday when, suddenly, three people drop new projects or problems on your desk? If you just want to get the hell out of there, what do you do? You open a drawer (or a new browser tab), toss the disorganized folders in, close the drawer, and get the hell out of dodge. The problem? These files won’t get magically organized over the weekend. Come Monday, they’ll still be there, papers spilling out of them, blocking your access to the organized folders beneath them.

Those disorganized folders are the traumatic memories. The trigger is Monday — you wander into the office relaxed from your weekend activities, open your drawer to grab a file, and BAM.

You can’t go back and erase the traumatic event, just like you can’t change the fact that someone in your office dropped a bunch of work on your desk late Friday afternoon. But you can reorganize the file. Our memories — like our file cabinets — are somewhat flexible. What we have to file might not be entirely up to us, but how we file is something we have some say over.

We are who we are because of our memories, not in spite of them.

Here’s where the analogy breaks down (you knew it would break down somewhere). At work you can just do the work, organize the file, shut the drawer. But how do you do that with your memories?

1. Narrate

Trauma researchers widely agree (and have since the 1800s) that narrating a traumatic event is a critical part of healing from it (see Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, 1895). Now that we know more about the brain, we can surmise that this is because telling a story is a way of organizing it. In order to tell a story about something, you have to render it into story form. This requires giving it a beginning, a middle, and an end. It requires that you put it into language (written or spoken). Most importantly, it requires that you see it from an external perspective. In the telling of the story, you should also be able to tell yourself it happens in the past.

In this way, you’re able to speak to your triggers — reminding them over and over that what happened is not currently happening. You’ll begin to recognize the difference between the past and the present. Your triggers may never completely go away, but they’ll stop being so persistent.

2. Reframe

When you tell the story — and only when you tell it — you have the opportunity to reframe it. A reframe happens when you see the story from a new perspective and can then assign new meaning to it. Other people can be enormously helpful with this. If you open up to someone else about your trauma, they might say, “you know, I see it a little bit differently.” A whole world may open up that you weren’t capable of seeing.

You can’t change what happened to you, but you absolutely can change what it means to you.

3. Return

Your memories, good and bad, don’t go away. It’s important to remember that we are who we are because of our memories, not in spite of them. Your traumatic memories will return. Sometimes inconveniently. Sometimes in the form of nightmares that wake you up in a panicked sweat. Sometimes, they’ll get in the way. That’s okay. Just return to them. Ask them what they need. And then put them back in the past.

Each time you do that, your ability to exercise control over your triggers will get stronger. If you can be kind to yourself in the process — instead of judging yourself for having memories — your ability to have compassion for yourself will get stronger too. And that makes everything better.

So, let’s work on our triggers together, and be kind to ourselves in the process.