A trigger is anything that generates a cognitive, emotional, or behavioral response in us. It’s a stimulus in the environment to which we react mostly automatically. Here, the environment includes not only the external environment (people, places, and things) but also things that happen in the mind and body, i.e., the internal environment (sensations, feelings, and emotions).
Triggers that are connected to our past traumatic experiences are called trauma triggers. Triggers that are connected to our past childhood or adulthood trauma add additional layers of emotion and suffering to triggering experiences.
For example, person A feels bad when they are criticized. This is a normal reaction to being criticized. In contrast, person B loses sleep over being criticized. Person A was raised by healthy parents who praised them, avoiding harsh and unnecessary criticism. Person B was raised by unhealthy parents who barely praised them, indulging in harsh and unwarranted criticism.
Triggers lead to re-experiencing trauma
Trauma triggers place you back into the previous traumatic experience mentally. As a result, you believe and feel that the trauma is occurring in the present. This current sense of threat leads to avoidance behaviors like suppressing traumatic thoughts and avoiding trauma triggers. These behaviors maintain the trauma because you’re not allowing yourself to face and make sense of the traumatic experience.
Since the traumatic event is painful and overwhelming, the human mind tries to avoid pain so it avoids processing or making sense of the trauma. Anything that remains unprocessed in our psyche, however, gets a chance to get processed again and again because the mind seeks to resolve things and reach equilibrium. Traumatized people may thus actively seek experiences that trigger them, even if they’re painful, so that they can make sense of their trauma.1Bellet, B. W. (2023). Self-Triggering: Understanding Individuals Who Seek Reminders of Trauma (Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University).
Hypervigilance and triggers
The mind becomes hypervigilant to cues in the environment that are similar to the traumatic experience. It’s the mind’s way to avoid experiencing the same traumatic event again by ‘over-detecting’ events as being similar to the past traumatic event. So, triggers are reminders of past trauma that act as warning signals, asking us to avoid going through the same traumatic experience again.2Ehlers, A., Hackmann, A., Steil, R., Clohessy, S., Wenninger, K., & Winter, H. (2002). The nature of intrusive memories after trauma: The warning signal hypothesis. Behaviour research and therapy, 40(9), 995-1002.
Triggers are stimuli in the environment that get coupled with moments of a traumatic experience that have the most significant emotional impact. The process by which our triggers develop is the same as by which we learn things. It’s called associative learning. When A happens right before B, we think A caused B. We believe A leads to B even if there is no logical connection between A and B. A just happened to be there when B was occurring.
Say a person was abused by their uncle who wore a red hat. Right before getting abused, they would notice their uncle’s hat. When this person grew up, they forgot about the red hat. But they often felt inexplicably anxious and uncomfortable when they saw men wearing red hats or other pieces of clothing that were red. In their mind, red clothing meant abuse was about to happen. Hence the feelings of discomfort and anxiety.
Dealing with trauma triggers
Trauma triggers can re-traumatize us if we don’t deal with them.3Richo, D. (2019). Triggers: How we can stop reacting and start healing. Shambhala Publications. Coping with trauma triggers comes down to dealing with the past trauma they are connected to. Once you resolve and heal from the underlying trauma, you’re also able to manage your triggers.
Learning opportunities
Triggers are excellent opportunities to discover the parts of your psyche that need healing. If you adopt the attitude of curiosity and look at your triggers as learning opportunities, you take a critical first step towards healing. When triggered, write down your experiences or share them with someone to get an objective view of what happened. Soon, patterns will emerge.
Note how you think, feel, and react when you get triggered. We often react to triggers in defensive, emotional, and childish ways. They bring forth our unhealed inner child that needs compassion, love, caring, and re-parenting. Traumatic experiences create core wounds in us, which are the negative meanings we give to such events. When anything touches those core wounds later, we get triggered.
Core wounds or negative meanings that we give to traumatic experiences lead to negative beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world. You’ll often find people who’ve been through trauma have negative, limiting self-beliefs like:
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m helpless.”
“I’m weak.”
Once you identify these beliefs, you have to reprogram them by giving your mind pieces of evidence that challenge them. If you believe you’re not good enough, give your mind pieces of evidence proving that you are indeed good enough.4Peres, J. F., Mercante, J., & Nasello, A. G. (2005). Psychological dynamics affecting traumatic memories: implications in psychotherapy. Psychology and psychotherapy: theory, research and practice, 78(4), 431-447.
Updating traumatic memories
Another essential thing to do is to make sense of the traumatic experience. Trauma memories tend to be fragmented. A person experiencing intrusive memories from past trauma thinks that the trauma is occurring in the present. They need an updating of their traumatic memory so they can make complete sense of it and store it as it should be stored- as a past memory, not as something that’s occurring now.5Ehlers, A., & Wild, J. (2022). Cognitive therapy for PTSD: Updating memories and meanings of trauma. In Evidence based treatments for trauma-related psychological disorders: A practical guide for clinicians (pp. 181-210). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
This can be achieved by exposing yourself to the triggers in a safe, therapeutic environment. Using the red hat example above, the person getting triggered by red clothing will be shown pictures of men wearing red clothes. Even though they may experience some discomfort and fear initially, over time, they’ll learn that when they see a man wearing red clothing, no abuse happens in the present. This exposure therapy teaches them to uncouple red clothes (trigger) from the abuse (traumatic event).6Ehlers, A., Hackmann, A., & Michael, T. (2004). Intrusive re‐experiencing in post‐traumatic stress disorder: Phenomenology, theory, and therapy. Memory, 12(4), 403-415.
When you work on triggers and reprogramming your negative beliefs, you’ll find that your triggers no longer have the power over you that they previously had. You no longer react automatically, emotionally, defensively, and childishly to your triggers. They become like an empty gun. Even if the trigger gets pulled, no shots are fired.
Eventually, even the trigger doesn’t get pulled because you’ve now taught your mind to view your traumatic experience in a new, more positive light. This updated way of making sense of your traumatic experience becomes the automatic way in which you process and react to the previously triggering experiences.