As a sufferer, I will tell you that no human being is truly a trigger for me except my abusers.
I hope my loved ones, work colleagues, friends, and treatment team never believe "they" are the cause of the triggering, because they aren't.
On any given triggering, it wasn't something "wrong" someone did, per se, that decompensates me for a time. It's just that I have very complex triggers, usually in combinations which are unpredictable and impossible to avoid.
I do react before I can think through my choices. My family has been taught that when this happens, they are NOT the cause. They must take steps for their own emotional/mental/spiritual safety (I'm not physical) so I don't have an opportunity to hurt them. That is really the MOST important thing to me. If I think I've hurt them, when I realize it, I start the chain reaction of self-hating thoughts, which drags down my mood and self-esteem, qnd escalates the symptoms.
They take themselves to another room. They do something that helps them feel better about themselves, or helps build happy memories without me. This allows me to process it without the added stress of having information overloading me. When I'm getting overloaded, it diminishes my capacity to respond in anything but a fight/flight/freeze manner.
When my supporter and I identify a strong trigger, we work on it together. Once we know what that is, we set a time for me to do my grounding/meditation skills. Then, he does it over and over and over, triggering me repeatedly, but we work to stay within the window of tolerance. Until I can get enough exposure to learn it's not going to hurt me, I can't call up my skills to manage the distress.
Repeated exposure to a trigger is the simplest, shortest distance to successfully conquering it.
When it works, eventually that trigger extinguishes from the repeated exposures. We get to where we can laugh about them.
Lundad94, do NOT believe you act without thinking. That is not humanly possible. That's a terrible thing to say to a human being. Did someone in your life keep telling you that you didn't think? Because that's an abusive thing to say to someone. There's an implication that a person isn't smart or wise, instead of just being a person who might have been distracted. Please be kind to yourself and challenge that phrase with something such as "I must have been distracted."
...and by the way, every supporter has a legitimate reason for always being distracted. It's us. ;)
Just because I am triggered by the way my hubby goes about some tasks or communications does not mean he needs to change them. That would only feed my avoidance.
My supporters are well-meaning when they try to spare me the same triggering. Yet, doing that keeps me from facing that stressor, and conquering it. That which I avoid becomes stronger. When I'm in the outside world, I get more triggered when I run into that, and then feel like avoiding the people, places, things associated with that triggering.
It feeds my agoraphobia. Ever time I escape from otherwise safe places, I am generalizing out the anxiety from the original cause to anything that reminds of something that reminds me of that cause.
Now, when I do get triggered, once I realize it I sit down. I calm myself and practice self-care. Then, we talk about it and fully face it. That often is enough to figure out what it was about that particular situation that reminded me of something I apparently don't want to think about.
Example: I am trying to wash dishes. My legs begin shaking, but I don't know why. I begin feeling very anxious, and when I notice that the tv is loud, I yell at the kids for the tv.
But the tv wasn't any louder than normal. It was loud, but that's the 'thing' I pinned my feelings on so I didn't have to look at the memories being triggered. But my poor kids assumed the intensity of my yelling and my dark mood was their fault. It wasn't.
My hubby and I talked about it, and I talked about it with my therapist. We tried the same scenario over and over again. It took many tries over several months before I could finally break through the mental defenses I had put up around the memory.
Once we kept exploring it, and I kept looking inward, it turned out it was several memories together I was avoiding. The sink, combined with the dishwater, the knives, the sounds of kids in danger (most kids shows seem to use this trope), a crystal pitcher my hubby had placed in my line of sight, and the smell of moldy sponges overloaded me. All my hubby and kids knew that I was suddenly angry, yet none of this was their fault.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that image of the pitcher kept hitting my brain. It brought up a stew of bad memories and unexplored feelings from situations from the people who gave it to me.
Also, my hubby handling knives while I was at the sink (to wash & dry them) was another trigger. Finally, after many anxiety attacks, I was triggered into a flashback of my teen years and having a knife pointed at me by a person who was on probation for stabbing her husband.
Now, we can finally have dishes done more often. But if my hubby or kids kept assuming they were the cause, and not a neurobiochemical encoding being triggered, we'd have never been able to accomplish extinguishing this major trigger. It's still difficult at times, but that's more a function of my overall activation level being higher to begin with that day.
My hubby now holds the knives so they are never pointing at me, and he looks down instead of at me during this. It was scary to let him know that just pointing them up and looking at me puts me into a freeze state. That's a lot of power in his hands.
My repeatedly traumatized brain has a roadmap of triggers so complex not even Google could sort it out properly. There is no way any human being can know what they are. Heck, it takes me forever sometimes. But I can feel and my supporter can see, hear when my anxiety shoots way up, and we work back from that moment together.
His normal self just being himself is never a "mistake" but more of a "whoops...that's got a lot more negative response than the situation merits. I wonder what we just stumbled into."
My triggers are like a minefield in our marriage. They go off. But my supporter didn't put any of them there. What I do need help with is repeatedly being assured that he will not leave when we step on one. Instead, we'll use our communication tools and professional support to defuse that.
We've already defused so many in 3 years that our marriage, our parenting, and our lives are so much better.
My hubby is under strict orders to not enable me...not push me intentionally unless I know about it, but not to walk on eggs around me. When he does that, the hurt child inside of me interprets that as proof that I am incapable of managing my own life, or that the trigger is stronger than I am. Nope.
My responsibility is to seek all possible help so I am not holding my loved ones hostage in my self-imposed prison. When I try, they going about living their lives now, as they should. That's the only fair, healthy way for us to move forward.
It makes me sad to read how many supporters believe that any of these triggers are their fault.
Please don't let people like me manage to convince you that my emotional state in the moment is your fault, because it isn't.
When I'm triggered, I'm not fully there with my supporters. Instead, my emotional state is in re-experiencing mode, overlaying our current experience with the unprocessed feelings in my past. My expression of those feelings must be faced in the therapy room so I don't hurt my relationships and the people I care about.
Now sometimes there are responses that are or aren't helpful, but those can be tweaked.
One of the most basic ones is challenging the labels my hubby and I use to describe each other's experience.
When he and I aren't seeing eye-to-eye on something, I now no longer trigger myself worse by saying 'you're just like my Dad' because it's just not true and highly unfair. There many be an element that reminds me of my dad, but I have learned to counter that thought in myself by saying 'my hubby is NOT my dad. This not back then. We will work this out, though it may take some time.'
As far as being told one is 'being parental,' challenging that statement differently can help bring a sufferer into today and out of the past s/he is re-experiencing.
To help bring a sufferer into today that we've been taught in couple's counseling is to pause, take a deep breath, relax our stance, and confront that label. We say very honestly but with love a statement to remove the past abuser from our current moment.
I'd say something like "I am not your parents. This situation is not back then. It's 2013, and you are safe. You are not a child. We are both adults, and we are sharing our opinions. I'm entitled to share my opinions just as you are. It doesn't mean I don't love you. It means I'm working on communicating. Please don't ever use that phrase on me again. It doesn't help us communicate better."
My therapist reminded me to keep it short and sweet with my hubby. He did tell me adding more doesn't help it 'stick.' So I say it, he acknowledges he heard it, and I move on. I don't demand a response or an agreement. My supporter needs time to process that communication. We do try to immediately shift the conversation into something more light-hearted and bring warm feelings right back in. We know we can have a conversation on this in the future.
...or something like that. Hugs to you all.
