Can You Ever Get Rid Of A Trigger?

[Cha123]

The other day I was stood in a queue at a busy airport when I learnt the hard way one of my biggest triggers. A group of girls were behind me who had his accent and were talking about where they lived which just so happened to be very close to where he lived. I felt so out of control and instantly developed complete hatred towards these girls. I convinced myself they were in on it and knew him. When I finally got out of the queue I needed to get away from them as fast as possible.

I hate feeling this way towards strangers and I don't want to always be terrified every time I hear the accent, hear about the city or ANYTHING remotely to do with it. Does anyone else experience anything like this? How do you cope instead of having a complete meltdown?!

 

[Friday]

Yep. In fact that's the whole name of the game (lol or at least half of it!) ;
reducing & eliminating triggers & stressors.

Link Removed

How long it takes varies. I've had some sorted in as little as a few days or few weeks. Others hang on for months. Others years. But everything I've chipped away at? Keep chipping, and keep chipping... and first they get blunted, and then they get tolerable, and then they get gone. Can still crop up from time to time, especially if I'm startled, but nothing in the way like they used to.

 

[Cha123]

Yep. In fact that's the whole name of the game (lol or at least half of it!) ;
reducing & eliminati...

Cbt looks like it could be really scary though?! Do you do it alone or with a therapist? I can't even begin to imagine actually digging up the past to teach myself that it is just a memory..

 

[StellaBlue]

All of this work can be scary. The thing is, as you work through it, you are changing the pathways in your brain. You have an advantage with this one - you've recognized it as a trigger. That's really the first step. For me, I am sometimes a step back from that - I have a reaction and then have to break down exactly what happened to figure out what the trigger was.

If this is your first attempt at dealing with eliminating a trigger and using CBT, and you are feeling pretty anxious about it, I would recommend finding a therapist to help you with it. And you may find CBT is not the model for you - for a specific trigger, it seems to be pretty effective...for deeper stuff, in my experience, maybe not so much.

 

[Friday]

Cbt looks like it could be really scary though?! Do you do it alone or with a therapist? I can't even beg...

CBT is a whole durn treatment paradigm, sorry. I have a splitting headache / wasn't as clear as I ought to have been. Exposure therapy, which is part of that, and in that thread, was what I meant to highlight. CBT is done with a therapist, usually. The pieces that are done yourself, or by anyone? The chipping away at triggers and stressors? That's exposure therapy, & You probably already do pieces of that all on your own and don't even know it :) Like with the girls. As a matter of fact, you stayed there a helluva lot longer than you would with exposure therapy and then you left. You're already doing it completely naturally... By leaving when it gets overwhelming, instead of staying until the police have to be called because you're off the rails. The trick, though, is to leave even sooner & don't avoid it entirely afterwards. Keep coming back.

In exposure therapy you wouldn't stay in the queue long enough to get a big response, cause that's just reinforcing the yuck. Little response & leave. Get calm. Little response. Leave. Get calm. Over & over. Never spiking hard enough to freak you out. It's that repetitive process of being in control & everything is fine, that trains your brain to relax instead of leaping to DefCon1

Ex) Listening to the accent. You listen to it just until you start to feel yourself respond & then walk away, shut off the movie/radio/etc. You're in complete control. Over time, your body doesn't do the little response anymore. So you listen longer, until it does. Keep playing with it until you start to get a response, and play with that until you don't. Might start out a few seconds on tape at a time, and end with you sitting in the middle of that town hearing people in that accent all day and not even being phased.

 

[iwannadeletethis]

The other day I was stood in a queue at a busy airport when I learnt the hard way one of my biggest trigg...

I've done that before too with a specific cologne.

It went away eventually. For me eliminating triggers is working through specific fears and not being afraid anymore.