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How to use triggers as a means to recovery?

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To answer this question, lets first define a psychological trigger.

A trigger is an activated traumatic memory due to your present environment via one or more of your five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. A trigger will result in a symptomatic or behavioral response.

To fully understand the difference between trigger and stressor, please read Stressor vs. Trigger (recommended reading).

Many sufferers and supporters view triggers negatively, as they provoke a negative action, so avoidance is often the solution--a natural human response. When you look closer at that natural response, what you're doing is instinctively creating a negative from a negative. It is far from healthy to avoid things that are not dangerous but which merely make us uncomfortable, psychologically or physically. Before you know it you're a recluse, avoiding people, places and life itself.

If this is you, no doubt life has gotten progressively worse; avoidance and hiding away is not living life, and most likely perpetuating depressive moods.

The answer is simpler than you think. It's called desensitization and is done via "in vivo exposure" technique. This phrase a fancy expression for "doing," literally exposing yourself to a trigger to desensitize your response from alarm to realism. Don't confuse this with realistically unsafe or dangerous situations. Another method, called "Imaginary Exposure," tackles actual unsafe situations by imagination only.

Any and every trigger you overcome reduces your symptomatic susceptibility. Put simply, you recover with every trigger you remove from your life.

Will you overcome every trigger? Not necessarily. Some may, some may not--yet every PTSD sufferer can reduce their triggers from many, to few, thus improving your overall quality of life.

Recovering triggers is an empowering process. The first trigger you tackle may be daunting, may make you extremely symptomatic with prolonged symptoms, yet as you knock away each barrier, you learn your strengths, your ability to fight fear and prove to yourself that you can overcome. This empowerment will help within other areas of your recovery.

Tackling triggers is a process that can be used prior to trauma therapy itself, building self-esteem and confidence to enter trauma therapy with significant self-skills, motivation and experience of a can-do attitude. PTSD's entire foundation is built upon fear, and demonstrating to yourself you can beat fear prior to trauma therapy is a win-win for you.

The Process​

  1. Compile a list of your triggers. What specifically triggers you?
  2. Categorize your triggers as realistic or unrealistic. You may want outside opinions on this.
  3. Devise a simple plan for exposure, starting gradually, building up to extreme.
  4. Review your cognitive biases based on your immediate thoughts and reactions to the trigger, and have counter-statements prepared to confirm the unrealistic aspect of the trigger.
  5. Put your plan into action, using your cognitive counter statements to confirm the unrealistic response to the trigger.
  6. Constantly review, measure, adjust and continue until you have desensitized yourself to the trigger and cognitively realigned your mental association from negative to neutral or positive.
Anything positive you obtain in healing trauma or learning to manage PTSD often transposes into other areas of healing and management, progressively making recovery faster and easier.

Do you do something different? If so, tell us how you've used your triggers to help your recovery.
 
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Some triggers are realistic, real. Others are not, more fictitious based on your emotions vs the reality of a situation.

Being triggered by someone with a gun in your general vicinity, or pointed at you, has realism, reality, to the response caused.

Being triggered by someone looking at you, walking near you, being in your general vicinity, based on your emotions (trauma history) is unrealistic for the situation, against the response.

There are realistic triggers, there are unrealistic ones. The unrealistic ones, the ones based on emotional response where no life threatening situation is realistically present, they are what need to be changed.
 
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This is an interesting stance to take for someone who opposes trigger warnings, @anthony . How should one build themselves up gradually in their exposure, if they're not sure when and where those triggers will come from?
 
I had sworn not to ever get involved with a man again. I thought that was a permanent decision of mine, but lately there has been a fellow at the Senior Center (Where I socialize) who has been making passes at me. I am going to bite the bullet and be flirtatious too. Who knows, but something positive might come from it!

I think we have all made that vow and then broken it! Lmfao. What I have learned is to date “safe” people. If a guy wants to invite me up to his apartment too soon - nope! Scratching you off my list at least as a romantic partner.

By having intense emotional flashbacks for the past 1 1/2 I have been able to “see” my world and the people in it “clearer”. In the past I would see a warning sign and it wouldn’t “process” itself fully! I don’t know how to explain it but I find that if I give myself “time” I can come to the “correct answer” instead of flying blindly becaue I am numb. With big decisions, I stall them at night when I get into bed I think about the event I want to process - and typically the next morning the answer springs into my head. Sometimes it is sad when I see that a “friend” really isn’t a friend at all.
 
Not meant as a jump on you @Widow_of_one ... but I think we had that discussion on the forums many months ago about how assuming one *can* tell safe people, especially coupled with trauma histories, may have more to do with cognitive distortions and need for perceived safety, than the reality of situations.

Safe people don't exist, period.
Hell, a toddler can kill you, not meaning it at all.

You prefaced yourself 'Having intense emotional flashbacks the last year and a half'... may be itself a reason to stop and think through you may not be seeing clearly, instead react in opposite for perceived control, in and under influence of the flashbacks.
 
A trigger is an activated traumatic memory due to your present environment via one or more of your five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. A trigger will result in a symptomatic or behavioral response.

WOW! ok so using your definition tell me if you think this is a trigger because in my mind it was:

I grab a pack of cadbury mini eggs, i rip open the bag and flash "i see my 11th grade boyfriend G and him giving me one as a gift when i picked him UP from the store where his girlfriend worked as a cashier. He was cheating on me with her, and i was "somewhat" aware of what was going on. I really didnt' want to see it."


SO then this wasn't a trigger it was just a trigger or just a memory because i looked at it as a trigger?

Not meant as a jump on you @Widow_of_one ... but I think we had that discussion on the forums many months ago about how assuming one *can* tell safe people, especially coupled with trauma histories, may have more to do with cognitive distortions and need for perceived safety, than the reality of situations.

Safe people don't exist, period.
Hell, a toddler can kill you, not meaning it at all.

You prefaced yourself 'Having intense emotional flashbacks the last year and a half'... may be itself a reason to stop and think through you may not be seeing clearly, instead react in opposite for perceived control, in and under influence of the flashbacks.

I have no idea what you just said to me but i will work hard to figure it out so that one day i can respond with a somewhat sensible answer? LOL
WOUld you mind posting that link here or sending it to me (i am afraid that my lack of computer skills is also an issue in addition to my "lack of therapy" and jargon surrounding it. I have read articles here and there and books but have had no "forum" to discuss the things i've read with actual people so this is a blessing.

Thank you, and to one day knowing what you said instead of "learning" ...
 
And while I am at it, I often have this problem with some of the responses I get from "Threads" I've started!! sorry but this will spur me onto to learning more...
 
@Widow_of_one Ah, apologies.

My point was mostly that one can't 'really tell' who's gonna be safe, because no one is, and no one can influence someone to the degree to prevent them from acts... even if they decide to hurt you.

And that believing you can find surefire safety marks, only makes you vulnerable in other ways.

The trauma didn't happen because you failed to spot a creep. It happened because they *chose* to be one, and you can't prevent their choices. They're theirs.

As hard to stomach that is.
 
Sorry for the delay but I have been busy moving into my new home!
Overall I look back at my life and see that the people who became dangerous to me showed all the telltale signs. There are plenty of safe people in this world but I didn’t have any interest in them because of my dissociation. Now that I feel better I see things I would have missed before.
 
Being triggered by someone looking at you, walking near you, being in your general vicinity, based on your emotions (trauma history) is unrealistic for the situation, against the response.

I am learning a lot here! When people stand too close to me “yes I get triggered”. No one should apologize for being triggered if you are triggered there is something there you need to explore. Being disassociated I’ve noticed that everything is “magnified” as in a woman looked at me in the streets of nyc and I felt her stare. After I calmed down I realized that she just looked at me BUT because I was in a dissociated state it startled me - in school they explained this as “returning to our left over animal state” - aka “plan b” - as I call it. “Plan a“ is normal; experiencing trauma puts me into another state - plan b. It means I can not connect to my feelings instead I have “extreme feelings” not anger but rage. Not joy only euphoria! I have only accepted this as fact over the past 2 years. So when you are in a state where the person is harmless yet you fee anxiety think “this is ok. I am plan b. Now I need to get myself out of this state.” Things that have worked for me is: walking in a safe area, any cleaning, talking to a safe person, using ice on my temple, breathing excercises, etc
 
I am going to bite the bullet and be flirtatious too.
I know that this is an old post, but @Changing4Best I hope that it worked out for you. I kept jumping into the fire going out with new people until I ran into a woman that insisted on being whole before getting into a relationship. I took her advice to heart. I'm going to lick my wounds and try to repair myself before jumping in again. I have a severe deficiency; I am so driven to satisfy my partners needs that I have no concept of what my needs are. The last two women, when in bed with them, would ask me what I needed and I froze, I couldn't think of anything. I'm imagining that 99% of people would have been able to communicate what was going wrong, but because it was my one partners behavior (like completely disconnecting, during intercourse, with me as if they were being sexually assaulted, in reaction to which, I would go limp and they would pull away and rage on me for being impotent). I knew the answer months after the relationship was over. I needed them to stay present with me and show me that they were in love with me and making sounds or expressions that demonstrated their pleasure. But, at the time I had no clue what my needs were.
I really hope that you found happiness. I'm afraid that by the time I get this all figured out I'm going to be hobbling around with a cane and drooling... :) :-) (:
 
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