Your triggers teach you
where your work still is...
Trigger/Content Warning - Suicide
Triggers teaching you - is not fun.
It’s also probably not a popular opinion, because it requires your work on your part and healing -
But it is true that triggers reveal to you where you still need to do your reparative work.
Because the triggers will always be there and have that hold over you, unless you do the work on them.
Now, I’m not saying we can do it right now, or even that we should.
But to know that effort is required of us, and that we don’t have to live this way, that because there is a wound, we need to clean it out and help it heal-
If we don’t, we bury it. It festers, gets infected, never quite heals right.
I knew that I had to work to do because whenever I saw a gunshot wound to the head on tv - even if it was not self-inflicted, for years after my dad’s death, I would feel my blood grow icy and get a chill that ran through me, and then I would be back there to finding his brains on the wall, on the floor.
I would be transported in my thoughts to what that must have been like - his last moments, if he felt pain - what his final thoughts were - what ran through his head when he made the decision to do it- and what the experience was like when he did.
I didn’t want to think that much about the final moments and graphic details surrounding my father’s death -
Really, I didn’t.
But I couldn’t seem to help myself.
My mind took me there, because I wasn’t healed.
It was a trigger.
I didn’t attend to it right away. I was in a doctoral program, not great insurance, for psychiatrist’s visits and therapy.
But, I did eventually get it attended to, through EMDR.
That word - trigger.
Trigger is such a loaded work - pun intended.
But seriously, it’s a word to mean a lot of different meanings—the specific triggers and how the specific trigger affects the triggered, or the traumatized one.
But I think too often we have this misconception that triggers are permanent - much like trauma, like PTSD, like cPTSD, and the truth is -
They don’t have to be.
We can literally change our brains, the neurons, neurotransmitters, DNA.
It’s one of the most amazing parts of being human.