(Note: I am not a mental health professional. I am, however, intimately acquainted with trauma and its lasting effects, including triggers. If you have suffered trauma and are having difficulty coping with seemingly random events in everyday life that “set you off” “for no reason,” I highly encourage you to seek professional help from a trauma-informed licensed therapist.)
The keep-you-alive machine
In the words of Tony Overbay, LMFT, your brain is one big keep-you-alive machine. Survival is your brain’s ultimate purpose. When all the other functions of your brain shut down—thinking, emotions, logic, creativity, muscle coordination—the part that remains functional is the one that controls your respiration and heartbeat. At the very end of your life, those are the last things to go.
Before that, when your brain still has access to all its parts, it takes care of the business of living life and you are largely unaware of it humming along, making choices about what to eat (shellfish makes you vomit), where to go (take the back roads instead of I-95), which clothes to put on (that shirt has an itchy tag). Your brain makes you turn the burner off when you are finished cooking. It reminds you to hold your breath when you go underwater. It tells you to stop at the red light because it remembers what you learned in driver’s ed.
But always, beneath all the obvious business of daily life, your brain is keeping you alive, and not just in breathing and heart function.
Your brain is proactive. It is always scanning the environment, making sure it has the most current, up-to-date information regarding everything that is going on around you. It is always looking for threats, for danger, for anything that might cause a problem. And that’s a good thing. It’s how your brain protects you and keeps you safe. It’s like a little Secret Service agent in your skull. You don’t have to think about this or remember to do it—your brain does it automatically, outside of your conscious awareness. It is the program God wrote to run in the background all the time.
Connections
One of the ways your brain accomplishes this is by making connections. If you’ve ever touched a woodstove and been burned, your brain (which includes your nervous system) stores that nugget of information away for future comparisons. The next time you are near a woodstove, your brain says, “Hey, wait! Last time you touched something like this, you got burned. There might be danger here!” So you tentatively reach your hand toward the stove to see if you feel any heat. No? Okay, it’s safe. Good job, brain.
If you were bitten by a dog, your brain stores that data for future interactions. No matter how many friendly dogs you encounter for the rest of your life, your brain still has the record of the one that bit you, and it will always raise an alarm. The alarm may become quieter after more interactions with friendly dogs, but the alarm will always be there, however muted. Your brain thinks, “This dog is like that dog.”
This is like that.
If you were mugged on the street, you know the terror of being grabbed from behind unexpectedly, and your brain records that terror for all eternity. Then decades later when a friend or spouse playfully grabs you in a similar way, your brain instantly goes into high alert. You jump, maybe scream, your heart rate skyrockets and cortisol courses through your body. Your amygdala initiates your fight/flight/freeze/fawn response and in a nanosecond, your amygdala (the fear center of your brain) has hijacked your body. Your logical brain is 100% offline and unavailable to you because your brain is busy keeping you alive. In that instant it does not have time for reasoning. Your brain is focused on this (being grabbed by a friend or spouse) is like that (being grabbed by a stranger). You may try to get away (flight) or turn and throw a punch (fight) or hold your breath (freeze), or simply give in and collapse (fawn). All because your brain made a connection between a previous experience and the one happening right now.
This is like that.
Some connections are happy ones. Whenever I get near the ocean and smell the salty air, I am transported to happy days in my childhood, playing in the sand and feeling the warm sun on my browned skin.
The brain’s remarkable connection-making ability is why the smell of rice pudding brings my grandmother to mind. It’s also why service members are triggered by fireworks, loud noises, chaos in the home, or men yelling. It’s because this (the current situation) is like that (the firefight in the jungle). Suddenly their brain is in the actual jungle being shot at, and it is trying to stay alive. Their brain thinks the firefight is still happening right now. It is more than “this is like that.” Their brain thinks “this IS that.”
This IS that.
It is well known that trauma is stored in the body as a current event, not a memory. Bessel van der Kolk says in his book The Body Keeps the Score that “trauma is not a memory; it is a reaction.” Your body thinks the past trauma is happening right now. There is no time stamp on it, nor a statute of limitations.
If you have been sexually abused, the same thing happens. Obviously your thinking brain knows the difference between your loving spouse and an abuser. But in the moment when your spouse touches you a certain way, says a certain thing, stands in a certain place—anything that reminds it of the abusive event—your brain takes over and says, “STOP! THIS IS LIKE THAT! THIS IS THAT!” and your rational, thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) is unavailable to tell your reactive brain (amygdala) that this really is different. Your amygdala KNOWS there is danger and it cannot be convinced otherwise.
This is like that. This IS that.
You cannot talk your way out of a reaction to a trigger. When we were at 30,000 feet on a flight last year and I was in the midst of the longest and most intense panic attack of my life, Ben tried to assure me that we were fine, we were safe, but my nervous system could not hear it. My body, my brain, my nervous system KNEW we were going to die and my internal alarm was screaming at me to do something.
It would be nice if we could carry the “your brain is a computer” metaphor through the story and just delete the old, unwanted files. But your brain is super-encrypted, the password only known by God, unhackable, and as much as we don’t want them to be, all the files of our entire experience are permanent. The only hard-drive crash happens when life ends and the body dies.
So what do you do? Again, I am no mental health professional, but I have a few suggestions.
Give yourself compassion.
It is so easy in these situations to beat ourselves up, self-shaming and self-guilting. I used to be the queen of “What is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Why can’t I just get a grip?” That kind of self-talk is worse than unhelpful.
One of the greatest things I have learned to do after I am triggered is to place my hand on my chest and say, “It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot. You’re doing the best you can.” I take a few slow, deep breaths, calm my inner critic, and remind myself that God knows all I’ve experienced and he loves me, so I should too.
And thank your brain for working so hard to keep you safe.
Learn grounding techniques.
Grounding basically means bringing yourself back to the present moment. Instead of staying in your mind, which is currently being hijacked by your amygdala, coming back to the present shows your body that you are safe right now, there is no danger, and everything is fine. It activates your parasympathetic nervous system to bring you toward a state of rest and digest.
I’ve talked before about grounding techniques, which can be as simple as using your senses to notice five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. You can help this along by eating a mint, holding a cold water bottle on the back of your neck or running your hands under cold water, or sniffing a bottle of a strong essential oil (I like lemon for the “happy” smell). Or count all the yellow things you can see. Do something to bring your brain right here right now.
You could do a few 4-7-8 breaths: inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7, exhale for a count of 8.
Or you could learn how to activate your vagus nerve, which is directly connected to your parasympathetic nervous system. Stick your fingers in your ears and pull down. Massage the spot right behind the bony thing behind your ear. Hum. (Bonus: did you know you can’t think thoughts while humming? This gets your overactive brain to quiet down.)
If you need more ideas, follow the hashtag #grounding on Instagram, or just ask Dr. Google.
Get professional help.
I will say this until I die: it’s okay to be a Christian and go to therapy. There is no shame in it, and there is no prohibition in the Bible against it. I do recommend you find a therapist who shares your faith if that’s important to you.
A good, trauma-informed therapist knows the specific therapies (namely EMDR, but there are others) that will help your brain “process” prior trauma, meaning your brain will begin to see the trauma as a memory rather than a currently happening event. So while you will still remember the trauma, your brain will gradually begin to understand that that was then, this is now.
Please don’t suffer unnecessarily. Educate yourself regarding what trauma is, what its long-term effects are, and how you can address them. There is no need to just live with it.
And when your brain throws up the red flag and screams, “This is like that!” give it some compassion and remind it of where you are right now.
This was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!
But your brain doesn't always tell you to put a coffee cup in the Keurig machine! (Ask Carrie about that!)