Triggers

what they are and how to deal with them

Let’s talk about triggers. 

Keep in mind that I am no psychologist. I’m just a person who has experienced trauma and now lives with the effects of it. 

Let me begin by saying this: Your triggers are not stupid. Thinking they’re silly is self-gaslighting, self-shaming, and unhelpful. They are just there, sometimes unpredictable, disrupting the smooth flow of everyday life. They demand that you stop and pay attention. They send your body immediately into fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode. They may be an object, a thought, a person, an emotion, a smell—literally anything that reminds your brain and body of a situation that was perceived as trauma.

We hear the word trigger used a lot these days, but it is not always used correctly. Here’s what triggers are not: something that aggravates you or makes you mad. Someone being a jerk in traffic is not a trigger, unless you experienced a trauma that this person’s actions remind your brain and body of. It is tempting to use words for their effect rather than their accuracy. Let’s not do that.

A trigger is something that reminds your brain and body of a previously experienced traumatic event, so that you feel like the event is happening again.

Some of the things that trigger me are not surprising given my history: cars coming toward me, the tractor in certain situations . . . Wait, have I not told you the tractor story? Well, let’s take just a moment to cover this piece of fun farmly trauma, and you will understand why a simple piece of farm equipment is a trigger. 

Some time after my head-on car accident when we were still living in the mountains of Western North Carolina in our farmhouse way up on the hill . . .

with the gorgeous view . . .

one day Ben was getting ready to take the tractor and two giant rolls of hay to another farm where we kept part of our herd. He had the truck with trailer attached and had it sitting in the driveway behind the house, pointed in the direction he would be going. This is a photo of the rig, not from that day:

The truck was just barely on the downhill part of the driveway, and the trailer was still on the level part. (If you know anything about physics, you can already see where this is going.)

Ben loaded one hay bale in the bed of the truck, then with a second bale on the hay spear of the tractor, he started driving the tractor up onto the trailer. 

I was standing in the kitchen window doing dishes and watching this whole process. I watched him carefully stage all the equipment, checking the hitch and chains, watched him load the hay, watched him climb on the tractor and put on his seatbelt, which he always does without exception praise the Lord and amen. 

As the tractor drove up onto the back end of the trailer, there was more weight behind the trailer wheels, which slightly lifted the tongue end that was attached to the back of the truck, which took the weight off the back of the truck, which made the whole rig start sliding downhill. It might have gone straight down the driveway, but the truck’s front wheels began turning toward the woods behind the house, where the land dropped off at a steep slope down to the back “road” that led to the unused part of the farm. (The house is up the steep hill on the left in this photo.)

Time seemed to stand still as I watched events unfold in slow motion. Truck and trailer with tractor (and Ben) on it slid off the cliff, crashing down through the woods. Just as the trailer disappeared over the cliff, Ben got the seatbelt loose and jumped off the side, but I didn’t see that part. I thought he was strapped to the tractor with it careening wildly through the woods down the slope.

I ran screaming through the porch, jumping into my farm boots as I passed the door, to see Ben topping the edge of the cliff, hands raised like Rocky after he ran up 72 steps in downtown Philadelphia.

I fell apart, sobbing, crying, hyperventilating, having a panic attack. But you know what? The human brain is an astonishing piece of engineering. Somewhere in the midst of watching this event with my own eyes, and after I realized my husband was still alive and unharmed, my brain did a little quick calculating and I said to Ben between sobs, “We just lost 65,000 dollars!”

This is why beef costs so much. (Not really, but . . . maybe.)

We ran to the edge of the cliff and looked down, thinking our 65 grand would be sitting waaaaay down at the very bottom of the cliff. What we saw was the blessing of God that began a very long time ago.

Decades before this day, some squirrel dug a hole and stashed an acorn in it, then forgot it was there. Now—the day of our big fat physics lesson—there was a giant oak tree just above the back road that was in the perfect place to catch one corner of the trailer, and the whole rig hung right there. The hay bale on the front of the tractor had cushioned it and kept it from flipping off the trailer. The truck had come almost to the road and was turned in the right direction, and everything hung on that one big oak, the tractor still running.

I wish with all my heart I had had enough presence of mind to get my phone and start taking pictures, but I did not. My brain was just trying to survive. (When a trauma occurs, the brain goes into survival mode. The amygdala takes over and the prefrontal cortext is nowhere to be found.)

We called our friends, who came as much to see the spectacle as to help us figure out what to do next. Then we called our buddy at the bottom of the hill who has the biggest tractor I’ve ever seen up close, who came up and hauled our still-running tractor right up the cliff and back onto the driveway, hay bale still attached.

The guys used chains to secure the truck and trailer where they were until we could get a towing service out there the next day to pull it all up the back road while keeping it from rolling to the bottom. Tow-truck drivers in Asheville don’t even blink an eye at this. They do it all the time.

So, can you see why the tractor is a trigger? It reminds me of an event that was more than my brain could process in real time. The event was actually, in the literal sense of the word, traumatic.

The next logical question is, what does it look like to be triggered?

Not long after this, we had a sick calf that needed doctoring, so Ben was hauling a bunch of cattle panels down to the lower pasture. He laid them all on the tractor’s bucket and strapped them in place, then started down the driveway. My job was to run ahead and open the gate so he could get through but the cows would not get out. I had done this many times before. I got there long before he did and started fumbling with the carabiner on the chain. He was getting closer and I was still fumbling. The closer he got, the harder I fumbled and the more panicky I felt. Finally I got the chain free, threw the gate open, and started running across the pasture.

Ben drove through the gate and knew immediately something was wrong. He turned the tractor off, pushed the gate shut, and started walking toward me. I turned around and came back toward him, sobbing and hyperventilating and shaking my hands in front of me in a stimming behavior like an autistic child does to distract herself from whatever is overwhelming. That was my second panic attack.

Was Ben going to hit me with the tractor? Not at all. He was watching and had slowed way down, waiting for me to get the gate open. He he ever hit me before? Nope. There was no rational reason for me to be afraid of the tractor, but because of the cliff incident, my brain and body stored the information that tractor = danger, and a trigger was born.

It’s that simple. A trigger is not an irritation. It is a reminder of a past traumatic experience. We don’t get to choose our triggers—our brain and body do that.

If you have suffered trauma, I highly recommend you seek EMDR therapy, which can help lessen or eliminate triggers. If you want to read about it first, the best book I’ve found on this topic is The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk.

Either way, please get help. You don’t have to keep suffering on your own.