The pizza was so good that it melted in my mouth.
The pizza was so delicious that it practically dissolved on my tongue. ign the courage to be triggered
The concept of being triggered, though it may at times be overused, sits on top of a hugely important concept in psychological life which demands our respect, compassion, and attention. To be triggered is, in its most basic form, to respond with intense fear and anger to a situation in the here and now which to other people may seem blameless and unconcerning. One moment we are calm, the next we’re catapulted into despair and terror. Only minutes ago the future looked hopeful; now only ruin and disaster seem to lie ahead.
Most of us who suffer from these episodes would very much like to better hold on to calm and hope. It may be important to know how to be scared or angry when situations actually demand it, but the triggered person typically feels after an episode is also deeply counterproductive and just plain exhausting to be visited by powerful emotions that aren’t warranted by what lies before us and that fail to advance our interests in any way.
The way out of being uncontrollably triggered is to understand how the mechanism operates. The mind is triggered when it believes that it recognizes in the world around it a situation that it feels from memory is going to be highly damaging and dangerous. Our triggers are a secret guide to our own private histories; they tell us about things that we were once very afraid of.
The triggering element is like a piece of a jigsaw that will precisely fit into an analogous puzzle in the past. We are triggered now by what we were devastated by then, even if we don’t remember too much about our past. We can guess everything we need to know from reverse engineering our triggers.
If we’re constantly afraid we’re going to be excommunicated and mocked, this will in some form be exactly what happened to us at some stage long ago. If we’re terrified that someone is going to overpower us and not listen to our voice, this is an almost sure sign of what we once experienced.
The precise relationship between trigger and catalytic event may not always be literally equivalent; there can be some displacement along the way, but the link will be strong all the same. The trigger contains and maps onto a traumatic event.
Let’s imagine a person who is triggered and thrown into powerful despair and self-loathing by images on social media of blatantly attractive and popular people. No sooner have they seen these then they start to doubt and despise themselves, reflect on their inadequacies, and remember all the reasons why they are fated to be a failure and unloved.
The trigger is not entirely nothing; there is something a little bit dispiriting about the beauty parade on certain sorts of social media, but the pointed issue is the scale of the reaction that is generated. In seeking to account for it, we’ve got to look backwards. The person has been triggered because the contemporary event contains, in a garbled, disguised, and unconscious form, the essence of a profoundly traumatic dynamic in earlier life which lies mostly unknown and unexplored and thereby commands immense and unending power over the victim.
Let’s suppose that this person had a mother who favored their more rebellious younger sibling over them, and that their looks were part of what damned them to horrible neglect and emotional coldness. It doesn’t, in the circumstances, take much to be returned back to this bleak place.
We are animals who are primed to sniff out in the present the slightest sign of the dangers of the past. The tragedy of triggering is that it fails to notice the differences between then and now, between the awfulness we suffered long ago and the relative innocence of the modern moment. Insofar as bad things do happen nowadays, triggering also fails to account for the way in which we’re no longer children and are therefore able to respond to the threats that do come our way with a lot more creativity, strength, and calm than we possessed as four or ten year olds. With things ever to get as bad as they once were, we have so many more options than we did and therefore so many reasons to feign the courage to be triggered.