Triggers
Mindful Awareness
Understanding the triggers of anxiety or past trauma, helps in bringing mindful awareness to our own experience of the situation at hand. By bringing more presence to the current moment, we step out of the role of doer into the observer. With that in mind, we next see how to take a step back. Moving through regulating our nervous system through multi sensory trauma-sensitive grounding techniques. Connecting with the sense of sight, hearing, feeling on skin, smelling and tasting, we get to root ourselves more and more in the current reality. Than that of the triggered event or situation that we’re drawn back to. Now we have an opportunity to breathe into the possibility of making sense of the situation that we were drawn back to due to the trigger. Understanding what happened to cause that trigger.
Chain Analysis
The replay of events that caused the trigger helps to do a chain analysis of how we got back into the old situation from the current situation. This in turn helps us cope with similar situations when they happen in the future. Something to look out for. This opens an opportunity to see there are still things we need to heal from. A doorway so to speak into understanding ourselves better.
Sitting with the Discomfort
With this opening into our experience, we have an opportunity to heal now with this trigger. Allowing ourselves full permission to feel the feelings of the triggered event. This helps us bring awareness to what else is left to understand from the past trauma. Some of these events until we move through the emotions and fully stay with it, in an open-hearted vulnerable way. Until we could include either a therapist or a healthy relationship, one can feel the insecurity of the trauma come in. Sometimes the fear is to isolate. It can manifest in so many ways.
Emotional Regulation
Knowing what the urge is to the response to the trauma trigger helps us identify a way to surf the urge. Seeing if the situation is justified by facts of the situation. By checking the facts, we allow ourselves to choose the next action. If the feeling is justified by the facts, we allow ourselves permission to act on the urge to do based on the emotion. If the feeling is not justified by the facts, we follow opposite action of the urge to do based on the emotion. This way we reach out socially in case of wanting to constantly isolate. Which is not always healthy, given we are social beings as humans.
Here’s to more healing moments….:)