Do you ever have overwhelming feelings or reactions that seem out of proportion to what’s actually happening in the moment?
Maybe you feel so many emotions all at once it’s hard to know what you’re feeling, they are just all so intense it’s too much.
Or someone might say or do something relatively small, but it leaves you feeling intensely angry or in a place where you feel like you’re completely worthless for days.
These are all signs that you have been triggered and that you are having a trauma response.
It suggests you aren’t just responding to the situation in front of you, but to something else as well, something much bigger than what’s going on right now.
What does being triggered actually mean?
Definition – A trigger causes a particular action, process or situation. We press a button and it activates (triggers) something else.
When it comes to trauma triggers, they happen when something in our present world reminds us of the past trauma. You might not even know what that past trauma is. But if your emotional reactions are big, they are hard to shake, or they are out of proportion to what’s actually happening, then chances something from the past has been triggered.
It’s important to know: this isn’t about being “too sensitive” or “overreacting.” What’s actually happening is that something in the present moment is triggering a memory from the past—a memory you may not even be consciously aware of.
When the feelings are the memories
Most of us expect memories to come as pictures in our minds or stories, something we can clearly remember and describe. But the triggers I am talking about here are called emotional flashbacks (unlike visual flashbacks which involve images or ‘movie’ like scenes), which are intense emotions without clear memories attached. Emotional flashbacks fill you with feelings like panic, shame, fear, hopelessness, anxiety, rage or deep sadness.
For example, you might experience:
- A sudden overwhelming state e.g., “I feel like a failure” or “I feel terrified and I don’t know why”.
- Feeling like a child, small, powerless, scared or ashamed.
- A sudden drop in mood, confidence, or sense of safety, almost instantly.
- Struggling to stay grounded and present, even if nothing ‘bad’ is happening in the present.
An emotional flashback is your brain and nervous system reacting as if the old trauma is happening again, right now. Your body goes into fight, flight, freeze or collapse in order to protect itself.
When the past shows up in the present
When you’ve had childhood experiences of trauma, you didn’t have the emotional skills or support to process those intense feelings properly. So instead, your body stored the memory in an unprocessed state. Later in life, something in your life -maybe a tone of voice or a situation, can remind you (or trigger) that early experience, often without you knowing it. When that happens, all those old feelings come rushing up and attach themselves to the current situation. This is why your reactions can feel so out of proportion to what is actually happening in the moment.
You’re not only feeling what’s happening now, you’re feeling what happened back then too.
You’re having an emotional flashback which is a trauma response.
Distress tolerance
A lot of inpatient programs teach distress tolerance techniques, which can be a real life saver. When you’re feeling those intense emotions, those techniques help you ‘ride the wave’ or ‘tolerate’ the feelings without falling into more harmful behaviours like self-harm or addictions. In therapy, if needed, these are the first things we teach, or ensure you can do, to make sure you can feel stable before therapy starts bringing anything more difficult up.
But most people don’t want to spend their whole life tolerating distress.
The aim of therapy is to make the distress itself become less intense over time. The deeper work is to understand why those emotions are so intense in the first place, and to heal the source of that intensity -back to those early experiences that you never got to process. And then, in a safe and supportive space, you can begin to gently feel what was too big to feel back then, and get your needs met in a way, that were never met back then.
As we do that, something incredible happens.
When you’re triggered, the emotions that used to get so intense, start to get less intense, and less, and less. Until one day, you’ll find yourself realising you didn’t get triggered by that thing that usually triggers you.