The word ‘triggered’ gets thrown around a lot. But what does it actually mean, and what’s really going on? Put simply, being triggered means you’re having a strong emotional or physical reaction to something in the present that reminds your body of a past traumatic experience — even if you don’t consciously remember that past experience (and often, you won’t). The triggers I’m most often helping clients with are called emotional flashbacks. These are sudden, intense feelings — like fear, anxiety, shame, anger, or sadness — that feel overwhelming or out of proportion to what’s actually happening right now.
What Do Emotional Flashbacks Feel Like?
Here are some common emotional flashbacks:
- Sudden shame or self-loathing, feeling defective or worthless
- Overwhelming sadness or grief that doesn’t match the moment
- Explosive anger or irritability in response to something small
- Intense fear or panic without a clear danger
- Feeling small, powerless, or helpless
- Despair or hopelessness, like nothing will ever get better
- Strong guilt, even when you’ve done nothing wrong
- Emotional numbness or dissociation
- Crippling anxiety that’s hard to explain
- Uncontrollable crying or the urge to withdraw
- A deep sense of being unloved or unwanted
- Feeling trapped or desperate to escape
- Inability to tolerate criticism or conflict
You may not have realised that these kinds of reactions stem from past experiences — but they do. Always. They are memories from the past.
So what’s actually going on during an emotional flashback?
To understand emotional flashbacks, we need to go back to when the original trauma happened. When a child experiences something distressing, it isn’t necessarily the event itself that causes the trauma.
What makes something traumatic is not necessarily the event itself, but it’s not having the emotional support needed afterwards — someone to help you feel safe, make sense of what happened, and process it.
If a child has that support, they’re far more likely to recover, adapt, and return to a felt sense of safety, even after something scary or overwhelming.
What Happens in the Brain During Distress?
When a child is emotionally overwhelmed, the brain goes into survival mode — fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or collapse. The brain prioritises survival functions (like the amygdala and stress response system). The left brain — which handles logic, language, sequencing, and understanding cause and effect — gets shut down or disrupted. The right brain becomes dominant, which handles emotion, sensory data, imagery, body sensations, and non-verbal memory. This means the experience gets stored in the right brain as raw emotional data — without time, words, narrative or meaning. It’s a felt sense rather than a memory with context.
How a Supportive Adult Helps
If a caregiver is attuned and emotionally present, they help the child make sense of what happened. They use words, reassurance, and co-regulation — where a calm, connected adult helps the child feel safe by offering soothing presence and emotional support. This co-regulation re-engages the left brain, helping to link emotion with logic, and sensation with story — a process called integration.
When the distressing experience turns into trauma
Without that support, the experience stays unprocessed and stuck in the right brain. It doesn’t get “filed” as something in the past — so later in life, a trigger can reactivate it. That’s an emotional flashback. Because the memory was stored in the right brain without integration, it often doesn’t come with a narrative or clear memory. This is why you may not realise you’ve been triggered — or that your reaction is coming from the past. It just feels like intense emotion, that is often too big or out of context with the current situation.
How emotion focused therapy can help
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) helps by taking the raw emotional material stored in the right brain — the feelings, sensations, and images that don’t have words — and gently integrating it with the left brain, where we make sense of things through language, logic, and story. One of the key ways we do this is through the extended focusing task, but there are other therapeutic processes we may use as well. Using your imagination and the safety of the therapeutic relationship, we’ll work together to access the original memory linked to your emotional flashback. We’ll explore what you were feeling at the time, what you needed but didn’t receive, and begin to make sense of that experience in a way that feels safe and contained. As you express what was never expressed and begin to meet those unmet needs — even symbolically — your brain starts to integrate the emotional and logical parts. The trauma can then be filed away as something that happened in the past, rather than something that keeps replaying in your present. This is how we gently reduce emotional triggers, and support long-term healing.