I was just a little boy, maybe eight years old at the time.
After hopping on the school bus, excited to get back home, two classmates sat in the seat in front of me.
After a few moments, they both turned around and started poking fun at me. Almost three decades later, I can still feel the “punch in the gut” sensation that I felt as those classmates made fun of me. They were making fun of the way I looked, and at the time, I had never experienced any blatant bullying.
The pit in my stomach was the beginning of years of emotional trauma that I would store inside my little mind.
I would later learn that the pit feeling was, in fact, an emotional trigger.
As the years went on, the bullying got worse, although I didn’t happen as frequently as it did for some other kids in my classes. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the effect such bullying + emotional trauma can have on the brain.
Especially a young child’s brain.
I liken it to fracturing your arm – if you treat that fractured arm in the right way, it will heal properly, and you will eventually get back to your old self. But if you never went to the doctors, and never adequately healed the wound, it will have lingering effects for the rest of your life (until you finally treat it).
That exact scenario plays out for millions of children around the world.
WHAT ARE EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS
Although there are numerous definitions, I define an emotional trigger as something that sets off a memory or flashback, bringing the person back to the event of their original trauma. Triggers can be any stimuli that elicit a strong, automatic emotional response. These stimuli could be a person, event, comment, stare, or even a smell.
Triggers always bring up a strong emotional response from the person experiencing them, and they are very personal and different for each person. These responses can range from anger, fear, terror, sadness, anxiety, guilt, shame, and many others. Triggers are automatic, meaning once the particular stimuli can be felt, seen, or heard, the “pit in the stomach” feeling is automatically triggered.
Triggers can be subtle, or they can be blatant. Some people know their triggers well, while others struggle to identify them. In my observations, many people know what a trigger feels like and can instantly identify them, yet don’t understand that they are triggers. They know that they feel like crap but couldn’t explain precisely why they do.
EXAMPLES OF EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS
I’ll give three examples of emotional triggers, each with its unique content.
#1 – The Relationship Song
Let’s say you had dated or been married to your significant other for five years. During those years, the two of you had shared a specific song that was “your” song. Every time it came on the radio, you both would instantly think of the other. This particular song created a strong pathway in your brain associated with your partner.
But then you both breakup or divorce.
The magic is over. There’s many strong feelings and pain involved with breakups and divorces, so your emotions are running wild. On one particular night, you drive home from a friend’s house, and you turn on the radio. The song, the one you had shared with your partner, comes hitting you through the speakers like a tidal wave. At this moment, you are instantly hit with a “punch in the gut” and that awful, nauseous and painful feeling. That is an emotional trigger at it’s finest.
#2 – The Stray Dog
Little Jimmy is riding his bike down at the park when suddenly a scary-looking stray dog comes up to him and begins to chase him. His heart starts beating faster during the chase while the fight, flight, or freeze response is triggered within him. Jimmy frantically pedals back home and tells his mom. She informs him that the stray dog is one of the neighbor’s dogs that had gotten loose and ran away. She tells Jimmy that the dog is harmless, but Jimmy is still triggered, feeling that intense emotional response every time he goes to that park. So he now avoids riding his bike anywhere near the park in fear he might be chased again. That is an emotional trigger for Jimmy.
#3 – The Nasty Comment
You’re at a meeting with all of your co-workers, and everything is going well. That is until you speak up and give an overview of the project you’re working on at the moment. After you finish, your manager gets up and makes a rude, sarcastic comment towards your efforts. You are hit with a painful feeling in your gut. This feeling is likened to be being sucker-punched, and the air was taken out of you. Soon after, every time your manager gets up to say something about you, it happens – that same “punch in the gut” feeling is triggered within you, even when your manager says something nice.
These are all classic examples of what emotional triggers look like in real life.
THE IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS
Our triggers are, in essence, a pathway to past trauma.
Some of the trauma may have been forgotten or not remembered at all. But it still resides within our amygdala (the part of our brain that initiates the fight, flight, or freeze response). The amygdala will form an emotional memory of an experience and attach it to, for example, a smell or an object, yet you’ll have no awareness of it. Meaning, you might fear that object or smell without any conscious memory of why.
Many people who have been in a serious car accident become fearful of sitting in the same seat in the car when the accident occurred. For example, suppose you were sitting in the backseat behind the passenger seat during a serious accident. In that case, you may develop a sense of dread anytime you sit in that exact seat in another car, without even fully understanding why. That is the emotional memory of the amygdala at work.
Other emotional triggers are well-known to our conscious minds.
These triggers might include a painful fight with a spouse or partner, a rude comment from a co-worker; a horrific injury while playing sports; a car accident; specific physical stimuli, etc.
All of these triggers are bringing up emotions that we haven’t fully felt. Sometimes the emotions are so strong and painful that they hurt too much to handle all at once. While other times it’s because we purposely hide them away, not wanting to deal with the pain associated with them. And other times, they are hidden away subconsciously by our amygdala. No matter what, triggers are essential because they allow us to see where emotional healing is needed.
Once we can spot these triggers, we can then begin on the journey of healing them.
HOW EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS CORRELATE WITH ANXIETY
Emotional triggers can have a significant effect on our lives.
It took me over three decades to understand how triggers from my past, specifically my childhood, affected me later in life. There would be situations where I would become tense, nervous, and anxious for no apparent reason. And even when I knew why, I wasn’t sure why these triggers lasted so long, often months and sometimes years. I assumed I was “overly sensitive” or “wired differently.” Although genetics play a significant role in anxiety, it didn’t explain why I had these emotional triggers pop up years after the initial incident.
But the interesting thing about emotional triggers is that they are sneaky little devils. They can rear their anxious heads at any time, often without much warning. Even if you have consciously forgotten about an incident that left you emotionally triggered, those triggers can still rise to the surface whenever the situation, person, or similar stimulus appears in your outer world.
When triggers from our past come up repeatedly, they can cause us a great deal of anxiety.
If you had a bad experience in your last marriage or relationship, chances are when you enter a new one; you will have triggers pop up. These triggers may be small, or they may be substantial, but they will likely be there. Many people do not understand that this is a natural response to stored trauma, so they begin to think something is wrong. Thoughts of “I will never change!” or “Why am I like this?” can leave us feeling anxious about our future.
Anxiety is in direct correlation with emotional triggers from our past. The more triggers we have, which negatively affect our lives, the more likely we will face anxiety because of them.
THREE WAYS TO SPOT AND TRACK EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS
Spotting emotional triggers is the first step in healing them. You can’t fix a broken engine without knowing which part of the engine is not functioning correctly. The same thing goes with our mental health; you can’t heal emotional triggers without understanding where you’re hurting.
But how do you spot these triggers?
HEIGHTEN YOUR AWARENESS (METACOGNITION)
Reading this article will give you an overview of the signs from emotional triggers. It would help if you familiarized yourself with the signs and feelings of a trigger. Once you do, it will be easy to spot your triggers. Becoming aware of the signs and emotions of your triggers is the first step. Without knowing what is a past emotional trigger compared to a standard emotional moment, you will have difficulty deciphering between the two.
Here are some tips:
- Triggers often feel like punches to the gut. You’ll experience a strong emotion attached to the feeling in your stomach. This emotion can be anything such as anger, rage, sadness, anxiousness, nervousness, hopelessness, etc.
- Triggers will usually occur many times when subjected to the specific person, situation, location, thought or stimuli attached to the initial emotional response.
- Triggers will usually bring up the same emotion(s) over and over.
KEEP A ‘TRIGGER JOURNAL’
Once you are aware of what a trigger feels like and how to identify them, you’ll want to keep track of them. Keeping track of your triggers is beneficial for a few reasons. First, writing them down will help your awareness of them. The more you track, the easier it will become to identify them quickly. And secondly, tracking them over weeks and months will help you spot patterns. After a while, you’ll notice the same types of thoughts and emotions coming up in certain situations. Understanding these patterns will make working on them more manageable.
You can keep your journal any way you feel most comfortable.
I usually have a hand-written journal where I list every single trigger that came up during that day. Sometimes I might have the same trigger every day of that week. I then know that that is an area I need to work through in my healing process.
You can jot them down in a notepad, a journal, on a phone or IPAD, your computer, or anywhere you feel comfortable.
The idea is to track them for at least three months.
Why three months?
Because some triggers only emerge a few times a year. Maybe during the holidays, or a specific event, or around a particular person. The longer you track them, the more helpful information you will gather about your emotional triggers and thought patterns.
PINPOINT THE ROOTS OF EACH TRIGGER
Now here comes the fun part.
You may have twenty, fifty, or even one hundred different triggers listed after you are finished. But not all triggers are created equally, and not all triggers affect us the same way.
You may discover that specific triggers only occur around a particular type of person. Or that a specific location seems to trigger you. You may also find out that whenever a particular topic enters your mind, such as politics or an argument with your spouse, that the trigger emerges.
The idea behind this final exercise is to lump the triggers together into broader categories. The number of categories will vary from person to person. I had close to fifty triggers written down after my three months and ended up grouping them into seven total categories.
These broad categories will encompass the bulk of specific triggers. For example, if multiple people at work trigger you throughout the week, then “People at work” would be a category you would write down. Figuring these categories out makes the process of deconstructing the triggers much simpler because you now have specific “hot topics” that you can now begin managing and healing.
IN REVIEW
Emotional triggers are all around us and are a common theme throughout life. Understanding what they are and how they feel is the first step in healing them. Remember that each of us will have different triggers, and not all triggers are created equal. Learn how to spot and track them accordingly, and then watch as you slowly become more aware of the root causes. The journey to healing these triggers will often be a long road, but you can and will begin to heal these triggers if you put forth the proper effort and diligence.
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