“This is maybe theeeeeee best thing I've read about trauma!!! It honestly was an aha moment for me. It's brilliant - thank you x” ~ TJ.
Sometimes we’ll observe the mind-body behaving in a certain way, when faced with a certain situation.
And if it’s a behaviour that the mind has labelled as ‘not good’ then we’ll call this a ‘trigger’.
(You could consider it a running of the mind’s ‘Never’ and ‘Always’ algorithms, but one where we’re not conscious of the thought, but rather we observe things happening a bit further downstream, at the level of feeling, or further still, at behaviour.)
Examples…
- “That family member ‘always’ triggers me,” we might say, or just observe a certain behaviour of ours occurring regularly, when around them
- “I get triggered at work when x, y or z happens.”
- “I find situation a, b or c to be profoundly triggering.”
So what’s going on here?
Well, you might not be surprised to learn that it’s a habitual pattern of thought, that’s all.
Not the content of what you’re thinking (don’t go all self-blamey here; we don’t do that here at the Daily Reminders), but how the mind’s using The Principle of Thought.
It’s algorithmic.
Using its data-in, data-out, if-this-then-that model, the mind perceives incoming data, pattern matches against what it holds in memory, projects into the future and hey presto, faster than the blink of an eye, we’re experiencing a thought/feeling combination we might call ‘fear’, or we’re observing the mind-body:
- moving in a particular way
- tensing in a particular way
- even hurting in a particular way
(This is what they mean when they say ‘trauma is held in the body’.)
And what to do about that?
I’m not sure there is anything to do about that, but to understand what’s going on, and not be freaked out by it. To see that it’s not true, here and now, in reality.
It’s the mind, creating a scary story (that you probably aren’t even aware of, at least at first) and then believing its own story to be actual reality.
You don’t have to take what the mind does, seriously. (If we do; if we push back or resist it, it tends to hang around for longer.)
It’s just a mind, doing what a mind does.
🤷🏻♂️
Here's something though – an easily overlooked piece of this annoying little puzzle, that might help.