Why Triggers Are Your Personal Responsibility

Welcome, beautiful people. Thank you for joining me on the Good Vanilla podcast. I am so happy to be hanging out with you today. We are gonna jump right into things and continue our conversation from last week about triggers. If you have not listened to episode #5, please go back and listen to that before you continue forward with this episode. There's some information about triggers that sets up the foundation around triggers, understanding them and how to identify them and how they actually form.

Today there's going to be some tough love. I’m gonna love you. But I'm gonna love you tough. That's the type of girl I am. I’m gonna come at you. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. We're just gonna dive right in.

Trigger warnings are everywhere. All you have to do is open up Instagram, open up Facebook, turn on the TV. It’s pretty much everywhere. All the messaging, it's good and it's bad. That's truly what I believe. I believe we need to be sensitive to other’s emotions. I strongly believe each person has a personal responsibility over their emotions and how they regulate and work through their emotions.

We need to stop fully relying on trigger warnings to protect us from reliving our original trauma. I don't know about you but I don't wanna put that kind of power into someone else's hands. I mean think about it. Wouldn’t you feel so much more comfortable and confident knowing you have the tools to make it through an emotionally triggering situation? Or are you gonna rely on people that know nothing about you and to be honest some don't even care. Are you gonna rely on them to protect you from your original trauma? It's just not realistic. 

I don't believe triggers are something you outgrow. I think they can diminish over time but don't write off triggers. If you haven't had one for a long time, and I’m speaking from experience, OK and I will get into that in just another minute. 

As long as you are living, you are taking in your environment, all the senses and stimuli and if you experience trauma, you are bound to be exposed to the stimuli you associated with your traumatic event. And thus obviously you're going to be exposed to triggers then. That is why you need to take the responsibility to identify the triggers that are unique to you. Once you identify your unique triggers, you can prepare for them instead of becoming paralyzed by them. And that's just what happens.

When you rely on someone else, you give them the power. When you rely on someone else to provide a warning for your emotions, to act like a safeguard over your emotions, you're handing that power away. If you prepare yourself then you get that confidence and with preparation you can diminish the paralyzation. And the panic and the anxieties. So that is why it's best to equip yourself to take care of yourself. Give the power back to yourself.

Over the last few months, I have been blindsided by triggers. I was upset right away. Honestly, I was very upset. I was concerned I was relapsing back into old habits, old thinking. Because right away the old anxieties around food and my body, they kinda just swirled up to the surface. I was very much surprised by them. I thought I was spiraling and I started over catastrophizing, thinking “oh my gosh, all the hard work I've put in. I thought I’ve come so far and now look at me. One little trigger and I am…” 

At the moment, I didn't even know that I was being triggered. It was the panic and then the old habits and the old thoughts creeping back in. And the old narratives that I was telling myself about how I look and my self-worth and what I needed to do. It was like a floodgate opened. And I was very concerned. I was very upset. 

But since I have worked through triggers in the past, it didn't take me too long to realize what was happening. Thankfully. So I could kind of reposition myself back into the logical brain versus the panic fear brain that was trying to take over. I wanna share one of those triggers with you, the story behind it.

When I was eight or nine years old, that is when I first started body shaming myself. I noticed my body type was so much different than a majority of my classmates. I was just one of those girls that grew up fast and I matured quickly. And it showed on my physical self. I was taller than everyone and I was bigger than everyone. I was more put together. I just had a womanly body when I was eight-nine years old.

 Years ago when I was in therapy, I discussed that 8-9 years old was a critical age for me. I have a 9 year old daughter and she is kind of like a mini me in a way with body type. She is just so precious to me. Thankfully, I know how wonderfully beautiful she is ‘cause I can honestly say how wonderfully beautiful I was. But I was blindsided right away when my oldest daughter just kind of blossomed into this young lady. It triggered me. It did.

I started feeling very insecure about myself and I tried to control those insecurities by obsessing over food. And trying to restrict certain foods for myself. I caught myself doing this because it's not a normal thing for me now. It's not a normal thing so I knew something was off. I have enough understanding about triggers and working through them because of everything I've gone through over the last 20 some years. So it didn't take me too long to identify what was actually going on because now I check in with myself.

When I started feeling the panic and the spiraling and I started reliving those old feelings of not feeling worthy and not being enough and having to work to be accepted, that I have to somehow look a certain way, be a certain way to be loved and accepted, once those thoughts started creeping in, I knew that it was a trigger. Unfortunately it would get worse when I was around my daughter.

I could feel my breathing getting restricted. The first thing to happen is an “oh no” thought going through my mind. Then the fear racing through my brain and thinking of all the things that I have to do to overcome that fear. I had to start speaking the affirmations that I spoke over myself over my daughter. I tied that trigger to my daughter.

It was so disheartening right away because that is so unfair to her. She has no control over evoking those emotions out of me. That's all on me. That has nothing to do with her beautiful self. And that is why it is so important to understand yourself. And to identify what you are feeling and being able to connect all the pieces so that you can do this for yourself.

Once I was able to pinpoint that I figured out a way to work through that and I still have to go back to those affirmations and I have to keep saying those things in my head because it's kinda new. It's something within the last six months. So it's retraining those thought processes, those neural pathways in your brain, making that new path, that new line of thinking. That is what I've been focusing on with that trigger.

But I was completely taken off guard. I had no idea that once my daughter reached the age of when I started having problems and started body shaming myself and noticing that I wasn't like everyone else, that I was different. That it's that age and she's at that age and that was all it took. It was all it took to just zing me right back to 1993, back to when I was eight. Zing there it was. A time machine. 

Reliving those feelings of inadequacy and it was scary and it was unfair and on so many levels it was something that I put as a priority to work through. Obviously because I love being around my daughter. I love being with her and we're so close and I wasn't going to give those old fears, those old triggers, those old emotions the satisfaction of winning. I had the power in my hands and I was going to take back the joy that I pursue when I'm around my daughter. So when I’m with her, it is joy, it is not any of this old garbage trying to work its way back up out of me.

Another life experience that took me completely by surprise are the problems I’m having with my gallbladder. I learned so many things about myself having a sick gallbladder cause here's what happened: gallbladder gets sick and because of that I lost weight and somehow losing that weight triggered my old mindset of seeing how much more I could keep losing. And not being able to eat, it triggered my old restrictive starvation habits. I was so shocked when I caught myself thinking these things. That they’d actually enter my mind. It was almost like somebody slapped me in the face. I thought, “what, I am back there. Those are the priority thoughts going through my brain?” Like, “oh my gosh. I wonder. I've lost weight. I wonder how much more I could lose. Keep losing. I wonder how much I can lose.” And “you know what, I don't feel good enough to eat.” And then it was just kind of like, “oh well, why don't we push it a little bit further and see how little I can eat. I mean just keep pushing this and see how far I can go. This is what happened. It didn't happen for very long, because I am tuned in now to those triggers and that mindset.

I am telling you these stories so that you see the importance of identifying these habits and ways of thinking and all the stuff in your life. So that you can create the tools around it that you need to support yourself. Because it happens. It doesn't go away. I thought it would go. I thought triggers, I thought that old stuff, I thought that was all behind me. No, it's just not the way the brain works.

And then to take it a step further, it got even crazier, because that happened with my gallbladder. Then it flip flopped. Then all of a sudden I gained weight because of my gallbladder. I got super bloated. I got really bloated and uncomfortable and that made me question if I was truly OK with weight gain. I was actually gaining weight because of bloating. I could see it. I was super uncomfortable. I almost looked 2-3 months pregnant. That's how bloated my lower stomach would get. I was really upset about that but as I worked through my feelings around it, I actually uncovered the truth as I was super uncomfortable and miserable. It wasn't actually a fair comparison of weight gain that was natural and healthy. The weight gain was from bloat. My digestive tract was severely slowed down. It was just weird how the gallbladder flip flopped from the year before. It was one extreme to the next.

I had to logically work through it. I had to work through it and figure it out that “yeah well, I’m upset and I'm super uncomfortable and miserable. It’s because of weight gain, it's because this hurts. This bloat hurts. This weight gain hurts. It's not natural and healthy.” I had to separate that out.

But the thing is, I was able to and I share these stories so you can see triggers happen to all of us. Expect triggers to be unexpected. We can't run from them or realistically always avoid them. I’ve said it once and I'm going to say it so many times to you, be a detective. You have to slow down and begin to identify triggers in your life. Because when you know they are happening and when you know what they are, you'll be able to work through them. Remember what I said earlier, prepare for them instead of becoming paralyzed by them. I was prepared for them right away. I was surprised. I was shocked. I was blindsided because it had been so long but it's just proof again that as long as you are living, you are taking in your environment. You are taking in everything around you and if you've had trauma you are going to experience triggers and I want you to have the power to work through them. I want you to have the power. I don't want you to have to rely on someone else.

Let’s be clear. Therapy is different. I've been to therapy before, too. If you need therapy, if you need someone to talk to, if your triggers are that debilitating, yes, you need professional help. I've been there before. I’ve had professional help and now I'm at a point where I can manage them on my own. I'm sharing some of the tools and the ways that I've gotten to this point in my life cuz I know you can get there, too. I’m here to support you if you don't have anyone to talk to. You can always reach out to me. Send me an email. Send me a DM. Let's talk about this. Let's figure out a way that we can work through our triggers so that they don't paralyze us. So that we don't spiral so far back that we're relapsing fully into old ways of thinking and old habits.

Let's pull yourself out of them. And actually, in my next episode, I am going to walk you through my process in more detail of working through a trigger moment. I’ll show you how I managed to get from point A to point B from the fully triggered panic, can't breathe anxiety moment, to realizing, “oh this is what's happening. This is how it’s all connected. This is why I'm feeling this way, this is how I can talk myself through it, this is how I'm gonna get through this.”

Come back next week and I will walk you through it. It’s a pretty simple process but it just takes a lot of inner work, for working through a trigger moment. That is essentially what I'm going to be sharing with you guys next week. So thank you so much for tuning in today. It is an honor to be in your headphones, in your ears. I love spending time with you guys. I love sharing this information with you. Please let me know if there's any other way I can help you specifically through trigger moments. I will talk to you guys next week. Thank you, bye.