Trigger or trauma
Trigger or trauma are in fact inseparable in their origin.
If we are triggered, there has been some form of trauma underneath it.
That trauma may lie in the form of a prior experience, often in relationship to another, or it may lie in the form of a core wound, some version of not enough-ness. Not worthy enough. Intelligent enough. Deserving enough. Capable enough. The list is endless. Often too these core wounds result from interactions with others/ our environment at an early age, and hence underneath their surface still lies a traumatic moment. Feeling unseen. Being picked on, laughed at, or misunderstood. The subtleties of our early lives can leave lasting impressions.
Some core wounds may even come from the ingrained personality traits we have brought with us on arrival into this world, or characteristics prevalent in our ancestral line, or even from wounds acquired in a past life.
Yet there can come a point on our journeys where it may no longer be all that helpful to identify the exact origin of the trigger. By no means am I talking about what has been described as big T traumas. These of course need to be validated, labelled and understood for exactly what they are. And perhaps throughout the course of a lifetime this may not even change, due to the devastating impact of what a human being can endure. Yet perhaps at some point along the journey of recovery from even such a major trauma, we may even find the language we use around it shifting as we shift and make our peace with what happened.
However when it comes to less extreme traumas, we may reach a point at which the trauma has been labelled, we have understood what happened, we have processed, perhaps even over-processed, received all the help, and it may in fact be the time to consider whether it is time for us to shift our lens.
In Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love” she writes “we are told to ask our own Internal Teacher for guidance in our thinking about any idea and its use in our lives.”
For me I realised that it was probably unhelpful to focus on the traumas at this stage. Although I continued to be triggered as a result of traumatic events of the past, they were in fact getting less frequent or more importantly overall less intense as I discovered more helpful ways to manage when they surfaced. To self soothe. To parent myself. To cultivate self-compassion and genuine self-love in these moments.
Greg Schmaus is one of many people in the healing field who talks about the archetypes we all carry. Those aspects of us that are universal to all human beings. The Victim. The Child. The Saboteur. And these are just three of our main fundamental ones just to name a few. So when I considered the use of holding onto the trauma label when contemplating where I was now at, I had to take an honest look at whether it was instead these archetypes being activated in an attachment to holding onto the past. And perhaps the other way of looking at things, as residual thorns to be slowly and gently over time extracted from my branches, no longer needing intensive outside support or external validation but instead utilising the resources I had cultivated from within, could be a more helpful, empowering and normalising way of moving forward.
That perhaps it was time to talk less, reparent myself more, and get more excited and concerned with actually living my life.
And this is something only each one of us can determine.
Is it time to seek some support? Get some clarity. Gain a deeper understanding and awareness of what we have been through?
Or is it instead time to be our own healer/ teacher/ parent/ friend?
The journey within is ours alone to traverse. It is up to each one of us to face our truths to determine if an idea is truly working for us, or if perhaps whether instead it is keeping us stuck and we are being called to forge a new path.
Resources:
Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love”
Greg Schmaus https://www.healing4d.com/about/