Triggers

Did you ever wonder about triggers? When I was a kid, Trigger was the name of my favourite cowboy’s horse and a part on a gun, but I had never heard of it related to an emotional reaction. Then I learned that triggers cause an emotional response out of proportion to the event. For me, my body went on high alert. A whole-body feeling of danger and having to defend myself took over. This is the fight or flight response and is behind all anxieties.

How does it work? Why does it happen?

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris gave a TedTalk describing the ACE study (adverse childhood experience). She said that doctors are not trained to screen or treat an exposure that increases the risk for chronic diseases and affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even how DNA is read and transcribed. That exposure is to childhood trauma.

I grew up in an unpredictable environment and was naturally curious about the brain and behaviour. I expanded my studies from a Medical Laboratory Technologist to an MSc in Neuroscience. Alas, the anatomy and physiology of the neurons, pathways and neurotransmitters did nothing to enhance my understanding of human behaviour and its motivation. Then I enrolled at Adler University for an MA in Counselling Psychology. This brought me closer to understanding childhood experiences and the beliefs that drive behaviour.

My “aha” moments occurred after reading Candice Pert’s brilliant book, “Molecules of Emotions,” and finally, a serendipitous meeting with an old friend that led to courses in Somatic Experiencing.

I learned about the vagus nerve and how trauma affects the nervous system. I learned there is an emotional center in the brain, and every thought creates emotion, and every emotion is felt somewhere in the body along where the vagus nerve travels. You could notice a slight sensation in your guts, a knot or butterflies in your stomach, pain in your heart, tension in your chest, constriction in your throat, or tightness in your jaw. All of these sensations are dependent upon your thoughts.

I learned how to calm the sympathetic nervous system when it exceeds the window of tolerance and launches me into fight or flight. This is what a trigger does. It can be anything our senses notice that reminds us of some aspect of previous trauma. And this is where fight or flight comes in. Your brain and nervous system do exactly what they are programmed to do. In caveman days, these responses kept us safe from predators. We could run from the threat or turn around and fight it, and then the over activated sympathetic nervous system could release that energy pumped into it from the perceived threat.

I am going to share some personal examples here:

PIANO LESSONS

Mom dropped me off at a piano teacher's house when I was five. I was a timid and uncertain child, and the piano teacher was someone to fear. She wasn’t kind to children.

“Now show me where middle C is!” she demanded. I held my breath, a knot in my stomach and reached out my trembling hand. I was afraid to make a mistake, and while second-guessing myself, gently pressed a key. In the pause between the movement and the sound, I waited for her reaction. THWACK! A ruler hit the back of my right hand. That wasn’t middle C. What a bad hand. Stupid hand. Surely hitting it would make it remember.

Years later, even after mastering a piece, I listened critically to every note and felt that tension in my stomach. After all, mistakes cause pain.

GRADE 3

I was placed in the “Bluebird” group because they thought I was a slow reader. The truth: I was afraid to make a mistake when called upon to read aloud. Where did I learn that it wasn’t ok to make a mistake?

Mrs. Holstein, our teacher, sat at the back of the classroom, maybe so we wouldn’t see her pick her nose. She had light brown hair and cat’s eyeglasses on her sharp nose and wore straight skirts and blouses with heels that echoed through the room. If she wore black and white patches and had hooves for feet, that would suit her better.

She called my name, “Come and get this test and correct it,” she demanded in her cow-like manner. I was embarrassed to have attention drawn to me, the only one called to correct a test. I sat down, pencil in hand, and looked at the question. It asked what direction one country was from another. I said north, but that was wrong. I did not know the correct answer, so how could I possibly change it? It didn’t occur to me that I had three other chances to get it right, so I just sat there looking at it, afraid to make another mistake. Mistakes cause pain. I hate pain.

Then the threats began, “If you don’t have the correct answer by the end of the day, you’ll get the strap.” I froze. If an eight-year-old can sweat, then I was sweating. It seemed inevitable that she would punish me. How could I give the correct answer when I had no idea?

It is a fact that when in “fight or flight,” the frontal lobes cannot perform their duties, such as thinking logically. I could barely breathe. My farm girl experience knew the barn was south of the house, but I had no concept of other countries and where they might be.

Miss Joel, a shorter younger teacher in the adjoining room, came to join the war effort. She stood over me, arms folded, “I think she wants to get the strap.”

The bell rang at the end of the day, and everyone bustled out quickly, leaving me to my fate. For a second, I thought they had forgotten their threats. I skulked to the cloakroom and put on my coat. They followed me there.

“Hold out your hands,” the cow demanded angrily. Mrs. Holstein held a strip from a belt used in farm machinery- an indestructible woven material. It was brown with a darker stripe down the middle. It was about 3“ wide and 18” long. The perfect length to inflict unbearable stinging pain on a child’s hand.

WHACK! I held my breath; the tears began to flow. WHACK! She pulled back and was ready to inflict the third WHACK. By the time she finished punishing my right hand, I was no longer present. Three strikes on each hand, tiny red burning bad, stupid hands. Only bad kids get the strap. I stumbled out the door and ran to the waiting bus. The last one to board, everyone knew why I was late. I sat silent for the hour trip home, looking out the window and gasping for breath to hold back my tears.

I walked from the bus into our house, my head down. There were no greetings or “how was your day” questions. No one commented on my tear-stained face. The kitchen clattered with chaos, and I went to my room to wait for the call to eat. I didn’t tell anyone what happened, and then, my dutiful tattletale brother announced at the supper table, “Marianne got the strap today.” No one asked why or offered sympathy. The only words I remember were, “Behave yourself in school.” And then everyone went back to their meal and more important concerns. It was like that on the farm. People were busy trying to stay alive while living off the land. If food was on the table and you had clothes to wear, then your parents met all your needs. We never discussed emotions.

After that, I noticed that I seemed to disown my hands. I clumsily reached for something, and it felt like my arms ended at my wrists; my hands did not exist. To this day, I have no strength in my hands, but on the bright side, I never went into another exam without taking my books home to study the night before. Suddenly I was in the top 3 students until grade 8, but that is another story. In University, I excelled, panic-crammed, going over my notes at least three times until I was sure that I was sure. Someone asked what motivated me to get good marks. The answer was, “Fear of failure.” But maybe something more profound was at work. Perhaps it was the pre-strap anxiety that reared its ugly head repeatedly. Several professors commented that no one had ever achieved such high marks in their class. I’m sure my subconscious mind was afraid to get the strap, as silly as that sounds to my conscious mind.

My academic studies led me through Neuroscience courses and a master’s degree in counselling psychology. Things were beginning to make sense. Always curious about human behaviour, I signed up for Somatic Experiencing training. Dr. Peter Levine developed this method for healing trauma. It is a bottom-up approach rather than the traditional top-down method used in talk therapy. Somatic Experiencing is much more effective.

Part of the training to be a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner is to experience counselling sessions with a seasoned practitioner. One particular session was life-changing. The surprising effect of my trauma revealed itself: I picked what I thought would be an issue I could work on when she stopped me.

“What’s going on here?” she asked me to look down at my hands. They were red and swollen. I looked at them in wonder, and I knew this was a body memory of getting the strap in grade 3. I was amazed at the example in front of me of what I was learning in Somatic Experiencing. Trauma lives in your nervous system. And here it was, visible in its presence.

I told the practitioner about that experience, and she asked what I would have liked to do to them. I felt the adrenalin rush and the anger rise as I described taking the strap away and hitting them both repeatedly on their faces. It felt good to think of revenge for a minute, to step out of being the good girl with her unacceptable feelings stuffed deep inside. There was no denying my feelings, and this is where the healing of that experience began.

I spent the next few minutes acknowledging my hands, watching them move gracefully like birds floating through the air. I welcomed them, acknowledged their presence, and accepted they were now a part of me, belonged to me. Hello, hands. I love you.

I thought this experience would completely heal me, there would be no more anticipation anxiety, but I was wrong.

Northern BC

A year later, I took a break from counselling others and returned to my original medical laboratory technologist career. I spent six weeks near a lake in northern British Columbia. The hospital there was small, with a two-person well-equipped laboratory. There was one area where a dysfunctional young man (he learned how to treat his autistic son from Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer), refused to train me.

Then when the other tech was on vacation, I was forced to work in that area without the training. It involved a unique coding system that I had never seen before. The pressure was on, outpatients lined up in the hallway, and I struggled to do this job.

I was sweating bullets. There was the familiar knot in my stomach and the feeling of impending doom if I made a mistake. Several times I asked him questions, and several times he refused to answer. He told me, “That’s how I learned; nobody trained me. It’s sink or swim.” No doubt I was drowning. I felt abandoned. I was frustrated and tearful. At the end of my shift, his parting words to me were, “I didn’t do that to you. You did that to you.”

I returned to my B&B, thinking about those words. Albert Ellis said that people don’t upset other people; they upset themselves with the stories in their head. It’s true. Something inside of me caused a reaction. I began focusing on that feeling in the pit of my stomach, breathing through it and wondering what it meant. Gendlin, a psychologist, described the technique in his book “Focusing.” I waited for the images that would match the feeling. There it was: Teachers standing over me, threatening me with corporal punishment, the fear and anxiety and inability to think. No wonder I couldn’t function. Getting the strap in grade three reached its tentacles into my life half a century later. Trauma does live in your nervous system.

Now was I cured? Maybe not, but at least now, when the anxiety appears, I can bring myself back into the present moment and look for the story I am telling myself. Healing is a journey, not a destination.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

— Dr. Peter Levine