TRIGGER WARNING

Ever seen this? This is something we do on Social Media now, so that we can talk about Mental Health Trauma safely. What is a trigger? A Trigger is something that causes you to react in a biased fashion. It is like all of a sudden, you can’t think properly. You can’t do your job properly. It most likely makes you angry. Some people freeze.

Bias, is basically making an assumption. Deciding that what is in front of you, or presenting itself as a situation, while in a triggered state, is not going to work, so you then actually choose to shut down your brain, and to operate in a lower consciousness, that resides in what we like to call Lizard Brain.

You then choose to defend the lizard inside of you. Still, what feels important, is that you are unable to change the course of your behavior. What becomes scary, or destructive, to yourself and others, is that this poor, definitely non-mammalian part of your brain, which is where all of your shame, grief and rage is stored (not sure of my brain physiology), tends to lash out. It tends to become combative, and it also can refuse to perform certain tasks. When I say I do not know my brain physiology, I am specifically talking about what part of the brain performs the function of grief, rage, and shame. Respectfully, I am going to guess that it is this “mysterious” fascia, that we have been unable to define the function of, could actually be what we are calling Lizard Brain. 

We can make is sound pretty. Like it is full of rainbows. We can assign greek terminology to it so that we conceptualize it as a philosophical concept. We can look at a couple of simple curvy lines, call it the subconscious, and even make it a communal space. This kinda sounds like we are all holding a meeting there, or what on Lopez Island, we like to call a circle where we “hold space”. Man, wouldn’t that be cool if you could actually hold space? To me it feels a little to light. 

Anyway, for those of us that do experience triggering, I feel I can supply a couple helpful tools that will enable both you, and me, to not perpetuate the cycle of what we call PTSD. If you continue to practice this behavior of bias, then you are choosing to exasperate the trauma experience in you life. If you hold onto the anger that you got in touch with, when you paid a visit to this communal room in your very own mind, you are choosing to assign this behavior trend to various initial conditions in your life. You may say something like “That person triggers me.” This is a false statement. All that is true is that you remember that at one point in time that person’s behavior in a certain moment caused a little spark in the trauma center of your brain. So why are you trapped there? Why does it feel like we can’t get out? But most importantly, why are we choosing to remain trapped there?

If I have learned anything from my experience living with mental illness for over twenty years, seeing doctors, getting intimate with peers, it that we are actually choosing what out brains do in every moment. In severe cases like PTSD, and countless other diagnoses, that is the crucial apex of discomfort. We believe we don’t have a choice. We feel so trapped in our triggered mental state, that we actually end up giving up our right and ability to choose. We surrender to a mean force, and literally jump ship from our own life, ability to be conscious, and the pursuit of our own happiness and dreams. All we need to do to get better, is focus on choice. That in every second of every day, we are choosing, to make our brains and bodies work. You are sending a command. From somewhere inside of you, you are operating ‘ship self’.

There is another way we jumpstart our brain. No, it is not with electrical shock therapy. That may have done some good, or that may have definitely done harm in my opinion, because we are very sensitive organisms. We can jumpstart our hearts this way, but I don’t think we should do this to the brain. What you do is accept little traumas, which give you the opportunity to practice choice, whilst actively participating in getting yourself out of this damaging feedback loop. You have to try to be courageous. You have to try to forgive. You have to try and be brave. And most importantly, forgive yourself for believing, or allowing yourself to believe, that you, not 7 billion people, struggle with this every day. It is literally a bias. It is giving a label to something. Not calling it by its name, no, that is the opposite of bias. When we define something specifically, it does not need a label. It has it’s very own individual name that belongs only and specifically to it. Because,

 if you know a demon’s name, you vanquish it. If you are biased against something, you are making an uneducated guess. You are reacting. Then there you are, in your less conscious brain, making decisions about not just your own life, but other’s as well.