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[personal profile] greenstorm
Well, here's something that I've been dancing around all my life, and that's hit me with a two-by-four in the last ten minutes.

Everyone has triggers of some kind; let's define triggers as something external (events, images, phrases, people) to which someone reacts in a hugely disproportionate way. Some of these triggers can raise positive emotions, some negative.

I have a bunch of them. Many of the negative ones I'm aware of kick in once I'm in a big-R relationship with someone in my mind; as long as someone is a friend, a friend-with-benefits, a playmate, a classmate, an acquaintance, or whatever they can engage in the behaviours which trigger me and nothing will happen. If I feel someone is important to me, if they have strong influence over people I love, if I need to engage them for something: then they can trigger me. Obviously this occurs in situations other than relationships, but it's been numbed out of me by my family, more-or-less, and I often have very low expectations from 'just people' so don't engage.

I'm not really here to explore my specific triggers right now so much as how I decide to deal with them. I've tried a number of different strategies in my life. Many have failed; some are serving me pretty well right now; some I feel like I should try but never have the mental fortitude to follow up on.

First I want to put out there very clearly some of the feelings I get when something triggers me. I experience some pretty fucking intense emotional fallout. I'll dissociate, sometimes I'll 'lose' the feeling of my body, sometimes I'll feel very panicky, sometimes I'll go near-catatonic and lose verbal ability. Often, if I follow my gut, I either shut down into wooden-face static-mind or I get defensive and angry. I often do end up following my gut in the first several seconds because the response to these triggers is so strong and so immediate it sidesteps any consideration of my actions. You can think of it as that pulse-pounding sensation when something jumps out of the bushes at night; there are similar physical and mental reactions attached.

So first, of course, there's a total lack of self-awareness. When I was first triggered I'd just act out panicked reactions as if I was reasonably responding to my environment. Say Juggler cancelled a date, and my brain acted like that was him saying he wouldn't see me ever again: I'd be stupendously hurt, cry, argue, etc. I'd say things like "you never see me anymore" where I was extrapolating past behaviour from the feeling I had rather than from, you know, his past behaviour.

After awhile acting like this was sucking for everyone, and with enough stubborn external input I got so far as to do some fact-checking sometimes after the panicked feelings had settled down. When this happened I'd be sorry, feel bad, not know what my big explosion was about... but I'd still have the big explosion, and then catch myself afterwards and usually only when someone talked with me when I'd calmed down. It was also easy for the talking to re-trigger whatever I felt in the first place. It was, however, a perilous beginning. To be honest, I don't always feel like I've got far from this stage.

I used to think I could just 'tell myself' not to feel so extreme in the next instance and it would work, but it honestly never has. My brain explodes and through a lot of careful stuff I've learned to deal with it in various ways, but commanding myself to not have an extreme reaction next time has never been helpful. It just doesn't work.

For awhile I tried to argue through it, with the idea that if I talked about it long enough and encouraged the people around me to steer me towards a more moderate viewpoint, I'd be convinced and settle down. The problem is, when I'm in that place I'm super unreasonable and arguing with me makes me more upset and so more unreasonable. Things get polarized and the world sucks for everyone involved.

So, I couldn't make it go away through sheer force of will, and external convincing didn't work. What works now?

If I sat with it, not blaming myself and not surrounding myself with anyone who would get upset at me for being upset, I learned it would eventually subside. Realise my name, Greenstorm, is taken from these mental storms. To a certain extent letting them go was letting some of my self-righteousness and identity go. I had to give up the idea that I needed to react, and also that my reactions were necessarily right.

Lately I've been surrounding myself with people who have the strength, patience, and self-confidence to wait a little bit, until the fight-or-flight feelings go away. Angus looks hurt but agrees with me, which brings me around really fast-- because in his mouth it sounds ridiculous. Michael is silent, and waits, which lets whatever I'm saying echo in my head until it sounds equally ridiculous.

Either way, when what I'm saying echoes back to me in a non-judgemental way (oh, so very important no not feel despised or judged and so not to go deeper into the fear response) and I feel like I'm being stupidly hurtful to these people whose well-being and respect I care about, I stop. It might take me a couple minutes, maybe twenty, and I can rein myself in. It takes longer if I haven't slept enough, haven't exercised enough, haven't eaten lately: relationship discussions are so laden with triggers for me that I simply will not have them if I'm not in a good physical place because nothing will go anywhere good.

With external acceptance of my 'I need a time-out, I'm feeling crazy' behaviour, or more realistically 'pet my hair and hug me, I can't talk right now' moments, I started to relax around my mental storms. They just weren't a big deal to anyone who cared about me (mostly because I wasn't acting like a delusional idiot around them, which in turn was because I wasn't provoking extreme reactions...) and so when I feel the panic clamp down I can be a little quieter, I can get an extra hug, sometimes I can even reason myself through it.

Does this mean I'm fixed? Not at all. I still have those triggers. When I'm around the kind of people who are very reactionary, my triggers go off and can still easily spiral. The difference now is that if interacting with someone triggers me, and it makes me feel awful, I have these wonderful people in my life as contrast. I can think, often quite angrily and defensively, "why am I wasting my time with this person making me feel so afraid/angry/defensive/whatever when I have so many sweet understanding people to spend my time with". Any desire to engage evaporates then, and with that all the loaded feelings disappear and I'm just talking to someone who's being very angry/defensive/upset.

And quite often any desire to engage ever again evaporates, never to return.

Drama always results when I act on my triggers, or when I make choices (even most behavioural choices) when triggered. If I just wait it out then drama almost never results. I've been living very low-drama lately, at the cost of associating in depth with a limited set of people. I'm pretty happy with that decision. The more I live like this, stably and well-loved, the more my triggers are defused, the more quickly I can catch myself, the less I want to engage on that ugly hurtful level with anyone.

It could turn around and spiral up as quickly as it's spiralled down, I keep an eye on it, but I'm pretty happy.

If you go and look at my old posts you'll see many, even more, I probably wrote when triggered. And if you look at my recent ones there are fewer of those and they're less certain of outside reality and more an exploration of internal thoughts.

Anyhow, just realised that whole thing's been going on and wanted to get it down. Be well.

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