Trigger Troubles
Do you ever find yourself wandering happily through your day just to be slapped with an alarming reminder of your trauma in the form of a hospital hand soap smell or a strange-toned voicemail from your doctor? Like you almost forgot you've been through hell when suddenly it gets a little too hot in the room, and you are triggered. Heart racing, palms sweating, anxiety-inducing triggered. To deal with these spooky memory monsters, I have had to dig to understand the deeper place where they come from. What am I truly afraid of?
You don't really understand what a "trigger warning" displayed across your TV screen at the start of a Netflix documentary is until you've experienced this feeling yourself. Worst of all, life isn't scripted. It doesn't come with a trigger warning. So you can be assured that if you've ever lived through something traumatic, you will be reminded of it when you least expect it. Often, it will come to you like a horror film trailer, all the scariest parts spliced together with a suspenseful soundtrack. It plays in your mind with precise recollection, and you wonder - how did I not blackout during that part? Sometimes, our brains hold a tight grip on things we wish they would just let go of, and those visions haunt us over and over again. I think part of it comes from the fear of it happening again and the thought that something so horrible actually happened to you. Not a theoretical person in a storyline, but you. Scary movies aren't real, but this was. When something reminds us of it, we feel a jolt of memory torture. This is not to say that we can't ever walk through a hospital again. We do have to carry on with our lives, and that means occasionally dealing with these not-so-fun experiences, but it's easier to do so when we get to the bottom of why these reactions happen in the first place.
Working through trauma is both the most challenging and most rewarding step one can take towards freedom. I don't know if I'll ever stop getting a chill when I walk into that one building, but I know that I don't avoid my appointments there anymore, and that's something. I do my best not to live in fear. But instead, to live in the moment. And when the moment brings a trigger, I will aim to fight it like Sidney Prescott in Scream. Not today, Ghost Face, not today.
