Triggers

Ever find yourself overreacting? You may have a Trigger. One of the things that human beings do best is recognize patterns. In reading this page, you are recognizing the letters, words, ideas and so forth that make up human communicaition patterns. These letters are visual patterns. The thought of an "elephant" that comes into your mind when you view that word is a "reaction" to the trigger formed by the visual recognition of the word "elephant". Our lives are full of triggers that create responses.

If you were fortunate enough to have a grandmother that baked bread or pies, then you may think of her when you now smell these items baking. Certain perfumes or cologne may trigger the memory of a particular person. These are olfactory triggers. A song may take you back many years to an important time in your life when you heard the song, you may have a song that was "our song" with someone, even with a significant other with borderline symptoms. Hearing this song is an auditory trigger. You can have taste triggers, or kinesthetic (feeling) triggers (those who have suffered sexual abuse may have bad kinesthetic triggers associated with the abuse that prevents them from now enjoying healthy sex, for example.) Many people have triggers associated with teachers who grabbed their ear, or their elbow... have someone try grabbing your elbow like a teacher would, and see if a feeling doesn’t naturally arise.

The triggers are what they are, the responses, however, are learned through our experience. Most of the time, this learning is very subconscious. Associating words with their associated cognitive symbology is like this after a while learning to read. In interacting with a person with borderline traits, we train our neural network (read brain) to react in a particular way to stimulus. For example, we may learn to ’walk on eggshells’ when in their presence. The stimulus, the person’s presence, is tied into a reaction, walking on eggshells. This is a natural pattern learned over time.

A stimulus, trigger, button or whatever you call it, can be rewired to a new reaction. Rewiring unhealthy reactions to triggers that may occur in our lives is an important part of our healing Journey away from the land of Oz.

Imagine yourself in a new relationship with a healthy person. They do something normal, and you have the same reaction that you would have had with the person with borderline traits. Your new partner may find this odd. (See Other Shoe for an example.) Another example is a time when a Non left a pair of shoes were left on the floor, her new partner tripped over them in the dark, and she cringed awaiting the rage that never came.

Take an inventory and be aware of what your triggers are: are they visual? auditory? feelings? Some or all of these? When do they occur? With whom? How do I experience them? Are they related to anniversaries? Voices on the answering machine? What is the pattern for me? I suggest that you do, as I did. Keep a daily log for several months. IT will help you get a sense of the ’big picture’. You may also choose the exercises here.

Triggers are like anything else in our lives, they can help or hurt.. help us heal and grow, or keep us stuck in old and unhealthy patterns. The choice is up to each of us! Imagine that.. WE, NONS, have control over that.. such a new thought that was for me then..

Creating new behaviors from old triggers is something that is necessary to the healing process. It requires introspection that is not available to a Non in crisis, but is useful once some control has been brought to the situation. You have to get out of the chaos and see the trees first.

Clearly people have to WANT to change before change can take place. We must learn to recognize what the triggers are in our lives. We should recognize triggers as an active player in our lives. Helping people to recognize their triggers is one of the more helpful things that a psychological change worker can do. It can come about through traditional therapy by making probing questions like, "and what about that episode do you think made you so angry?" Which requires a patient with some introspective abilities, Or it can come from observations made by the Therp. The second is harder for the therp, but is just as effective when accurate. Detecting what the triggers are is the hard part. It’s amazing what knowledge of your own triggers can do for you in helping you to eliminate them.

Do you, in your work Brian, actually recreate the trigger for the patient? Do you go to the point of getting them to react in the triggered way? Getting the person into the state of being triggered is helpful in that you know that you know what the trigger is, and you can test for whether the trigger has been defused later by reapplying the stimulus. It sounds pretty simple, but most therapists don’t even try to go there... Validation is important for theraputic work, but it isn’t the ONLY tool.

Brian:

Thinking is much to slow to protect us form

much of the danger in the world.

[Kelly Anderson] I would say in that case, it comes from not having detected the right trigger. Thinking IS too slow, that’s why rehearsal of the new behavior to the old trigger is so important.

Brian:

deep seeded ’scripts’ get activated under certain conditions

The job of a good therapist is to make the unconscious scripts conscious to the patient, so that the conscious mind can retrain the unconscious to have different responses. Until the unconscious is brought to the attention of the conscious mind, change is hard, because most change that is real has to involve the unconscious mind.

Some triggers are very general, and a generally useful response can be put into place. For example, the very first thing I did was to train myself upon seeing my BPXW, to take a very deep breath, slow down, and collect my thoughts and center myself. This kept me out of her dynamic whenever I came upon her. While this is a simple new choice at a general old stimulus, it really did help me a lot. It gave me a chance to slow down and think... and that was enough to solve the particular problems that would arise when I didn’t stop to think. Complex problems can have rather simple solutions.

No matter how you got to the feeling (many different stimulus can produce the feeling of anger, for example) you can choose a new reaction from that point. You can create an anchor on the feeling of anger, and go to a different response directly from there.

A stimulus comes into the body and activates a feeling which is tied to an instruction manual that tells us what we have done in the past when we have felt in a similar fashion and then we do. Cognition has to squeeze itself into that chain of events between FEELING AND RESPONSE and lots of times it just does not make it in time.

I think we would agree that whatever solution is put into place, it should be practiced, repeated, until it is in our "muscle memory" as it were. That we rehearse our reactions so that when real world situations come up, we are better prepared to deal with them.

Rehearse the trigger with a friend.

If the new response to the old trigger doesn’t seem to be working, then maybe we haven’t figured out exactly what the old trigger is.

In any case, I 100% agree with you that triggers are central to everything! Finding our own buttons, and coming up with new more resourceful responses when they are pushed is critical to healing.

-Kelly

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Disclaimer: The information on this site (http://www.bpd411.org) is based on personal experiences of the authors and members of our e-mail mailing list. It is NOT meant to replace professional advice or take the place of counseling, therapy or additional personal research.