I'm talking everything triggers today. If you're going through a divorce, then you know how often triggers show up - sometimes expected but more often unexpected. These triggers, when you're not equipped to manage them, can rock the rest of your or sometimes the rest of your week. But don't worry, in this episode I'll give you a comprehensive guide to understanding these emotional cues, identifying and understanding their sources, and crafting a strategy to handle them with grace and self-compassion.
This week, we're not just talking about the problem; we're offering solutions. We'll walk through a series of practical steps to help you find your footing after a trigger turns your world upside down. I'll give you a four step process to follow to identify when you've been triggered and a guide to help you track trigger habits in your day to day life to help you become more aware of when they're happening and how to intentionally choose your response to the triggers moving forward.
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
This is episode number 154 of Becoming you Again, and I'm your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karen Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My Lovely Ladies, this week I'm going to jump right in and I am talking about triggers and specifically like, first of all, what they are. I know I've done some other podcast episodes on understanding triggers and why we have them and all the different things, but today I want to talk about what they are, where they come from, and then I kind of want to talk about how to either understand them or start to become more aware of them when they show up in your daily life, so that you can begin to let those triggers go or figure out a way to create an intentional, chosen response when you feel triggered, instead of a natural, automatic reaction. Because let's just be real for one minute when you're going through a divorce. You are constantly being triggered, sometimes it's a couple of times a week, sometimes it's every day, sometimes it's multiple times a day, and that can be very off-putting when you first of all don't understand where the trigger is coming from, you don't understand why it's happening constantly, and when you don't have the awareness around it. It can take a very long time to re-regulate your nervous system, to get your brain back online and to start to feel even just normal in your own life again, because you're just constantly being dysregulated, dysregulated, dysregulated. Your nervous system is constantly being heightened or shutting down, depending on how your nervous system response is, whether it's fight, flight, freeze, and the divorce is already filled with so much that being constantly dysregulated by triggers over and over and over again is not helping anything. So let's get you aware of where the triggers are coming from, why you might be feeling them, so that you can start to apply these concepts in your daily life and live your life without feeling like you're exhausted from your emotional responses and with out feeling like you can't handle anything because you don't feel like you can trust going anywhere, being around anyone, seeing anything, smelling anything, getting a text from your ex, getting an email, talking to someone. We want you to feel comfortable in your daily life, and understanding your triggers, learning how to kind of diffuse them and deciding how you want to respond to them in the future when they come up because we know they will is going to be key in a key in helping you just create a more normal life for yourself as you go through divorce. And maybe normal isn't what you want, maybe you just want neutral, maybe you just want not as terrible as it's been. That's okay too. Let's get you there, because not as terrible as it has been is better than as terrible as it is now. Right, all right. So let's get really scientific for a minute. What is a trigger? Well, a trigger is basically a psychological stimulus that is going to prompt you into an involuntary recall of some kind of previous experience. It can be a traumatic experience. It can just be an experience that was off-putting. It can be an experience that has been annoying, anything that takes you from the space here and now and reminds you of something that has happened in your past that in some way doesn't bring a great memory to you. Now here's the problem with triggers they can happen at any time. They can very much and very often occur unexpectedly, and they can occur expectedly, like with anniversaries and with going to a funeral or knowing that you're going to be seeing someone who is a trigger for you. And so, again, I want to emphasize the more we can understand why you're reacting in that way, what it is that's triggering you, the more you can become aware of them in the future and they'll become less unexpected and the more you can decide beforehand the response that you want to have to those triggers, because responses are usually slower and reactions are usually like, right away, we don't even have a thought, we don't even have a choice, we just do it. We want to be able to create some space to choose our response. Okay, so let's just very quickly talk about the different kinds of triggers. There's external. This is anything that's happening with, like your environment, right? People, places, things, events, those kinds of things. That's the external kind of trigger. So, like your ex-husband shows up to your house unexpectedly and he knocks on the door and he won't stop knocking until you open it, that's an external trigger, right? Internal triggers internal triggers are something that is happening in your mind, in your body, some kind of feeling. So maybe you feel anxious or you feel insecure, or you feel uncertain because of, like, thinking about something in your life in a certain way and you are getting more anxious the more you think about it. You're getting more insecure the more you think about it. You're getting more uncertain the more you think about it. It's like you think about this thing, you feel a certain way, the intensity is growing, you continue to think about the thing, you continue to feel a certain way and the intensity continues to grow and you become more and more triggered over this thing. That is an internal trigger. It's happening inside your body. And then, of course, there's sensory triggers. Sensory meaning your five senses. So maybe you see something, maybe you taste something, maybe you smell something that just reminds you of this time or place or this situation, that something happened. Senses can play a huge part in allowing triggers to go off for us, and so understanding that is just going to help you diffuse those triggers when they happen. Now, listen, you don't always have to know why you are being triggered. What we really want is to notice and understand as much as possible about our triggers and sometimes just doing that noticing and understanding that you're having a trigger, understanding that like oh okay, it could be because of this. Oh okay, I heard that song and that reminds me of this. You may not have, like, a complete, deep understanding of like, and this leads back to my childhood, when this thing happened or that thing happened Like we don't need to go that deep sometimes. Sometimes we might, and that might you might need to go see a trauma therapist to go very deep into that, but also, at the same time, noticing and understanding can be exactly what you need to create that intentional space between the stimulus and your response, because our brain is always wanting to make sense of our surroundings. We have some basic needs that our brain is like. I need to make sure that we have these needs met before I can do anything else, and the first one is safety. Obviously, we always have to feel safe. We always want to feel safe, and when we don't, our body starts to go hey, why are our nervous system go, starts to be dysregulated. Our brain is like what's happening? How do I fix this Right? We want to feel secure and we want to feel accepted. So what we're trying to do by understanding the trigger, noticing it and being aware of it is to create that safety for ourselves, bring our body back into regulation. So the first way that you can start to re regulate your body when you've been triggered and create that safety that you are seeking is to identify the trigger. Again, you don't necessarily have to understand why, the why behind it. It's helpful if you can, but it's not necessary. And so the first thing that you want to do is you want to identify the trigger and there's a couple of different ways you can do that whether or not you know where it's coming from, whether or not you know exactly what it was that triggered you. Again, you don't necessarily always have to. So the first thing that you can say when you recognize that your body is like very heightened, your nervous system is heightened into anxiety, heightened above its normal baseline, you can just say something like whoa, I can see that I'm triggered right now. Oh my gosh, I recognize that I am being triggered. After you recognize that you're being triggered, we want to validate yourself in this situation as much as possible. Try not to go into shame or blame or invalidating or judging yourself or feeling this way, telling yourself that you shouldn't be feeling this way, trying to talk yourself out of feeling this way, like you got triggered and it's okay. It's okay that you are feeling insecure, it's okay that you're feeling heightened, it's okay that you're feeling this way. We want to validate what is happening in your body, because the more you try and pretend or tell yourself that you shouldn't, or ask yourself why do you keep doing this, it makes it so that you can't actually identify and accept what is truly going on for you. The more we can step into acceptance of what is, the easier it is for us to move through that trigger that we're feeling. But we can never move through it when we won't even accept it, when we won't even recognize what's happening for us. So once you recognize okay, I am feeling triggered then we want to validate and you can say something like wow, I can see that I'm feeling very unsafe right now, or I'm feeling very scared, or I'm feeling very uncertain in this moment and it actually reminds me of if it reminds you of something a previous situation, a previous thing, a previous person, a previous time you can validate and recognize that and if not, you can just try and look for reasons why it makes sense that you would be feeling triggered in this way. Can you see any kind of similarities to something that has maybe happened before, to a person doing something, reacting some way, being some way saying something, smelling something and figure out why it might make sense that you would be feeling triggered right now, in this moment. Once you do that, it's really important to get yourself back to the here and now, back to the present moment, because, remember, healing happens in the present moment. Creating and feeling safety for yourself happens in the present moment. So how can you orient to the here and now? I have given dozens of ways for you in previous podcast episodes to ground yourself, to use a somatic exercise for yourself, to orient yourself right now, in this moment, find yourself that you're safe in the present moment, and then to be able to get your brain back online again. Remember, when we are dysregulated, when our nervous system is heightened and we go into our fight flight response, our brain goes offline. Our prefrontal cortex has a very hard time making decisions, making good choices, thinking about things in a very logical, problem-solving way, and so what we want to do, after we have recognized that we're being triggered and why it makes sense, and got ourselves to the here and now, what we want to do is we want to bring our brain back online as quickly as we possibly can. It may take a couple of days, even it may take a couple of hours. It may take one minute, right. It just depends on how practiced you are, how triggered you were in the moment and a lot of different factors. But the more you do this activity, the better you get at it and the easier it becomes over time. Normally it's not always going to be perfect at something, but we can get better at it. So how do we bring our brain back online? We want to create that immediate safety and stabilization for ourselves in the moment. You can ask yourself something like what does my body need right now, in this moment? Or what do I need right now, what does safety look like for me in this moment? And then you provide that for yourself. Whatever that looks like, whatever that answer is, you give that to yourself. What does love look like for me right now, and how can I provide that to myself? I'm going to give you an exercise to try and kind of track your triggers throughout a week. I'm going to kind of lay it out for you. You can write it out on a piece of paper and track your triggers and start to become more aware. Remember, we're just trying to notice and understand as much as possible so that we can diminish how often we feel them and we can choose our response. But as you're going through this exercise over the next, however long you decide to do it, you could do it for a week, you could do it for a couple of days, you could do it for an afternoon, even if you start to notice that triggers are happening very often. But as you're doing this, your brain might be like this is stupid. Why are we doing this? This is too hard. I hate this. You'll never get it, you'll never figure it out, you'll never understand. Like this is what our brains do, right, our brains like to tell us that we're the worst and that we're doing it wrong, and that will never be enough. It's just a very common thread that most women have running through their brains. And so when your brain wants to offer you those ideas, some empowering thoughts that you might choose to think in those moments that you might choose to redirect to or come back at, that mean girl voice in your head, it might be something like listen, I don't have to understand everything about this trigger right now. Right now, I'm just gathering information. Right now, I'm just trying to figure out a little bit more about this trigger. Or you could say something like there is a way out of feeling these triggers all the time, and I'm figuring out what that looks like for me. So remember these empowering thoughts. They don't have to be perfect. You can come up with someone, your own, something that feels more real and more resonant with you. Play around with it. Doesn't have to be the ones that I gave you, but just remind your brain, your body, yourself that it's possible for you to diminish how often you feel the triggers, how often you are triggered, and again, to create a more intentional response to how you show up when you are triggered. Alright, so this exercise that I want you to try out again, you get to choose how long you do it, but on a piece of paper, I just want you to put this across the top, right? You need six sections. First, one's going to just be the day and the time, right, so you notice you get triggered. Okay, write down the day and the time that it happened. Then the location when were you when you felt triggered? Were you in the car? Were you in your bedroom? Were you watching TV? Were you out and about? Where was the location? And then write down a short description of what was happening when you got triggered. What was the thing? What was the actual trigger that you noticed when you started to feel dysregulated? What was going on? Just write out a very short description, five, ten words describing what happened, and then I want you to try and pay attention to what might have been happening five minutes, in the five minutes before you were triggered, if there was anything that you noticed for yourself that was happening in your brain, that was happening in your body, that was happening around you. And just notice, because sometimes what is going on in our brain before what we're thinking about, maybe what's happening in our body, what we're feeling, can lead to. What might be going on when we become triggered, can lead it to that reaction that we didn't want and maybe not Remember. This is all just gathering information. We're not using it to judge ourselves. We're not using it to shame ourselves. We're not using it to berate ourselves. All we want is information. Then I want you to do a body scan. You want to notice the physical sensations that you're feeling in your body when you were triggered. Where did you feel it? What did it feel like? Was it a tightening of your throat? Was it a tightening in your stomach? Did you feel queasy in your stomach? Was it hard to breathe? Notice the sensations in your body and describe them physiologically. And then, lastly, I just want you to do that intensity scale of like one to ten. One is not really intense at all, I felt fine. And ten is this was the worst trigger I've ever had. I thought I was having a panic attack. It was terrible, right. So just notice, on that scale of one to ten, what were you feeling when you felt triggered, how intense was that trigger? And just try and keep track. This is a great way to recognize how often you're being triggered. Start to notice what it is that's triggering you and then go through those steps that I gave you as you begin to notice these things. Let me go through them one more time. You want to recognize that you're being triggered. Oh, I'm being triggered right now. And it makes sense, because then you want to orient to the here and now. Remember, get back to the present moment. Do a grounding exercise, a somatic exercise, some kind of orienting exercise, anchoring in blue, anything like that to get you to the here and now. And then you want to provide for yourself what you need right now, in this moment. This is going to help get your brain back online. And once your brain is back online, once you are regulated as much as possible in that moment, once you are safe and taken care of and you feel secure, that's when you get to decide for yourself okay, the next time I feel this trigger, how do I want to respond? Is there something that I can do for myself in preparation to this possible trigger? Showing up to respond in a different way than I did last time? How do I want to intentionally decide to show up? Who do I want to intentionally decide to show up as the next time I feel this, the next time this happens, and then work to do that as much as possible? Yes, it will be hard. Yes, it will be challenging. No, you won't be perfect at it. All of those things are okay. We can do hard things. Challenging ourselves makes us stronger and we are not going for perfection here. We are going for as much as we can and then loving ourselves and giving ourselves grace through the rest. You got this, my friends. Triggers are hard, and they're especially hard during divorce. But we can make it easier on ourselves by starting to recognize, notice, work through it and then decide intentionally how we want to respond, moving forward. Alright, my friends, thank you for being here. I love you so much. I will talk to you next week. Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's wwwkarin nelson coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.