What It Means To Feel Triggered and How EMDR Therapy Can Help

Everyone deserves the chance to heal the hurt they have experienced from trauma. The term triggered has gained a lot of attention in the last decade, some good and some bad. This post dives into what it means to feel triggered and how EMDR therapy can help.

One of the everyday things I hear as clients enter therapy is the feeling overwhelmed and frustrated by the rate at which "triggers" invade their life. The term "trigger" has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, and I feel like people think one of several ways about it in conversation. Through the years, the term has been trivialized, and some see it as a silly word that relates more to being offended, having hurt feelings, or disagreeing with something or someone. Others resonate with the word and feel it accurately describes their trauma response and how they feel when unexpectedly thinking back to a traumatic memory. In comparison, still, others downsize their responses as just minor annoyances as a part of their life. 

So what does it mean to feel triggered?

Being triggered is a trauma response that can occur when someone has experienced trauma (little or big). The trauma survivors' nervous system has been unable to process this trauma because their thoughts, emotions, and bodies are stuck in that trauma. This means that when something reminds the brain or body of the trauma, that person is sent into having a trauma response. They feel triggered. This can happen anywhere and can look different for different people. Some may feel on edge, tense, anxious, or irritated with seemingly minor annoyances of life. For others, they may feel numb, just moving through the motions. For others still, it may look like an even greater sensitivity to touch, light/dark, or sounds. These are all normal trauma responses, and if I were to list all of the different possible trauma responses, this post would be much longer. 

EMDR Therapy Akin to Riding a Bike

I find it helpful to think of EMDR therapy as similar to cleaning a wound. As a kid, if you were riding your bike and fell off, chances are you scrapped your shins, your knees, maybe your forearms and elbows. Gravel might have stuck to your skin in a mess of gooey blood, and there's a good chance it stung quite a bit as you limped your bike home. Before cleaning the wound with peroxide or soap and water, you had to get the gravel out. Running water over the damage until most of the rocks had fallen off, there might have been stubborn little pieces that refused to let go. At that point, maybe a caregiver stepped in with a pair of tweezers picking every tiny rock out before cleaning the wound and putting a band-aid on it. This is similar to what most people think of EMDR therapy because it's often just known for processing the trauma or cleaning the wound. Before this part, however, comes the resourcing, the grounding, and the stabilizing. This is akin to learning with training wheels, mastering the road and feeling secure, and having a loving adult hold the back of your seat and run beside your bike as you learn without training wheels. We build a foundation first before we can ride on our own and before we process the trauma that most people are worried about. 

How EMDR Therapy Can Help When Dealing With Triggers 

Triggers come from trauma, and the point of EMDR therapy is to help you build resources to feel stable and process the trauma that has left your brain and body feeling stuck. EMDR therapy can help to clean out the wound that hasn't had the chance to heal. As you can process trauma, little or big, one event or multiple small ones throughout your life, you may find new perspectives and shifts in thoughts you once owned as your truth. It can be scary, challenging, and complex, as waves of emotions can sometimes feel overwhelming. With my whole heart, I believe that the therapeutic relationship, resources, coping skills, support systems, and your internal strengths can be drawn upon in these times to help you through difficulty, so trauma does not have to continue to haunt your life. If you are interested in finding out more about EMDR therapy. In that case, whether you live in Tampa or anywhere in Florida, I encourage you to consider a free consultation with me. We can discuss if I'm the right fit for you and if EMDR therapy is what you need as you pursue the next phase of your healing journey.