Break the Cycle of Silence

Triggers are everywhere. In your relationships, in the words and actions of people around you, in the sensations that you feel… In smells and tastes, sights and sounds. The ideas you were raised with create a schema of beliefs you have about yourself. The fears you had as a child, the fears you attained after not gaining what you needed to thrive and grow, carry on into the present as a part of you. The only way to stop the triggers from happening over and over again is to first become aware of them, use techniques such as grounding yourself to manage them, and to accept them. To accept the painful roots of a trigger is not an easy experience, but it can be made easier by understanding step one – awareness. Noticing the event that occurred right before your trigger can give you an idea of what childhood fear the current situation you’re in is related to. There is no “making” people understand. They either do or they do not. You can help and teach and guide, but explaining something to somebody should be to help them if that is what they wish, not so that they can become someone they are not and help you. Only you can help you. My core beliefs, or schemas, were mostly of rejection, abandonment and subjugation. For example, a break up was that much more devastating for me, because of the intense fear I had of rejection. My stepdad telling me from a young age that my family would turn against me made me become excessively conscious of myself – I had to be good, sweet, loving and kind in order to receive or even deserve love from others. Abandonment fears arose when mum took us away from our dad and then left us in an unsafe place to go to work. It felt as if mum and dad no longer cared for us because their priorities weren’t directly being there when we needed them most. The subjugation schema found me accepting defeat, putting others needs and desires before my own, feeling that the things I wanted and needed in my life did not matter or that if I disagreed that I would be rejected or in danger. My experiences shaped my future and only through learning and understanding them have I managed to move forward from them. Every challenge I encountered since the abuse had to do with a trigger. Each trigger was a strong or seemingly irrational emotion for the circumstance at hand, but it was a clue to finding out the real problem. The problem that stemmed from unresolved issues from childhood that had decided now was the time to present themselves in my life. You know a trigger when it presents itself because it is not just a strong emotion that paralyses you or leaves you hiding behind your coping skills the same way you did as a frightened child. It is nightmares and memories that take your breath away while you are trying to just “get on with it.” It is feeling your heart pound out of your chest and noticing your breathing has stopped. Your palms sweating, tears welling up behind your eyes. An urge to disappear or a wish to be invisible. A knife in your throat or a knot in your stomach. A ringing in your ears and a throbbing in your head. Heat rising all through your body. SIGH. I catch my breath. I always knew from these clues that I was ready to delve a little deeper into the darkness of my mind and find a way to heal the new found broken pieces. Just as a movie starts off gently and gets increasingly intense as it goes on and more in depth as you understand who all the characters are; your mind slowly overtime as you get stronger and wiser allows you to delve deeper and find out more about yourself and your life than you ever thought possible. Without a love and acceptance for yourself, it is extremely difficult because you can end up fighting or running away from this frightening invitation. Without love, your mind probably won’t torture you and you’ll live in a coping mechanism with a lid on your old wounds, possibly ignoring triggers, falling down the same holes with the same problems over and over again. You give yourself a gift when you accept the invitation to find more links and work through more problems. A part of you becomes the healthy adult that you never had as a child. You’ll feel the memories again as if they happened yesterday, but you will cry and scream and release the pain. The rewarding part is, once you’ve let it all out, that same problem can’t hurt you or hold you back in life anymore. You are instead left with a growing healthy adult self that can banish the internalised negative words from the unhealthy adults you had in your life, nurture your inner child and put restraints on the pain so you don’t allow yourself to self-harm.