What is a Trigger

In recent years, “feeling triggered” has been used to express upset. While feeling triggered is a form of upset, it is a very specific form. Being triggered means feeling upset in a manner that is not rational or proportional to the situation at hand because of historical trauma. Being triggered is an automatic negative response to a person or situation. For example, if a partner cheated on you and you see someone who reminds you of their affair partner, feeling upset with the context of the historical trauma makes sense. However, feeling upset at the mere sight of someone without the historical trauma or a connection to the person is irrational. The automatic negative response is worth investigation, but it is not proportional to the situation. Without a connection to historical trauma, it is not a trigger response.

Knowing whether or not you are actually being triggered by historical trauma is not always straight forward, as our mind can suppress or hide traumatic events from us. One way to figure out if your automatic negative response is actually a triggered response is to take a moment and walk back through your mind to when and how this negative response came about. When is the first time you remember having a negative response to situations or people like this? When was the first time you encountered a situation or person like this? By asking yourself time questions, you will be able to activate your episodic memory. Our episodic memory is our long-term memory where we store details of events. By accessing the details of past events, we can then examine if our automatic response is due to bias or trauma.

It is important to know that not all negative automatic responses indicate a past trauma and being triggered. Biases and preferences as well as lack of sleep, mood, depression, anxiety and a whole host of other contributing factors can create irrational or automatic negative responses that we don’t understand. Using our episodic memory, we can investigate our biases. Sometimes an automatic negative response can be caused by revulsion of something in the environment. Some people have strong connections to environmental preferences or sensitivities to specific environmental aspects such as smell and color. Biases against specific things can also cause an automatic negative response. If you find yourself experiencing a lot of automatic negative responses, you may be struggling with depression or anxiety. Doing a mood inventory and checking in with where you are emotionally can help create a clearer picture as to why your are reacting the way that you are and help you find the answers to how to deconstruct and reduce your automatic negative responses.