HOT BRAINTIME: Triggers and flashbacks are clues to our dissociated abuse

HOT BRAINTIME: Triggers and flashbacks are clues to our dissociated abuse, little ‘pop-up’ reminders of things from the past that our brains have interpreted as danger. They can therefore point us towards what we still need to process. So whilst being difficult to deal with, they can also become useful guides on our ten stage journey of recovery. Rather than being ashamed of triggers, we can start to see that they are our brain’s best attempt to keep us safe by giving us maximum warning time to respond to potential threats. The problem lies in the fact that our amygdala, which functions as a kind of ‘smoke alarm’ in the brain, responds so quickly and so automatically to potential threats (within 7 milliseconds and outside of conscious thought), that if we were in a lot of ‘fires’ as a child, we react without even thinking to the merest ‘whiff of smoke.’

This automatic, hardwired survival response is built into every single human being, but it has become over-responsive in the case of people who have suffered repeated trauma, especially in early life.  We are going to look at what we can do to turn off the smoke alarm once it has been triggered, or in other words how we can develop strategies for turning our front brains on and our back brains off. We will also look at what we can do to turn down the sensitivity of the amygdala, or the brain’s ‘smoke alarm’ over time so that we are less likely to react unnecessarily to ‘burnt toast.’


 Our brain is a single yet highly complex organ with many interrelating parts or areas, and yet it can be helpful to think of it in terms of two separate units: front and back.  some of the problems that we face as dissociative survivors is that the connections between different parts of our brains are not as well developed as they might be, and that is certainly true for the highway between the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ brain. Our front brain plans and considers and assesses and thinks; and our survival-based back brain, which is mainly unconscious, acts to keep us safe with automatic responses in the face of threat and danger. When we are triggered, we could say that our back brains light up and our front brains go dark. We become panicky, impulsive, unable to think, even unable to speak. That can be a lifesaving response when the danger is for real, like a mugging or a near-miss on the motorway, but it’s not so helpful when our smoke-alarm smells ‘smoke’ that is a reminder of a traumatic episode from years ago and where there is no actual current danger. (Whatever we feel, memories can’t actually hurt us.) So it is imperative that we know what we can do at that moment of being triggered to get our thinking, front brains back online and to turn down the emergency response of our back brains.

Of course, the first and most important thing to realise is that we can actually do something. We believe that the core essence of trauma is helplessness – it is being overwhelmed and powerless where there is absolutely nothing that we can do to stop what is happening to us. For many of us who have gone on to develop a dissociative addiction, that sense of helplessness lives on in a very powerful but often unconscious way, infecting everything that we do with a sense that we can’t. It is a habit that our brains developed in childhood because chronically, over years and years, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of times, we experienced traumatic events where we experienced intense helplessness. Our brains grow and develop in response to our experience, especially repeated experience. And so quite without any sense of choice, most of us developed a chronic sense of learned helplessness: this can become a default state that we are triggered back into, either when we are reminded directly of our original trauma or when we are hit by a circumstance in the here and now that renders us helpless again.

And being triggered – being hit by an automatic body-brain response where adrenaline is pumped into our bloodstream, our thinking brains shut down and our survival-based back brains light up – can also make us feel helpless! After all, it all happens outside of our control, without our permission, even when we are doing our best to stop it. So it is easy to believe that there is nothing that we can do about it, and we can start to restrict our life to cater for it – we give up work, we don’t bother to try to sleep at night, we rely on prescription medication or other drugs, or alcohol, to try to numb things down. But the good news is that although triggers happen within 7 milliseconds, we can be ready for them, we can develop a strategy for managing them, and we can even begin to turn down the sensitivity of our ‘smoke alarm’ over time so that we are less likely to be triggered in the future. The net result, of course, is that life then starts to become a whole lot easier and we can concentrate on more than just surviving an hour at a time.

So what therefore can we do when we are triggered? We believe that we need a ‘go to’ strategy, something that is easy to remember even when our front brains are screeching to a halt, and something that works in a variety of settings. What We developed for ourself was something that came out of understanding a little bit about the front brain, and how three general areas of the front brain, with their own particular characteristics and peculiarities, can be engaged to help us get back in control again when an unexpected trigger knocks us off course.