Triggers, trigger warnings, have been in the news a lot lately. Talk of trying to keep everyone safe in college lectures, panels at science fiction conventions, news items even, as if the world should be wrapped up in cotton wool and bubble wrap like your great-grandmother’s china so it doesn’t get scratched, cracked, or broken; but people aren’t dishes that only come out at the holidays. People move through the world every day to go to work, to school, to vacation, to . . . life. If you spend all your time trying to be protected from anything that could possibly upset you, how will you ever grow strong enough to overcome it? A trigger doesn’t go away but we can grow to the point where it no longer controls us. We can master our triggers and own ourselves to the point where we are no longer subject to the word, phrase, events that once made us so afraid, or angry, or upset. We can take back ourselves, our lives, all the words, all the memories, and we can own them again rather than them owning us. I swear to you that this is true because I’ve done it, but here’s the trick – you must not hide from your triggers.
If you hide from them and avoid them forever, perhaps you’ll never be “triggered” again, but you also give up parts of your life and yourself forever. Whatever made you feel like a victim, or took your sense of safety, will forever win, because you haven’t faced your demons, you’ve given ground to them. Old maps used to come to the edge of the known lands and then write two phrases, “Here be Dragons,” or “Here be Demons,” which meant that beyond that point the map makers couldn’t guarantee safe passage because the unknown was full of monsters. If we avoid triggering events and allow people to keep us “safe” from everything then the maps of our lives are not edged with monsters, the maps of our lives have sections right in the middle of them where a sign says, “Here be Demons,” right in the middle of our life. The middle of our life is full of places we pass through on a regular basis, so we pass that sign every week, maybe everyday, a sign that reminds us that here is a place that was once a part of our life and now it’s too scary to enter. To me, that was a constant reminder of what frightened me and made me feel like a victim, every time I stepped around that area of my life rather than walked through it I would feel a little more scared, a little more unsure that I was strong enough to do what needed doing, because the demons had won, they’d claimed a piece of my life forever.
How I faced my triggers was by walking into that place, those words, that moment with the big glaring warning sign over it, and I faced my demons. Was it scary? Yes! But every time I faced something that triggered me I got a little bit of myself back, I reclaimed pieces of my life, of me, from the demons; and every time I did that the “demons” got smaller and weaker, which meant I felt bigger and stronger, because that’s what triggers are, they are ways for things that hurt us to make us feel small and weak forever, but we aren’t trapped with our demons anymore, we survived, we moved forward, we built a life. I refuse to let the bad things control me by making me avoid parts of my life. I will reclaim all of it, every last bad word, hurtful phrase, frightening moment, all the pain, all of it is mine and helped make me who I am today. One of the things I discovered as I faced the pain was amazing to me – I didn’t die. Even having to live through the painful event by facing the trigger didn’t kill me, and Nietzsche had it right, that which doesn’t kill me really does make me stronger. My goal is to live the quote a little differently, “That which does not kill me had better run, because I’m coming for it.”
“Destroy your personal demons, use their corpses as fuel to light your way.” LKH
For those of you who may need help, please see the following links, courtesy of Dr. R. Kieran