Skills to Heal: Recognizing Your Body’s Signals
Everyone’s body reacts differently. We can group responses, but your body is going to process those responses differently. This is why it’s important to not only know your triggers - but to know the physical signals in your body that signal a trigger happening.
Remember, these are survival systems. They won’t always make sense, but they do need to be noticed.
For those who have never experienced a trigger I will go through the steps.
1. Something occurs that is tied back to a traumatic incident.
2. The body’s survival system reacts with one of the five fear responses. (Fight, Flight, Faint, Flood, Freeze)
3. The person looses all sense of time and is dragged back to the original traumatic incident - because trauma and survival systems don’t understand time. Time is a logic system function. Survival systems only know NOW.
4. The person is in the traumatic incident. They are re-living it, even though they are standing right in front of you.
Physically in their body they may experience tightness of the chest, changes in vision, dizziness, sweating and inability to breathe.
Their eyes may be wide, they may be unable to speak. They might be physically unable to move, pass out/faint, or grab onto the nearest thing that isn’t a threat. They could also knock you out - because they’re mistaking you for the threat.
Also, all the emotions could come to the surface and you could just see chaotic everything - from fear, anger to complete meltdown with tears and agony on a toddler level. This is not to make fun of them, it just means that emotionally they got overwhelmed and didn’t know which emotion to deal with first and the body said, “All. All the emotions. Uncensored. Right now.”
These responses are where the breathing techniques come into service. A survivor may have some control, but not always, because again - they just re-experienced something horrible. This doesn’t excuse their actions if they hit you - but they should be able to explain what triggered them later. And the other person needs to be able to listen and understand. I get pretty salty on this topic of listening and understanding even if it makes no sense to you.
Because triggers and the events that follow are so physically and emotionally draining as well as disruptive to those who experience them its important for you to be able to recognize the start of your own survival system and know what to do not only for yourself, but to help those who you can trust.
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