Thinking about bad things happening doesn’t prevent them from happening. What it does do is make it much more likely that you will feel the physical ramifications of those negative experiences whether they take place or not. Our brains can’t tell the difference between when we are facing something stressful or we are just imagining something stressful. Considering the fact that we tend to dwell on things long before and after they actually happen, we extend the painful period for ourselves tenfold by experiencing any moment of discomfort over a hypothetical situation. Of course we have come to learn that the reason why so many of us do this is actually a result of past trauma and our brains trying to shield us from experiencing the same pain we have encountered before.
Living with an autoimmune disease can be very triggering because many of us live in a state of hypervigilance and the world is a trigger for us. There’s not really any place we feel safe from our symptoms because they’re with us everywhere we go. Some people are more triggered by physical circumstances such as exercise, or getting injured. Any kind of physical exertion can lead to a flare up or attack for them. In my case, I am well aware that my MS is primarily triggered by my emotions and stress levels. This causes me to feel extremely protective of my emotional wellbeing because it is tightly tethered to my physical wellbeing in a way that I cannot afford to tempt very often.
My fight or flight response kicks in when I feel as though someone is taking advantage of my sensitivity or using what they believe my weakness is against me. Even now, I am aware of when I am falling into negative thought patterns, and yet I still struggle to stop myself from having a visceral fear based response to the thoughts that come flooding into my head when I worry excessively about an outcome that I cannot control. In extreme circumstances, this can lead to uncontrollable shaking, tunnel vision, queasiness and a loss of my grasp on reality because in the past when I was experiencing these symptoms, I often felt them because I was in real danger. Because of that, any time I feel I might be put into a position where that could happen to me, physical reactions start to happen the minute my brain senses that I am feeling distressed.
When I feel this way, or I get a sense that my thought process seems to be getting ahead of itself, I turn to the person who has known me my whole life and understands me without any judgement. Luckily, besides being patient, nurturing and always a safe haven, she is a licensed therapist and my Mom. There is no one who can manage me the way that she does because what I experience with her is complete trust and familiarity. She was there with me through all of the formative years and experiences in my life that shaped me, both good and bad. She knew the little girl who grew up feeling ostracized and ashamed for expressing her feelings and had her reality and identity admonished by authority figures. She fiercely went to bat for that little girl back then and she knows exactly how to speak to her now when she surfaces and spends a lot of the time worrying that people will exploit her sensitivity and use it as a weapon against her.
I had an experience this morning that made me feel as though I was being completely misunderstood and accused of something that hadn’t even happened yet. When talking to my mom about it, she listened and she validated my experience. This part is key because she wasn’t telling me that I was wrong for having fears or even that I was wrong for worrying they might happen. She was able to help me redirect my thought process towards examining the subtext of what I was having such a strong reaction to. She simply asked me if I thought that it might be possible that I was using this experience to finish my emotional work from something that had happened to me a long time ago that I still felt was unresolved. That really struck a chord with me because I’d never thought of it that way. I was looking at this issue I was faced with through the lens of someone who’d just been treated the way that I was in the past about something totally unrelated. It was as if my reaction to what happened this morning happened simultaneously with the event that this trauma stemmed from in the first place.
When we are triggered by something, we have to immediately try to ask ourselves if we are responding solely to the issue at hand, or if we feel we are trying to defend ourselves in response to all of the past infractions against us in that moment that we weren’t able to before. When we feel like our response seems to be disproportionate to what’s going on, it’s very likely that the reason for that isn’t because we are overly sensitive or we tend to take things too personally. It is because we aren’t reacting to that one instance alone. By being triggered, we are transported emotionally to past circumstances that made us feel unsafe. We flood with emotion and feel like we don’t know how this got to be as bad as it did, but all we know is how we are feeling and it feels like the world is ending.
Far too often, we have mischaracterized this as being dramatic or overly sensitive. Those words are so damaging for someone like me who has been to hell and back a few times and I know that I am sensitive, but I strongly resent being called overly sensitive. I refuse to believe that feelings make you weak. Having feelings about something is often harder to do. Whether it is openly loving people, caring about issues, defending what you know is right and standing up for yourself and others, allowing ourselves to feel is a lot harder to do than being apathetic about all of those things.
Learning about your emotions and your triggers, where they came from, why they are happening, and learning how to speak to yourself like your own therapist is a skill that should be a top priority for all of us. Remind yourself that you have the power to change how you feel about something. Your first reaction doesn’t have to be your final reaction to something. It is okay to pause and reassess, it’s okay to not respond to something until you’re ready so that you can protect your emotional privacy and work through the things that you need to in order to formulate the response you ultimately feel is best.
Dealing with trauma requires us to continuously reexamine ourselves in ways that can feel as flattering as a 3-way mirror under florescent lighting. The point is that we have to allow ourselves the space to see things from different angles and decide how we can set aside the extra emotions that don’t serve our purpose at the moment and put our best foot forward. If we don’t like what we see, we have the power to try something else on for size. We don’t owe it to anyone to respond to something before we are ready to, and we need to make sure that we sift through what is a response to the past versus what we are experiencing in the present. By doing this, things feel a little less scary and insurmountable. The best thing we can do for ourselves is try to simplify things so that they’re easier to manage and hopefully, we will eventually be able to take things as they come; informed by our past experiences, but not triggered by them.
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