![]() Sadly, one of the curses your abuser left you with was this trigger. Do therapeutic work to heal your trauma response.If you make yourself known and are vulnerable, you can lean on other trusted folks, allowing them to speak into what they see. Get feedback from trusted friends and advisors.This will give you a chance to slow down and reorient. Take a break, allow your amygdala a chance to calm down, write about the experience, go shoot hoops, play guitar, or go for a walk in nature. Keep this in mind as you are working through your trigger. They are not the enemy, and they are not your primary abuser. Try to stay aware of your partner’s humanity. Maintain eye contact with your partner.Breathe, place a hand over the place in your body where you feel your anxiety/fear. Here are some practical steps to help with de-escalation. Take a moment to locate yourself in these four categories and write a page about how you engage in your own triggers when they arrive. What are you prone to do when you are triggered? Do you rage, attempting to power over your partner? Do you become busy and anxious? Do you go silent and avoid confrontation? Or do you become needy and over-apologetic? These are all examples of Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. (The graph below from provides more info on each response.)īe aware of your trauma responses. Mona DeKoven Fishbane writes in her book Loving with the Brain in Mind: Neurobiology and Couple Therapy, “The amygdala is constantly scanning for danger and sets off an alarm when a threat is detected this alarm sends messages throughout the body and brain that trigger fight-or-flight behavior.” In addition to triggering fight or flight, this alarm in our brain also causes two lesser-known trauma responses, freeze or fawn. These landmines are common in relationships, and depending on your emotional health or your partner’s, they can be plentiful or few, but they can wreak havoc if not tended to properly. It’s vital that we learn how to navigate these dangerous fields within ourselves and with our partner. These landmines grow from unprocessed and unhealed wounds in our story and create tender places within us that can cause us to overact or project unfairly onto our partners. ![]() The truth is, these coping strategies worked when we were young and even helped us survive trauma, but are now hindering our ability to have a healthy relationship. Many times we learned these responses to help us cope with traumatic situations. Relationship coach Kyle Benson defines a trigger as “an issue that is sensitive to our heart-typically something from our childhood or a previous relationship.” Another way I like to define this concept is as a trauma response. Understanding the fact that these stress responses are not choices but are inbuilt management techniques developed over time to help us to survive can hopefully help us to let ourselves off the hook for the ways we might have navigated past experiences and give us more compassion and awareness should we have the honour of being trusted with someone else’s story.At our counseling center, we deal regularly with trauma triggers in relationships. These responses are triggered in an instant, before we can make a conscious analysis of the situation and decide on the best solution, they come from deeply primitive and instinctual parts of the brain, parts which exist purely to keep us alive. It’s important to remember when looking at our own and others past responses to traumatic experience that these are not choices and are not made with the logical parts of our brain. And that’s really not surprising, given all the shame, and victim blaming that surrounds people who survive physical, mental or sexual trauma or abuse. The last response is one that has in the past had very little attention given to it and is rarely talked about. This stress response system is designed to help us react quickly and effectively to get to safety when faced with threat. These are Friend, Fight, Flight, Freeze, Flop and Faun (more information on these responses in my video ‘The Truth About Fight Or Flight’).
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