168: Feeling Triggered by Current Events

Firstly, because this work is cited all the time even in current media. I was recently sent a book for review that talks about the positive impacts of moderate levels of stress and actually draws out a Yerkes Dodson curve for the reader and goes on to say that, “A moderate amount of stress and time pressure and role conflict can all enhance your creativity.” I was pretty curious about that. So I went and checked out the study that was cited in support of that claim. And it was a meta-analysis of 76 experimental studies which found decidedly mixed evidence of the relationship between stressors and creativity. These authors found that yes, their preponderance of the evidence indicates there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and creative performance. Low stress-inducing situations caused increasing creative performance while high stress-inducing situations cause decreases in creative performance. But, and there's a pretty big BUT here. Two kinds of threats were particularly stressful for study participants social evaluative threats meaning an aspect of the self that could be negatively judged by others including things like videotaping the participants being told you're being evaluated or being compared negatively to an individual or group and uncontrollable elements where participants couldn't affect the outcomes of the test, avoid negative consequences, stop a negative experience, or succeed despite their best effort. The more of these kinds of stresses were present the worse the participant’s creativity was and if we think about it, these are exactly the kinds of stresses we're thinking about when we're being triggered by current events. We aren't looking at time pressure or competition when we're thinking about these world events we find stressful, we're looking at threats to people's identity, and things that are happening over which we have literally no control whatsoever. When these kinds of stressors form the background of our daily lives It's no wonder we have a hard time, partly because thinking about those events takes up some of our mental capacity, which means there's less mental capacity available for us to dedicate to our children. So why do we find these events stressful? What is it about them that causes us to have this reaction of worry or panic? When we refer to feeling triggered, we're actually using a clinical description that means the panic we're feeling is connected to trauma that we felt in the past. If we're feeling worry or panic and it isn't connected to past trauma then we call that feeling flooded. The experience can be very similar but if you aren't responding in this way because of trauma you've experienced, then you aren't really being triggered. Since we're now looking at our trauma history, we'll go ahead and use the word triggered. So when we hear about people being disenfranchised so they aren't allowed to vote or their votes won't be counted, It may remind us of a time when in our childhoods someone didn't listen to us. Perhaps we had a parent who was an alcoholic or just stressed out of their minds themselves and who used to berate us and put us down, and belittle us when we were young. And nobody stood up to protect us. And now when we see someone else's views being ignored and told that they don't matter it reminds us of that hurt that we used to feel when we were little, or perhaps we see the news about a Black person being killed as they go out for a run or lie sleeping in their own beds, and perhaps even subconsciously, it reminds us of times when someone who was close to us was violent towards us when we were little and couldn't defend ourselves. The brain is a strange thing and it copes with these kinds of things in very strange ways. One thing I do want to be cautious about here is equating feelings that White people might be having about these kinds of events with White folks in the Black community experience. I'm not trying to say that White people suffer just as much as Black people do when a White person murders a Black person, quite the opposite actually, since the past and ongoing traumas that Black people have experienced as a result of White supremacy, probably make this even more triggering for them, but it's not my place to speak to that. It absolutely seems possible for a person who isn't Black to feel triggered when a Black person is killed, if it reminds them of the massive injustice they experienced in their lives especially when they were children, and even smaller injustice is feel really big. You might have blocked these memories so you no longer have a conscious recognition of what happened especially if these events happened when you were very young, you might latch on to a sight or sound, or smell that happened at the time and that caught your attention or that perhaps you use to distract yourself from the difficult events. So maybe there were sunflowers on the kitchen table which was really unusual or the tap was dripping as one of your parents was violent toward the other one or toward you. Later in life, you might see flowers on a kitchen table or hear a tap dripping and suddenly all comes rushing back to you, and you might not even realize why. You might have grown up using power over others as a way to make yourself feel more safe so that nobody could treat you the way that you were treated as a child but that most likely came at a cost as you hid the part of yourself that felt small and scared and lonely and convinced yourself that that part of you didn't exist anymore, it was still there all along and when current events remind you of what it's like to feel small and scared and lonely, it becomes overwhelming. So when these things happen and we recognize we're in a moment of stress the classic therapy technique is to practice grounding, connecting with your senses here and this present moment and reminding yourself that you aren't there in the unsafe place anymore, that you're here in this moment where you're safe. And then you work to create a pause between whatever was the triggering event and your reaction which gives you time to reregulate yourself so you're no longer reacting in the heat of the moment. You bring a sense of compassion to yourself and your experience acknowledging that this is hard which often then further calms you, and then you reappraise asking yourself, whether there's another potential explanation for what happened, whether it's as bad as it had initially seemed and whether you can believe the story that your overactive left brain is telling you about your experience. And from there, you can respond to your child if it was their behavior that triggered you or to the current events in a way that's aligned with your values, rather than just reacting. If all of that sounds super difficult I'm not going to sugarcoat it and imply that it isn't it is, it absolutely is, and that's a big reason why I spend 10 entire weeks working with parents on it in my taming your triggers workshop. In that workshop, we help you to see the real reasons why you feel triggered by your child's behavior and help you to heal from those things. At the same time, you learn new tools for navigating these difficult situations with your children so you can understand why they do the things that drive you up the wall and work with them to uncover their needs that are underneath their behavior and your needs as well. The vast majority of the time you will find it is possible to meet both your child's needs and your needs, so you aren't triggered as often anymore, because you don't feel triggered when your needs are met. We discussed the idea of our overactive left brains with Dr. Chris Neubauer, in Episode 113, on “No self no problem,” our brains spend a good deal of the time telling stories about what's happening to us as a way of trying to understand it and a lot of the time the stories it tells aren't really grounded in reality. There's some interesting experimental evidence on this with people who have had the connection between the two halves of their brain cut which used to be a treatment for epilepsy, our right eye are connected to the left side of our brains, and our left eye are connected to the right side of our brains, so you can cover the person's right eye and show them a message that only their left eye sees that says stand up, and then they go ahead and stand up. Their right eye didn't see that message and so the left side of their brain has no idea why they stood up, but then you verbally asked them, “Why did you stand up?” And because our language centers are in the left side of our brains, we're asking the left brain something it knows nothing about. And those people will say something like, “Oh, I stood up because my leg was stiff, or I was thirsty, so I was going to get a drink.” Obviously, neither of those things are true, the person stood up because they saw a piece of paper telling them to stand up but their left brain didn't know that so it made up the best story it could to explain what the body had done. Our brains do this all the time. They remember all the stories we've told ourselves in the past and they use that information plus the limited information we have about this new situation because we can never know everything there is to know about a situation, and they make up a story that fits the new information into what we already know as best we can. And of course, the view our brains have is a biased view. It's distorted by all the things that have happened to us for better or worse. If we had a stable life as a child and felt confident that most people in our lives were basically good and looked out for us and had our best intentions at heart, then we're more likely to interpret an ambiguous situation today as being not so bad. Yes, it might be difficult but if we didn't feel judged by our parents or caregivers, or other people who were important in our lives, and if we had a sense of autonomy, which meant somebody would listen to us and try to understand us, and our ideas would actually have an impact on what happened to us, and it probably won't rock our world. But if we did feel judged by our parent, or caregiver, or by society more broadly if we're talking about something like racism, or if we didn't have the experience of being listened to, and being able to make decisions that affect our lives, like for example, if we had traditional parents who believe that they are the ones who should be in charge, and make all the decisions about what we were allowed to do, and how we're allowed to express our thoughts and feelings, and even whether we're allowed to express our thoughts and feelings, and it's not so surprising that suddenly being in a position where something about our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and identity is threatened, and we lack a sense of control over the event that's happening now, then, of course, we're going to feel triggered.

Our left brains are busy trying to make sense of the information about the new threat and because it's trying to fit that in with all the other stories it has made up over the years, to help us cope with the ways our parents treated us, It perceives this new threat to be ding, ding, ding. Really big deal. So then our task is to remind ourselves that we're here now. We're safe. By grounding ourselves in this present moment and that we don't need to react in the same way that we would have reacted when we were threatened as a child but one thing that all the books and blog posts and other resources I've seen on this topic doesn't address is what happens if the current threat isn't just reminding us of a long past threat, but it's actually threatening to us or someone we love today. What happens if we're transgender? or we have a child who's transgender? and our government rolls back protections for transgender people, which emboldened people who think that transgender people are wrong in some way. What happens if we're indigenous and over 80% of Indigenous men and women have experienced some form of violence in their lives, with more than half of Indigenous women having experienced sexual violence, the majority of which was perpetrated by someone who was not indigenous, which means that a threat is not just some remote idea that we can remind ourselves isn't relevant to our lives anymore, but which may still be a clear and present danger. And what if we're Black and we see that Black people can't go to the corner shop or go for a run? Or even sleep in their own beds without being killed? How are we supposed to ground with that?

This stirs the pot. So the next effort to make a change is happening from a different baseline with a different set of conditions which makes new things seem possible that hadn't seen possible before. As we go through this process our identities are reconfirmed and our sense of agency is expanded. When we combine this with our mindfulness practices, we find ourselves better able to cope with the challenges that life throws at us, and we aren't just waiting around for things to change and for our chance to vote for someone who will do something differently. We're also taking action to actually change things that really affect us, which changes our circumstances, as well as our view of ourselves and what we're capable of, and it turns out that doing this work and community is critical. When I asked Dean Spade about whether he gets overwhelmed by the many mutual aid projects he works on, he said he doesn't really because being in community with others, and working on projects to reclaim our agency is actually healing for us. It isn't something that depletes us. It's something that restores us. I see all the time the ways that people make huge progress on their healing journey when they're in community with others, I'm thinking of a particular exchange that happened in the Taming Your Triggers workshop that started last February, and both of the parents who were involved in it gave me permission to share it with you, although I'm abbreviating their names to S and C. So we have a space in our private community where parents can share the successes they're having along their journey and one parent C, had posted because she had agreed to play soccer in the house with her six-and-a-half-year-old son for 20 minutes. And when the 20 minutes rolled around he got very upset and told her that she didn't care about him, and C, reminded herself of the tools we've been learning and she connected with what her need was, which was for some rest, and to stop running around. She offered to be a goalie for her son, but he still wasn't happy about it and continued to protest, and she reminded herself she is allowed to have this boundary, and he's also entitled to have his reaction. It wasn't her job to fix, heal, squash or otherwise make his feelings go away any sooner than he needed them to. She was able to sit through his upset without becoming flooded or triggered, which was a new experience for her because up to this point she was able to start off calm, but then she would later snap because her calm approach wasn't “Fixing him soon enough.” She said it didn't take long for him to move on and get out a book for them to read together. And a whole bunch of parents chimed in on that post to say that they saw echoes of their own families of origin and this interaction. One of whom was parent S, who quoted what C had said about snapping because my calm approach was not fixing him soon enough, and said, “Thank you for just expressing so perfectly one of my triggers.” Sometimes it's so helpful to read how someone else is processing and making sense of things. And then, C, the original poster responded with a heart emoji and said, “I don't even think I thought of it as a trigger worthy of writing down until you framed it as a trigger. I knew it was something that bothered me. But now I see it falls into the major categories of things not going my way and being out of control, and perhaps overlaps a bit with having to re-explain myself and not being understood.” And I chimed in and said that this is how learning happens in community and that it makes my heart sing. And then s wrote back and said, I definitely related to the loss of control part, I've been thinking on it more and for me when I'm faced with these ongoing sad and dissatisfied feelings and outpourings for my kids when I'm being calm. I think there's a couple of parts. One, there's the perfectionist/good girl and me who's thought sound like but I'm doing everything right, I'm staying calm. I'm saying the right words, I'm being a good parent. Why isn't this working? Why aren't they calm and happy?

And then two, the childhood part of me where I wasn't allowed to have sad or dissatisfied feelings, and express those to my mom, as she would later become either more upset than I was or irritated and angry, I've now been recalling memories of when I was very little when my mom would say, “Stop being silly.” If I was crying over something she viewed as unimportant or silly, or if I was sad or emotional, she might say, “I think you're really tired.” And then she responded to me. “Yes, it's been so amazing and interesting having other people put into words my experiences that I'm still figuring out and processing, it really speeds up the whole process.” So if you're finding that you're feeling triggered or flooded by your child's behavior more often than you'd like whether this is happening because of current events out in the world, or things that have affected you in your past or even struggles you're having today, then I'd love to meet you in the Taming Tour Triggers workshop. I'll share some new tools with you to help you understand things differently but as you've seen, a good deal of the progress that parents make in this workshop is a result of the interactions they have with others in the community. In our individualistic culture, it's very common to think that we're missing a piece of knowledge and when we have that piece of knowledge, everything will drop into place, and we won't feel triggered by our child's behavior. And certainly, the tools I provide will help, but it's really practicing those and seeing what works, and where you get tripped up, and processing what you're learning in community with others, that is what enables parents to actually take on these new ideas and not just learn them in their brains but truly believe them and take them on in their bodies. And from there, you become actually able to use them in your real life with your real family. The workshop is open for enrollment right now until Wednesday, October 12th. And we'll all get started together on Monday, October 17. I've specifically planned the timing of the workshop to wrap up right before the holiday season because while we have to navigate online vitriol every time we're on social media, In just a few weeks, we're going to be spending time with our extended families and some of them hold very different views about the world, about current events, and even about our child rearing practices than we do. If you've often found these kinds of events to be triggering or flooding in the past. And you're looking ahead to this holiday season with something of a sense of dread and you want to be able to go into these interactions, knowing that they won't rattle you in the same way that they have in the past, then the tools you will learn will help with that too. Just go to your ParentingMojo.com/tamingyourtriggers to sign up and I will see you there.