58: Choosing the Triggers We Use [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series]

The way we’ve been talking about triggers is an incomplete conversation and it’s time to change that. The more information you have about what triggers you will help inside trauma therapy and help create adaptive material to help with trauma.

Here’s where we need to rethink what we’ve learned about triggers: A trigger is a stimulus that elicits a reaction. Any stimulus; any reaction. But our culture has added qualifiers to our definition of triggers, turning them into something that’s negative. Triggers can also be positive (think: you smell cookies baking and you suddenly want to eat a cookie) or even neutral.

And this is where branding of EMDR, Brainspotting, and ART can fall short, by only focusing on disturbances and negative triggers and not looking deeper into positive triggers.

This is important because the more you know yourself, the more powerful you’ll be in the world. Our job as therapy clients and therapists is to get curious so when you’re doing the hard work in therapy, you can learn to use linkages and triggers with intention, control, and choice.

It’s pretty amazing stuff and this week, I’m walking you through what this looks like and talking more about how we can rethink triggers so they work for us, not against us.

When something traumatic happens to us, it can be healing to have a therapist listen to and/or validate our horrible experience, especially if no one else has before. However, rehashing the details of that traumatic event can be retraumatizing. Brain-based therapies like EMDR teach us that we don't have to talk about the trauma or the details if we don't want to because the real healing doesn't focus on the traumatic event itself.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

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With a Masters in Education from Vanderbilt, Kambria has been creating trainings and teaching adult learners for over 20 years. As the Director of Education and Quality Improvement at Stanford Medical School, she created ease in complex systems, thereby giving medical trainees successful learning experiences. Now, as a dedicated mom, therapist, and EMDR Consultant, Kambria knows what it means to do things efficiently, effectively, and in a learner-centered way. When she isn't podcasting or creating online courses, you can find Kambria playing with her twins on a beach in California.