Today I wanted to tackle the concept of triggers, and offer a message of hope.
Back in 2002, in the early days after the assault, on Mother’s Day I took my daughter Zoë to a sweet child-friendly cafe with a playground, for a meet-up with a group of mothers. The first to arrive by a long way, I ordered a large slab of cake, a pot of tea and a rubbish ice-cream for Zoë who was very satisfied with her treat. I breathed for a moment, leaning into the comfort of the beautiful cafe as I waited for the others to arrive.
Zoë needed a toilet stop after a while, and as I’d never been to the cafe before, I wasn’t familiar with the bathroom’s idiosyncrasies. It was an old-style ablution block a short walk from the tables and playground. As I was exiting with Zoë on my hip, I turned off the light switch and plunged us into darkness. I fumbled with the door handle, turning left, right. It wouldn’t yield. Unease welled up, rising to panic.
Then, I remembered; this was exactly the situation I’d been in when trying to flee during the attack. My body in its wisdom was telling me to beware as the last time I’d been in this position it had been Bad.
When my mind made this connection, the anxiety evaporated. The message that all was safe was sent back down from my rational brain to my body. As if I was re-encoding the doorknob with a safety tag, turning off the fear trigger.
It was pure dumb luck on my part that so soon after the event I was able to make the connection in my head and re-file the scenario in the toilet as safe. Perhaps this healing pas-de-deus between my body and mind was fuelled by my natural optimism, the bedrock of my nurtured childhood, and my fortunate adulthood.
And yet, there was another really key element for me in this; information. My GP had given me the gift of the clue; post-traumatic stress. It was my key to the door out of its dungeon.
I was lucky. So often, people who have suffered trauma are not routinely informed of the likelihood of suffering from PTSD. I’ve never forgotten being on a autumn writing retreat in Greece back in 2022. I was reading Corey White’s moving memoir The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory where everything that could have gone wrong in his childhood, did. He’d cycled through child protection, mental health services, drug and alcohol rehabs, prison, you name it. Over all those years and medley of settings no-one had ever mentioned that with what he’d survived, he would have post-traumatic stress disorder.
As I inhaled his book in the hazy Greek heat I was incandescent with fury on his behalf that nobody had ever mentioned PTSD to him. When he finally learned about PTSD, it was a key turning point in his memoir. It began to unlock the mystery of why he behaved the way he did.
I’m not trying to suggest recovery from PTSD, that taming our triggers is an easy process. My moment in the loo was just the beginning of a long road after a single incident trauma. But the healing often can’t even begin if we’re not educated about trauma.
If this speaks to you today, and you want to find more, have a look here. It’s my new go-to resource hub for post-traumatic growth research and information.
And for now, that’s a wrap on this series. Blessings to you.
