S1 Ep8 - Triggered

Welcome to the Rebrand Revolution. In this episode Sidonie examines our reflexive relationship with the word Trigger or Triggered and asks why a word that the dictionary says is equally about inspiration and impetus has such a nightmarish reputation. Sidonie argues that being triggered is not inherently negative but can be a visceral reminder of our lived experiences and invites us to consider - what if being triggered is just activating your internal satnav?

• Show Notes

  In this episode, I reference the following:

  Susan Cain
  Susan Horowitz Cain is an American writer and lecturer. She is author of NY Times bestseller “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole”

  Links

  • Website

  Absolutely Fabulous was a legendary 1990s British sitcom starring Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders.

• Audio Transcript

  This podcast is recorded on Kaurna Country. We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Kaurna people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land.

  You are listening to Rebrand Revolution, the podcast where we take today's pop culture cliche and turn it into tomorrow's empowered call to action. My name is Sidonie Henbest. Thank you for joining me. In each episode of Rebrand Revolution I'll take one of the buzz words of the pop culture lexicon and give it a makeover. Look at the good, the bad and the ugly of it, and see what we can do to flip the script, to change the conversation and to empower us to think very differently about the words we use every day.

  In this episode, I've decided to tackle one of those words that was actually been around for a really, really long time, many centuries. It's certainly not new in that sense of pop culture, but it has started meaning something very different in the last few years, and I thought it deserved the chance for a makeover. And that word is triggered. Let's not waste a precious moment of this podcast episode, and let's get right down to the definitions. Today's word is trigger, or to be triggered. The verb trigger is defined in the Oxford English dictionaries as "to cause a device to function". For example, burglars fled empty handed after triggering the alarm. It also means "to cause an event or situation to happen or exist". For example, an allergy can be triggered by a certain scenario. It also means "an event or situation that causes someone to do something". For example, the death of Helen's father triggered her to follow a childhood dream and become an astronaut. And finally, a trigger, "especially something seen, read or heard that causes someone distress, typically as a result of the feelings aroused or memories associated with a particular traumatic experience". So beyond the traditional linguistic applications of say, triggering a by-election or triggering a chemical reaction, which have not changed in their meaning or application as far as I can tell, the idea and the frequency of the word triggered in everyday parlance has exploded in recent years, alongside the arrival of a whole swathe of behavioral and psychology vocabulary and terms in pop culture. And it is this aspect of trigger and being triggered that I want to unpack today.

  So the idea that being triggered is a bad thing is shoved down our throats so regularly that it is easy to forget that the trigger and the response are not innately baddies. Allow yourself to breathe it in that scent of Jasmine or gardenias in the air on a warm summer's night, or the smell of fresh cut grass reminding you of your granddad mowing the lawn. Maybe it's the smell of cologne than a lover wore. The fact that human beings can experience certain sense sounds, situations and have the experience of being instantaneously connected to a moment from the past is quite remarkable. It's an amazing thing, and in that sense, being triggered is actually just a visceral reminder that we are alive, that we are connected and that we are people who have lived and loved. It is evidence of the extraordinary database contained in our brains that has laid down these neural pathways connecting our entire lived experience like a superhighway. Very cool! Sometimes the feelings or memories that are elicited are heartwarming, joyful, even sensually or sexually arousing. Sometimes they are what Susan Cain calls "bittersweet". The one thing that is for certain is that they are highly evocative. They deliver us instantaneously to another point in time. In behavioral terms, the positive versions of this phenomena are actually known by a different term, which is glimmers. That is a trigger that we perceive to have a positive outcome. Wait, hang on, that stuff counts? Yes, that stuff counts. So as well as that rather beautiful collection of things, beautiful in the true sense, sometimes of the just the big feelings and feeling alive and even bitter sweetness, I think of those things as beautiful... As well as those aspects is, of course, the idea of trigger as an impetus or inspiration. You know, the idea that we sit on a desire or a dream until something happens to trigger us into action. I was having some conversations at a birthday party the other night and sharing a really powerful moment with a woman talking about the realization of the preciousness of life, how fleeting it all is here on earth for us, and how that in itself can be an amazing catalyst for us to do things. That recognition, that acknowledgement, that it is not all forever. Being triggered into action can be an amazing and powerful thing, empowering... and sometimes it's because we're angry. Sometimes it is an angry response to something that has happened to us or around us, maybe even to someone we love, but this, remembering, this connecting, this inspiration to act, what amazing tools triggers can be, right?

  So we're well aware that, as well as this, as it turns out, quite substantial collection of things in the good column about the idea of a trigger, or to be triggered. We also know there is a particularly large list of things waiting for us on the bad and ugly side of this column as well. And I think for the simplicity of this conversation, this is where we're really going to shift our attention to a slightly more consolidated definition, and that is the one that comes from the APA, the American Psychological Association who define trigger as "a stimulus that elicits a reaction". For example, an event could be a trigger for a memory of a past experience and an accompanying state of emotional arousal. So, speaking of arousal, we are more jacked-up and stimulated than ever before in the history of human beings, right? I mean, this is not new news, and I am definitely not the first person to say it to you. In fact, we even know why. If nothing else had happened to move human beings further forward along this trajectory, the advent of the smartphone and the arrival of the digital age has made us all dopamine junkies, and information is streaming at us, using the latest and most powerful neuroscience as a way to gain our attention and to keep us engaged, to keep us coming back for more. And in that sense, we are all in a semi permanent state of arousal caused by technology and the myriad of content we consume. And so whether you experience this as hyper vigilance or numbness, or something that's a combination of both. The result is that we as little human beings on the planet right now are regularly in a state where our nervous system is responding in a way that is quite dysregulated, one might even say malfunctioning.

  And I think in this sense, the perception that we are under attack is not untrue, right? Platforms like Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram are designed to hijack our brains and our nervous systems and to lay down chemical pathways of their own that make us seek out more and more and information is being delivered to us with such frequency and ferocity that we are becoming numb, even in spite of trying to be awake and alert. And this doesn't feel good, right? It really doesn't. In fact, some days can feel like we just jerk from bad to worse, and I think this is part of the nefarious cycle that sits at the heart of this. We know that we feel and experience less happiness than we did when we were kids, and we're pretty sure that's less happiness than we believe other people experienced in the past. And we're searching for meaning, and we're trying to understand why things feel hard, harder than they were, and because we are all enthralled, culturally and collectively, to this machine of self awareness and self development, and we've been given access to behavioral language, words like triggered and trauma, but not necessarily the education to use it. We don't understand how to apply them, and we don't actually understand what they mean for us.

  And this shows up in a simple but really concerning way when we are encouraged to label feelings as something more solid. Feelings are here one moment, they are gone the next. They are not a fixed state of being, and they are certainly not part of our identity. So I consider one of the really ugly parts around the frequency of language, such as trigger and triggered in our everyday usage, is that it's hijacking the real meaning, and instead encouraging us to label feelings such as discomfort or dislike as being triggered, and encouraging us in a way to identify as victims who are constantly being wounded by other people. Before I go further, it is really important to me to personally acknowledge the experience of triggers. For certain people, there are some humans who have experienced significant or repeated traumas, and for those people, the exposure to certain senses, scenarios, or locations can result in powerful and debilitating emotional and psychological responses. For these individuals, the experience of being triggered will activate a nervous system response that may take days or even weeks to re-regulate. These are experiences that you would not wish on your worst enemy, and I think it's important to acknowledge the accurate deployment of language. And when this group of people are talking about triggers and being triggered, and their health teams and clinicians are talking about it, it means something far different than you feeling a bit pissed off or a bit activated or a bit whatever. This is something entirely different.

  Here's the thing, being triggered is a normal part of being alive. Humans are supposed to experience triggers both in the brain and the mind. It is both a survival and a behavioral thing. It is about cognition and awareness and pattern matching, a form of pattern matching utilized by the brain. It is batch sorting information and saying, "this looks like something I've seen before, and we put all of those over there in that basket". It is, in effect, a tool of resource deployment from the brain. So if triggers are just phenomena unique to each person - that may elicit memories and an arousal state, what is the opportunity for us here? Well, firstly, I think there's an opportunity for us to get crystal clear on our words and what we actually mean when we say that's triggering, or I'm triggered by that. What do we actually mean? What are we trying to tell ourselves? What are we trying to express to other people? Do we mean I feel uncomfortable, or I am experiencing dis ease? Or is it something else? This exponential use of words like triggered or trauma, and the pseudo authority of content creators who throw them about like they have the degree to back it up, has led to people frequently and quite understandably confusing an experience with their actual identity. So rather than as an aspect of identity or even a personality trait, what if we are just having an experience that is activating our mental database and showing us where something like this has happened before? Because at its most basic level, a trigger is a notification from our database in our brain to say, Hey, this is familiar. We've done this before. Here's what happened last time. Let me pull the file on that for you.

  And so my question for you, and my reframe, if you like, today, is, what if being triggered is just the activation of your internal sat nav, and what if, once your internal sat nav is activated, you can use it to make different decisions? What if you can use it to confirm the path you're already on? That's our choice. That's agency, and that's the ability to self deliberate. But it's an interesting question, so common and so prevalent is this idea and understanding that triggers and being triggered is is a negative thing that we forget that actually it's just the notification from the system. It's not actually synonymous with a particular type of response, and notwithstanding, those who have repeated trauma and extreme life experiences that say something different to that. I'm not talking about those people for the rest of us, really. A lot of the time when we say we're triggered, I think we mean, I've just noticed my internal navigation system dinging in my head. It reminds me of the time I took a long road trip driving from Adelaide to Brisbane, which is about three and a half days in a van with my friend Bethany, and we had a sat nav with us, and we thought, we don't want the voice of a male Sat Nav to drive us for three days. It's a long time and a lot of driving. It's about eight or nine hours of driving a day. And so we reprogrammed it to be Joanna Lumley from Absolutely Fabulous. "Turn left. Sweetie, darling. Turn left." Much more fun.

  But in all seriousness, the word trigger is such a good example of perfectly good language, perfectly misused. And I invite you today as always, to start a conversation, to consider the words you use and be curious as well about what it might mean for us when we notice something like this go off when the sat nav dings, what is it trying to tell us? I hope this episode has given you a little bit of food for thought, and I invite you to next time you go to use the word trigger or triggered, have a think about what you really mean. My name is Sidonie Henbest, and you have been listening to Rebrand Revolution until next time. Stay curious.

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