We start to identify our subconscious triggers after a time they come unbidden

We start to identify our subconscious triggers after a time they come unbidden, unwarned, unwanted: and suddenly we become triggered. Before conscious thought has any chance to intervene, our body is once more engaged in a fight-flight-freeze response. Back comes the dissociations, the powerlessness, the rage: the memory of childhood abuse. It is difficult to endure, but eventually overtime we have learned that triggers are not a sign, as we so desperately feared, that we were crazy. Triggers are merely signposts to what has yet to be integrated in our memory and experience. They are a conditioned response meant to help us, to keep us safe, to avoid something that caused us harm in the past. A redundant response that leads to an old coping strategy

Our survival based back brains aren’t smart they tend to generalise, they extrapolate, they guess: preferring to err on the safe side, they identify a superfluous detail, like ‘beard’, as a signal of impending threat. Our back brains can’t deduce (yet) that lots of men have beards, and that beardedness is not a good predictor of abuse. So it screams a warning at us now, until our front brains can assimilate new data from our now-safe environment, where beardedness is simply a personal grooming preference that speaks nothing of the motivation to perpetrate: like the colour red, or the sound of footsteps, or the odour of sweat, or the feeling of cold.

 Triggers came with such overpowering affect, an echo of the feelings we had at the time. So we avoided them at all costs. It took a long time for us to recognise that by doing so we are ignoring their vital message. Triggers are clues about what is still dissociated. we used to complain often that we couldn’t remember what happened to us, but then we discounted the hints, stored in procedural, implicit memory, that triggers offered us. Recovery involves accepting triggers as messengers, and learning to listen to the message that they brought, rather than building a life of chaos, distraction and noise.


The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives. www.thetenstages.com