Why are traumatic triggers so hard to change and overcome?

You walk into a restaurant and feel dizzy and like you might faint. You see a man with a particular body-type and your heart starts racing and you're sweating. You feel overwhelmed by housework and find that you've been sitting, paralysed in a chair for half an hour. You don't want to react in these ways, it ruins everything, but it seems impossible not to. Don't despair; you are not hopeless or broken. You have adapted in exactly the way evolution intended.

Evolution isn't really you're friend here. Evolution never starts from scratch, it always builds on what was there before. So under your beautiful thinking brain that allows you to make rational decision, and under your feeling brain that brings life to your life, is your survival brain and that's what rules the show when you get triggered.

Your brain learns from experience and the more crucial the experience, the deeper the learning is embedded. If you were attacked by a bear and you somehow survived, however you survived that experience would determine how you reacted if you ever saw, or thought you saw, another bear. If you managed to fight the bear off, you'd start fighting again. If you went limp and played dead, that would become the rule. If you're life is being threatened by a bear, why waste crucial milliseconds running what you see past your thinking brain, fact-checking and comparing it to other experiences when you could be reacting to save your life?

If you live in a an area densely populated by bears this is going to save your life countless times. But if you live somewhere with very few bears and a lot of things that slightly resemble bears it's going to cause you a lot of problems. You'll be going limp when you need to be engaging with your surroundings and living your life.

EMDR is perfect for resolving this as you can not only process the traumatic fragments stored in your amygdala that set off this reaction but you can also embed new pathways based on how you would like to react. In a gentler, sneakier way, imagery re-scripting can do the same. By changing the way you feel about the event, you change it's meaning. You are no longer in danger because you are 'bad' or 'hopeless' or 'useless', the event can be filed away in the narrative of your life without the power it had before. Yoga also can soothe the nervous system and give it greater responsiveness.

But next time you are triggered remember; you are not broken, you have adapted. Your brain is performing it's primary task - surviving - brilliantly. Too brilliantly, yes, but brilliantly.