How To Live Life With Triggers
After any heartbreak, rough time, emotional/physical abuse, toxic relationship, it’s not unusual to have triggers. Triggers can be a person, place, smell, sound, or even a thing that can cause you to think about what had happened. What people have a hard time understanding is that you can be completely healed, but still break when you come across those certain triggers. It doesn’t mean you want anything from that experience back, including the person. That’s completely normal, but hard for people who don’t have triggers to understand.
Life can be hard after a traumatic experience. Regardless if the experience changed you for worse or for better, it still changed you. You talk to people differently, you changed your routine, you change the way you style your hair, you change what you do on a Friday night, even change how you deal with certain relationships in your life.
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Triggers can be as small as smelling a familiar scent, to seeing someone who hurts you. Personally, I have a problem with comparing myself with others. I stopped going to my favorite stores, I stopped going to the mall completely, I even stopped hanging out with certain friends so I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself. As hard as these triggers are to live with, I know I have to push past them and live my life anyway.
Sometimes we want to our triggers to go away so much that we try facing them. It’s not always the best thing to do, but you might try anyway. As much as we want to, we can’t force our triggers to go away. The day will come eventually, but it’s not anything we can make happen. To help get past the harder days, you have to remember why things they way they are today. Try to write your feelings, delete social media, take control of you environment, stick your ground when talking to friends, you can try your hardest to avoid them. My biggest tip is to take time for yourself and yourself only. Remember that everything happens for a reason and that it’s okay to feel the way you do, even when you are completely healed.
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Don’t live your life a certain way to avoid these triggers. Live life as if they mean nothing to you. Those triggers could stick around for a week or sometimes even years, but you can’t let them overrule you. It’s okay to delete things things that could trigger you. It’s okay to remove yourself from unnecessary situations. It’s okay to worry when you leave your house. It’s okay to worry in general. When triggers come about, let them break you, but not for too long. There will come a day when you walk past what use to be a trigger and it just won’t bother you anymore. Live for that day. Just remember to live your life to the fullest every day you can! You got this!