Trauma responses and “vibes.”

Sometimes our trauma responses will be directly traceable to things we clearly remember happening to us— but not always. 

Often our trauma responses can be triggered not by anything specific to our trauma— but by the “vibe” or “feel” of a situation. 

Our trauma responses always make sense, some way, somehow, at least to a part of us— but the “sense” they make isn’t necessarily logical or linear. 

This is why techniques of psychotherapy that try to get us to “logic” our way out of a feeling, like cognitive behavioral therapy, have never been my favorite tools— because trauma responses aren’t always, or even usually, about “logic.” 

Trauma survivors know well that the things we think and believe when we’re triggered into trauma responses have little or nothing to do with logic— even though we may “know,” in the moment, that we’re not responding “rationally.”

The fact that trauma responses are frequently triggered and depend by “vibes,” rather than any explicit connections to anything we remember experiencing, is also why I’ve always been kind of “meh” about exposure therapy for PTSD. 

There truly are some people out there who believe that trauma symptoms and struggles are mostly, or entirely, about how we remember and explicitly reexperience things from the past. 

Trauma survivors know: there are many ways to reexperience something— and many of those ways don’t have anything to do with an explicit memory. 

Post traumatic struggles are not just about what happened to us, or how we remember them. 

They’re about how what happened to us, affected us— notably our baseline level of anxiety, our beliefs, and our self-esteem. 

If trauma symptoms and struggles were “just” about what happened to us or our memories, PTSD would be easier to resolve. Maybe we could straightforwardly logic or expose our way out of it. 

But vibes? Vibes are harder to wrangle. 

We need to understand that our nervous system pays attention to context and subtext.

The details of a situation may or may not resemble anything we’ve ever experienced in the past— but our hypervigilant nervous system isn’t just sniffing for details. 

It’s sniffing for the “feel” of a situation or person. 

It’s sniffing for danger that our conscious mind may not register as danger. 

It’s sniffing for things we haven’t thought about or paid attention to. 

It’s sniffing for things that we may not even have the words to explain why they feel familiar in an awful way. 

If our nervous system becomes reactive to a trigger that we can’t quite put our finger on, or we can’t quite understand how it’s related to anything we’ve experienced, our job is to not deny, disown, or reject that reaction— but to get curious and respectful. 

Our first temptation, when a trauma response hits us, is often to list reasons why our response is illegitimate. Why it “doesn’t make sense.” Why we “shouldn’t” be having it. 

I need you to resist that temptation. 

The fact that we don’t understand a trauma response in the moment isn’t nearly as important as how we respond to it. 

We are not going to diminish the intensity of a trauma response by invalidating it, any more than we’re going to banish the thought of a pink elephant by repeating, “don’t think about a pink elephant, there’s no reason to think about a pink elephant.” 

The skill involved here is what we call “radical acceptance.” Radical acceptance doesn’t ‘mean we LIKE a particular response— it means we accept the reality and legitimacy of a response even, especially, if we don’t like it. 

If we’re serious about decreasing our vulnerability to trauma responses, we’ve gotta give up this BS (Belief System) that we “need” to understand them, or that they “need” to have a clear connection to our trauma history to be “legitimate.” 

Lead off with acceptance. 

Lead off with the assumption that this response makes sense— some way, somehow, to some part of you. 

Lead off with compassion and patience. 

You know— like with any symptom, thought, feeling, response, or need you have in trauma recovery. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

You’re getting better.