Cool Biology Fact
You might regret you read this.
The unfortunate part about triggering a fight-flight-fawn-or-freeze with me is that I go literally insensate-- reason will not help, all of my training gets memory holed, and can only focus on a single point, which is making the pain and fear go away. This can lead to some dark places (I have a safety plan in place to keep them from amounting to anything, don't worry).
Now, I have a demyelinated vagus nerve-- this is the gut-brain that manages a lot of autonomic functions like heartbeat and most pertinently, panic. This is same nerve that causes that causes that sinking feeling when you're anticipating something awful. This causes constant anxiety on a cambrian-brain level. You cannot reason out of it, it does not care about the odds, or self-preservation, or the future. I've tried to recall these things in a Triggered and I can't.
Now, I also have other fried nerves that burn when aroused, this basically means I have a little detonator that you can trip by breathing too hard on it. Usually, putting me in a high stress environment causes that.
As that's a lot of pain to make stop, it causes a feedback loop that is uh, kinda like being tortured. My world recedes and I get combative, nihilistic, embittered and ruthlessly darwinistic, and all that brutality turns inward because I'm breaking my family's cycle of taking personal frustration out on someone else. This is, I imagine, the stuff of a healthy person's nightmares.
Worse, I'm also trans, with cPTSD (duh) and ADHD, which means that self-immolate button goes off for reasons so mundane as to be embarrassing, but make me curl up into a ball and cry, begging this phantom torturer to stop hurting me, frantically searching for any way out.
But to end with good news, it used to be much worse! I've made a lot of progress! I don't scream anymore!
So, as you might assume, I'll try any strat you Trigger Sufferers use to manage that if y'all know one. I'm already really good at advoidance, but sometimes the only way through is to open that door. ...Which is why my productivity is not particularly great. I've been fighting for disability for 3 years.
