Part 3 - Processing Emotional Hijacks

I want to talk about how to process emotions that are associated with a trauma, which usually show up in the form of triggers. These come up as more of an emotional hijack than the ability to actually process them. And it's a very different dynamic for how you process these kinds of emotions. So I just want to touch on that a little bit. There's a whole other course we can do on emotions with trauma. So I'll just give you a few tips on how to handle those kinds of emotions. So first of all, just recognizing that you are being triggered is huge.

I would invite you if you have experienced a trauma in your life, that you figure out what your triggers are, because sometimes you might not know what they are. I can tell you for example, some of the triggers that I experienced with my sexual assault. So one of them was the first time in the year when I put flip flops on. And when living in Minnesota, that usually occurred around May and my rape experience occurred in June. And I didn't think that putting flip flops on for the first time in the year would be a trigger, but it was.

And so it's just little things like that. And what would happen to me when I would do that is a full emotional hijack. And for the rest of the day would be in a state of basically fight or flight panic. And just on edge all day and it took me a few years actually, realizing that this was a thing for me to understand, oh my gosh, that's a trigger, because that night that I went out, I was wearing flip flops. And so some of them might not make any sense. And that's okay if they don't make sense logically.

But if you have experienced trauma, maybe it was not a one time event, but I would invite you to write down, gosh. When do I feel like I'm emotionally hijacked? When I literally cannot control my emotions or suppress them or they just completely take over my day. So I would invite you to write this list down of what your triggers are, because it really helps you then identify all this right and being triggered right now. And then validate them similar to what I was explaining in the last video. So first of all, identify what your triggers are.

And secondly, I want to explain what's happening in the brain when you experience an emotional hijack. So some emotions are stored in your memory bank with a much more intense storage than others. So I always explain memories with trauma as like a file cabinet. We have memories in our brain, good memories, bad memories of things, and there 's emotions with them. So if you imagine like a file getting put in a file cabinet with a memory, there's emotions that are attached to that. So let's say you smell pie in the oven and you immediately go, oh, this writer reminds me of Thanksgiving.

And this one Thanksgiving that we had this and this and this family over. And it's a great memory. So like a smell is a way that that emotion was elicited and it brought up a joy , comfort kind of emotion and it associates with a memory of Thanksgiving. The same thing happens with other memories and how they're stored. They're stored with emotions and they're stored with a sensory input, which is how we usually experience emotions as well. So when you have a trauma, these emotions are really intense.

And in the memory file, it's stored very intently. So when you are triggered into something, your brain goes on autopilot, pulls out that file and says, oh my gosh, this is how we reacted last time. So we should probably react the same way. So when you experience these kinds of emotions, it's very automatic. You often don't have time to pause and process. And that is okay because that's what happens with trauma in your brain. So I want to invite you that when you recognize you are triggered, don't expect yourself to process it in the same way that you would other emotions, but I'll do allow yourself to process those emotions when I started working at the hospital where I was taken the night that I was raped.

I had no memory, first of all, of the hospital experience and I experienced flashbacks, flooding of emotions every single day I was there because my brain was like trying to piece together the missing memories and it was so unbearable. I was just in a trance with flashbacks. And so I could tell myself, all right, you're not going to feel this right now. You have patients to take care of today in the ER, but I had to actually let my body feel those emotions like after work. So I would sit with them just like I was explaining where I sat in my chair, I would allow them to come up.

I would process them. I would cry. I would journal and just really allowing them to manifest because that's what your brain is trying to do is trying to say, hey, there's something really painful associated with that emotion or that memory and we want to process it because then you can allow yourself to validate it as well. But I just wanted to speak a little bit on this because these are very different kinds of emotions and they have a different intensity. So don't expect yourself to process them in the same way.

And these are ones that you might need to enlist some help in processing. This is where you might find a really good trauma therapist that specializes in different techniques such as EMDR or brain spotting or neuro-linguistic processing, something like that that really can help you walk through some of these traumatic memories and emotions because it's a whole different playing field when we're talking about that. So I just wanted to touch on processing those and then we're going to talk next about how to process and deal with other people's emotions and how to set some boundaries with that.

So stay tuned.