Traumatic experiences might end, but their impact never truly ends. The brain is permanently impacted in a whole myriad of ways, as I discussed in my previous post. My writing became extremely tiny and squeezed together, I made myself as invisible as possible at school and actively avoided a real social life, cyclical depression and non-pathological dissociation were triggered.
Another lasting impact is that of body memories.
A body memory is a physical, physiological response, energy, and feeling which is activated when something reminds us of the original trauma. Every single time I walked or drove past my junior high in the years afterwards, until I left New York in 2017, I had extremely strong body memories.
In my mind, I felt like I was back inside that building, and my stomach and throat began tightening, with a shortness of breath and an overpowering feeling of physical fear. Even recalling it now revives that feeling.
When my woonatic ex-roommate was invading my personal space in 2013, when I was on the phone with my father, her hostile attack dog attitude triggered me into a body memory, and I began gasping for breath, with that same overpowering sense of physical terror. I managed to gasp out that I felt like I were back at Hackett. My father suggested I hold one of my stuffed animals to calm down.
My roommate was convinced there was a meth lab in the communal cellar and serious drug activity in our apartment complex. She even got the manager of all the area’s rental properties to do an investigation, and brought cops over one night at 1 AM to check out the supposed evidence. She rightly looked like a total laughingstock and paranoid tinfoil loon when this investigation yielded absolutely no evidence of any drug activity whatsoever.
There wasn’t a single moment of peace during the few months we lived together. Every day she found something new to complain about, either our apartment in particular or the complex in general. It was obvious she had deep trauma of her own influencing her behaviour, in much worse ways than mine ever has.
But despite how much my old junior high triggered me, I relied on it as a North Star after I finally began driving at age 25. (Believe it or not, not everyone immediately learns how to drive as soon as they turn sixteen!) Albany is by and large a 15-minute city, designed for people instead of cars, cars, cars, and more cars. Thus, driving instead of walking or taking a bus can be a bit tricky, esp. downtown.
Every time I missed my turn (thanks to so many one-way streets) or didn’t know where I was going, I drove towards Delaware Avenue and Hackett, which is at 45 Delaware and almost at the start of the avenue. I knew how to get there from any point downtown, and once I reached Hackett, I simply took the #13 bus route to wherever I needed to go uptown or midtown. It was a landmark I couldn’t live without. (In my day, kids in Albany took city buses instead of separate school buses.)
William Stormont Hackett (1868–1926), Albany’s 70th mayor and namesake of my junior high. (Its official title is now Hackett Middle School, but the name engraved on the actual building is William Stormont Hackett Junior High School.)
This is why I don’t support the contemporary idea that triggers should always be avoided at all costs. Facing our fears and traumas head-on can help us to heal from them and remind us we’re stronger than they are. When we meticulously avoid them as potential dangers guaranteed to give us a total breakdown, we let them have power over us. You can’t properly heal if you never confront your issues.
Psychological triggers are very much real, as I know from my own experience. It really makes me angry to see so many people casually throwing the word around for every little thing, in an attempt to protect everyone from potentially bad memories or phobias. I’m not made of glass, and I’m not a damn snowflake. Sure, there are subjects that are difficult for me to read about, but that doesn’t mean I’ll have a total mental collapse if I encounter, e.g., a story where a grandfather dies.
Also, because I haven’t avoided directly confronting these topics, they no longer make me get so emotional. I was absolutely crippled by grief when my paternal grandpap (pictured above with me on his 64th birthday, 2 October 1984) passed away in August 2005. I couldn’t stop sobbing during the two days of his wake and during his funeral. For years afterwards, I got really choked up when reading anything involving the death of a grandparent, esp. a grandfather.
But now? Writing this isn’t giving me flashbacks to seeing his dead body in the coffin, triggering waves of anguish, and bringing tears to my eyes. I healed from the worst of my grief thanks to facing my triggers head-on and pushing through them.
The same goes for my trauma over my car accident. For many years, as soon as I was finally able to walk again, I ran across the road when the light was red. I didn’t want another car to hit me. I don’t leisurely amble across now, but I no longer feel the need to race like I’m trying out for the Olympics.
The rude co-counselor I had one year at the Orthodox day camp (who was young enough to be my daughter) was chutzpahdik enough to try to tell me I was wrong for running across the road so fast. You’re not in my mind, little girl! You’re not the one who was almost killed in a car accident! This same girl also was horrified I corrected her on geography and said Yemen is in Asia, not Africa. She refused to believe I was right.
Mental health is so personal. It’s really gross and presumptuous to try to dictate to other people how they’re supposed to react and act, even years later.
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