Triggers

This week for my choosing your breath workshop we are suppose to write down all of our "Triggers"  This was really hard for me.  I chose a picture of a tornado with a lightening storm going on around it and wrote all of my triggers around it.  I ended up with 3 pages of all my triggers.  That was so overwhelming to see all of the things that trigger memories of my angel babies.  For me some of the things on the list cause a ptsd reaction that cause me to freeze up--not be able to think straight--I can't breathe--I start to cry uncontrollably and I panic and have this have to escape mode where I just up and run out of where ever I am at.  When I went through my EMDR therapy to help ease some of those trigger things my therapist did give me some coping exercises that I can use when I feel a ptsd trigger coming on--sometimes it works and sometimes I still have to just leave and find some place alone to just cry and breathe and let the memories just work their way through me.

The next part of the exercise was if we felt we were in a place to handle it write down some ways to cope with these trigger things.  It has been 5 years since I loss Janessa, but, unfortunately in those 5 years I have loss 3 other babies and I am still not in a place to write down a so called battle plan for my triggers, so, I just drew a big question mark and labeled it how do you tame a tornado and then left blank pages for a future time when maybe I have some answers.

I have learned to cope in small ways because I know certain things do cause triggers in me so I just avoid the situation--like mothers day and baby blessings at church are huge triggers for me so I just sluff on those days.  I've noticed that some things that were awful triggers for me in the beginning aren't as bad now, like baby aisles at stores.  When I first lost Janessa I would avoid baby aisles like the plague because it was like someone stabbing me in the heart whenever I went by one.  Today and the past couple of weeks I've found myself accidentally going down those aisles and I can breathe now and just have a longing for my empty arms so that has gotten better, but, I still avoid those aisles whenever possible.  It is just so hard knowing there are so many things that still hurt and cause me pain and probably will for the rest of my life.