If you’ve gone through a traumatic event, you may find yourself re-experiencing those emotions. At some point, avoiding triggers could become difficult or impossible. In those moments, it’s important you learn how to take care of yourself and prioritize your mental wellbeing. Prepare for dealing with your triggers as you recover from your trauma so you’re ready when those unexpected stressors happen.
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Practice grounding techniques
When you’re feeling overwhelmed by your memories, you probably have a hard time controlling your emotions and coming to reality. Grounding techniques get you to focus on your body, allow your emotions to pass through you without judgment, and refocus your mind away from your stressors.
Start by breathing slowly and deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth. Try noticing sensory details around you. One way of doing this is listing five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can smell, two things you can feel, and one thing you can taste. When you get into the habit of rooting yourself in your body, you can practice mindfulness.
Get active
Exercise is one of the best ways of combating distressing memories. Low-impact exercises like yoga, aerobics, dancing, and walking outside are just as good for you as harder workouts. Find a few that work best for you and that you take pleasure in. If it doesn’t make you happy to do it, you won’t want to lean on it when you’re feeling stressed.
Cultivate healthy coping mechanisms
Along with exercise, find a few solid activities that put reliably your mind at ease. Reading, crafting, cooking, listening to music, taking a bath, and meditating are all excellent ways of releasing stress and redirecting your energy away from spiraling thoughts.
Journaling is another way to both cope with triggers and trauma while also articulating your emotions and writing through your experiences. What’s most important is that your coping mechanisms give you the time and space to be safe and decompress. Make a list of your favorite relaxing activities so you can rely on them when the time comes.
Avoid using substances
You might be tempted to turn to drugs or alcohol to numb your feelings. But this is an unhealthy coping mechanism that can spiral into substance abuse if you’re not careful. There’s a difference between socially drinking for fun and using alcohol every time you’re feeling triggered.
Instead, practice those grounding techniques to avoid developing reliance on an unhealthy coping behavior.
Stop doomscrolling
Sometimes the news is triggering. When headlines center around a sexual abuser, failures of the justice system, or sexual assault survivor stories, you need to prioritize your mental health. It’s easy to get sucked into your news feed when you feel like you need to stay on top of everything on social media.
In reality, each post could be re-traumatizing you. Nobody will hold your feet to the fire about keeping informed, so close your laptop, get off your phone, and direct your attention to things that won’t distress you.
Seek trauma-focused therapy
If you keep feeling re-traumatized and can’t cope with your sexual assault experience, it’s time to see a professional. Many psychotherapies are geared towards understanding, re-contextualizing, and healing from traumatic experiences. You should consider trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, cognitive processing therapy, or narrative therapy.
Each of these strategies can be tailored to fit your unique needs. Nobody should live in fear of being re-traumatized, and therapy can help you come to terms with your past sexual assault.
To learn more about how trauma therapy can teach you to cope with your triggers, please reach out to us.
