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Situations, Bio-Chemistry, & Trauma, Part Three

So this brings me to what I really want to talk about: cause & solutions, which can be outlined in three broad categories:

1) Situations: People get angry and freak out because of the situations that they are in.

Lots of people lose keys and don't freak out - other people do. So the question is, "Who is triggered by external scenarios and how do you change the triggering for something less crazy?"

If people are triggered by situations, then what is happening is that something in the present is touching on something in their past. This is what psycho-therapy is for. For example, for awhile there, I seemed to be getting into violent confrontations with people every time I turned around. I spent some time in psychotherpy changing this behaviour - recently, someone hit me in bar and I didn't react in any way except with words. I said, "Hey - you can't hit me." But otherwise, I didn't flinch, and that was some real progress from before. And I was pretty proud of that.

Psychotherapy has you focus on what is unconscious so you can think it through clearly. It's a very rewarding thing to do - on the other hand, when I was told that people were mad at me for something I'd done, and I reacted with total (primal really) fear, then this was a situation which I hadn't dealt with before. And I've tried to understand all that, but it's pretty hard on your own.

2) Bio-chemistry - where you are reacting to external stimuli because of some imbalance in your system.

3) Trauma - now this is the thing I am most interested in now as a possible source of problems and their solutions. Because, face it - I've been dealing with lost things triggering my anger for a long-ass fucking time now. I hardly want to leave the house because I'm afraid of what will happen if I lose something again or feel overwhelmed. And I just keep thinking that there really *is* something in the body that causes the way I feel, which is often *very* physical.

posted by by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw @ 12:59 AM