Are Trauma Triggers Ruining Your Writing Life?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to be here with you today because we are going to talk about an issue that I see happening all the time with my memoir clients. It shows up continuously in webinars I do for Jane Friedman and others, and it is an issue that I have faced myself. That issue is trauma triggers and how to be able to tell the difference between writing that supports you and serves you and writing that causes you harm and negatively impacts your mental health.

To have this conversation, I want to start with a story, and this is the story of Jessica. Now, this isn’t the person’s real name, though Jessica is a real person, and I have met many Jessicas throughout my coaching career. So let me set it up for you. I’m sitting in this crowded room at a writing conference with this talented speaker in front of us. She has just delivered this beautiful presentation about how she wrote her memoir, which included significant trauma. And then she says, “Are there any questions?”

I look across the aisle and see this woman raise her hand higher than anyone else’s. She’s almost jumping up and down, like, “Ooh, pick me, pick me.” The speaker sees her enthusiasm, points to her, and says, “Yeah, what is your question?” Suddenly, I watch this person, who was so enthusiastic, become so small. She curls into herself, gets quiet, and says, “I have been working on a memoir about my challenging relationship with my mother for about seven years. This project is so important to me, it calls to me. I cannot ignore it. But every time I start writing about it and get about 50 pages in, something stops me. Suddenly, I feel like I don’t want to write anymore. I start avoiding my writing desk, and even when I force myself to show up, I have writer’s block. No ideas come. I have nothing I can write about. So, I give up, and I’ve done this about six times. I just don’t know what to do because the story continues to call to me. It feels important. I feel like I can help others by sharing it, and I also feel really stuck.”

Raise your hand if you have ever felt this way. And listeners, if you’re hearing me on Apple Podcast or Spotify and you cannot see me, I am raising my hand high because I understand this struggle. So many of us want to write about these difficult things in our lives because we have something inside us that doesn’t feel integrated, and we want to make sense of it. We have survived something, and to quote Jessica Buchanan, “You now know something,” and you want to share that with others. But how do you do that? How do you know if you are truly working through the work that is going to serve you, heal you, and help others, or if you are negatively impacting your mental health?

That is what we are going to talk about today. One of the biggest issues that writers of tough stories face is that they get triggered by the process. So, to start this conversation, we are going to talk about what trauma is and trauma triggers—specifically how they feel inside us, what they look like on the page. There are so many subtle ways that this shows up that we do not talk about, and then what you can do about it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:30]

So, let’s start by talking about what trauma is. Trauma is an experience of “too much.” That’s something that Jacob Nordby talked about on my recent interview with him. It is also an experience where our system is overwhelmed by whatever is happening. When our system is overwhelmed, we go into high alert and we have one of four trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We can have these responses, and if someone is there to help us make sense of it, we are able to physically shake it out of our bodies. Life goes on. But when that doesn’t happen, and especially when we cannot escape the situation, we don’t understand what the situation means, and we have no choices around what happened—or especially if we suppress our feelings about it—that energy of trauma can get stuck in our bodies. It stays stored in our nervous system until it has an opportunity to be released.

What a trigger is, is that something in our environment feels like that experience from the past. There’s something about it that’s similar. So, the nervous system fires in the same way as it did before because it’s trying to complete the cycle so it can release that energy and learn how to solve the problem for the future. That’s what’s happening with a trauma trigger. As Amy Robeson said in a podcast episode that I listened to on her podcast, “Trauma triggers are an opportunity to heal.” So, whenever that system fires, we have an opportunity to heal, whatever that is, and to release that energy, but we must know how to do it.

Writing can be a great modality that helps you work through things. It can also help you channel and release that energy. But there are times when we are writing, when what happens is we keep that loop going, and we keep that energy stuck inside us. So, we want to understand what it feels like to be triggered, what it looks like on the page, and how we can sometimes do things that perpetuate that process of maintaining that trigger and that energy inside us rather than releasing it.

So, sometimes when you have a trauma trigger—and this can especially be true if you are a person who is diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or complex PTSD—you might experience something in the present that triggers your nervous system to say, “Hey, this is like something from the past.” You then have either a visual or auditory experience. So maybe you’re suddenly catapulted into a memory. You start thinking about whatever that was in the past. You start replaying it in your mind, a visual movie. Or maybe you start hearing sounds about it. Or maybe you even have physical sensations around it that are like what happened before. These physical sensations could be sensations of distress, such as tightness in a certain part of your body, like tightness in your jaw, tightness in your back, or maybe you feel sick to your stomach. Your heart might be racing. These are all physical experiences you can have that are the energy coursing through you. It’s trying to figure out how to be released and how to move through you.

That’s what it feels like inside us to have one of these experiences if we have what I would call a “traditional flashback” or what we might see as a more common trigger experience. Right? Something happens, and then we can immediately connect it to something from our past. But sometimes we get triggered, and we have what’s called an emotional flashback. This is something I wrote about for HuffPost. What happens in that case is that there is that same trigger, right? Something happens in our world that the nervous system says, “Uh oh, this is like something else.” But because we don’t have good access to whatever that was from the past—either because we were young, or we blocked it out—we have an emotional response that feels outsized in relation to what’s happening in our world. So maybe we make a really small mistake, and then we panic. We have all these visceral experiences, and it feels scary or upsetting. Part of us might know this feels like it’s over the top, but we can’t stop it from happening. That is an emotional flashback.

And if you want to know more about that, I will share the article I published for HuffPost on it so you can learn more. You can have these visceral experiences that are tied to a memory, or sometimes you just have an outsized experience that you don’t understand.

Sometimes what happens is that when we’re triggered, especially with emotional flashbacks, we might have an experience of, say, arguing with someone about something that has nothing to do with the trigger itself. We just start having an emotion, right? So, these things can happen, but this also shows up on the page.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:08]

What happens on the page? I see this a lot, and it’s subtle. Okay? So, two things that happen that writers are very aware of are like the things that happened to Jessica. She couldn’t come to the page. She started avoiding her writing desk. And even when she did, she had writer’s block.

So those things will happen if we have triggered ourselves. And especially if we try to force ourselves to come to the page when this small, wounded part of us doesn’t know how to manage our emotions or manage the emotions around that event, and it’s saying “no.” If you’re not listening to that still, small voice that’s saying, “No, I’m not ready. I don’t want to do this,” those are the experiences you will have.

However, sometimes what will happen is you will feel called to write about something from your past that is highly traumatic, and then, as you’re writing about it, you will feel this urgency around writing every single gory detail of that event—from the very beginning to the very end. There will be a lot of sensory details. You will feel immersed in the experience. If someone reads it, they will also feel immersed in the experience. It will be filled with highly charged emotional language, or it could be charged with no emotional language, but it will be just vivid and graphic. You will share that on the page, and you will not be able to stop yourself until you get to the very end of whatever this terrible thing is.

Then, it will just stay at this level of what I call “This is what happened to me,” where there’s no additional understanding of how it relates to the rest of your story or even the sense that you make of it now—largely because you haven’t yet had time to make sense of it. So, the emotions might still be stuck inside you. This can happen a lot if, when the traumatic event happened to you, it led to a freeze response.

So often, what happens when we are traumatized is we will originally have a fight or flight response, and if you can’t fight against whatever it is or flee the situation, you will go to freeze, and it will lock up. This is often why things get stuck in the body. So, when you begin to tap into that, you have to go from freeze down to fight or flight. You have to reconnect with whatever those emotions are to go through the entire process.

This is one of the reasons why I say it’s so important, if you’re writing a memoir about a tough topic, to have a therapist along with you.

So, these are some of the ways that triggers show up on the page and inside us. You know, this can happen even when you think you’re not writing about something traumatic. Maybe you just have a lot of intense feelings about something, and you just haven’t had time to work through them. These are truly opportunities to heal. But how do you do that? Well, you need to understand what’s happening to you on the page, and then you need to understand what to do about it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [12:24]

So, when we are writing, especially for writing in scene—and scene writing is cinematic writing that happens in a specific place and at a specific time—our nervous system relives the experience. We are reliving whatever happened at the nervous system level, and all our neurons are highly charged, right? So, we may even be having an emotional response. And again, if this is overwhelming the system, it keeps everything stuck. So, if you are having a lot of physical symptoms related to your writing—if your jaw is tight, if you have a lot of sick stomach, if your heart is really beating fast, or if you have trouble shaking off the experience—you want to pause.

Stopping is the first thing you want to do. The second thing you want to do is ground yourself. You want to regulate your nervous system. One of the best ways to do this is through movement. So sometimes I will just shake my body, or you can sway, or you can go for a walk. But you want to discharge this energy. Don’t just sit there, get up, move around, get that energy moving. Sometimes I’ll get people to wiggle their toes because, when you’re wiggling your toes, it takes you into your body in a safe way. That will help you be in the here and now, away from the place where you’re triggered.

So, move your body around. After you’ve had a chance to move your body around, you want to connect with your support system. If you have people in your life who can hold space for your emotions, often that is a therapist. I’m very supportive of people having a therapist when they’re working on a memoir, especially if it involves a tough story. You want to make sure that you have someone involved who can help you with that, and anyone else in your life who supports those tough feelings. Connect with all those people and then take a break from that writing. Give yourself permission to work on another part of your memoir. So, if you’ve come up against, like, “Oh, these are the really challenging parts,” maybe you write something that’s from a later part of your book.

Writing about this thing that happens later can help you have insight, which can help you understand what this thing means. That will help you learn how to frame it and keep it more in your prefrontal cortex (which is the thinking part of your brain) and less in the limbic part (where fight or flight exists). You can also do some journaling.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:43]

Here are two journal exercises that you can do that can help you get back on track. The first journal exercise is to write to the highest and wisest part of yourself. This is something that Jacob Nordby talks about, and Julia Cameron talks about in Seeking Wisdom. Ask that wise part of you for advice. Just sit down and say, “What do I need right now? What will help me move forward in my memoir writing journey?” Write these things down, and just automatically write. Don’t think. Just let your pen move and see what happens.

You may find that the wise part of you has some great advice for you around what to do. That’s one piece. But I also want you to connect with your inner child—the wounded part of you that went through whatever you went through. Find out what it has to say. Ask it, “What’s going on with you right now? What’s making it hard to come to the page? What do you need for this process to feel safe?”

Sometimes the very best way to connect with that part of you, and to get your answer, is to write with your non-dominant hand. So, for instance, I happen to be right-handed, and my non-dominant hand is left. I know already some of you are going to say, “Well, I won’t even be able to read my writing,” and it’s possible you may not be able to read much of it. Yes, the process will be much slower, but sometimes it is the most expedient way to get to the truth.

So, give yourself the opportunity to hear what that part of you needs, and whatever that is, give it to it. Whether it’s ice cream, a break, a chance to work on something else, some time playing, give it whatever it needs. Because the more you listen to that wounded part of yourself, and you say, “Hey, I got you. I am here for you. I will listen to you,” the more that part of you will trust that the adult you has its back. And that writer you is not going to push it harder than it’s ready to go.

One of the ways we re-traumatize ourselves and keep that cycle going is by forcing ourselves to do something we are not ready to do. We often do this in the name of productivity, of being a good writer. Maybe we want to get our books done by a certain date, maybe a milestone birthday. I totally get that. As a writer, I understand that. I’ve made those arbitrary deadlines for myself before.

But what we want to remember is that when it comes to trauma, it involves not being able to escape. It also involves a lack of choices. So, when you give that wounded part of yourself choices, it has an opportunity to do something different. When you give yourself choices, you empower yourself, and that is one of the most important things you can do as a memoir writer.

It doesn’t matter if it makes your process longer—your book is going to be stronger as a result.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:17]

So that’s what you do if you are experiencing triggers in your writing. And I ended up meeting with Jessica. We talked through her story, and I shared a bunch of strategies that she could use that would help her work on her memoir in an affirming way. If you want to know what those are, you can watch my Building a Resilient Writing Practice series on YouTube. If you’re listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcast, go to YouTube and check out my series. Listen to that. If you’re on YouTube already, just go down to the bottom and click on that series. You will learn some concrete strategies that can help you build a sustainable writing practice that will allow you to write about anything—whether it’s traumatic or not.

Sometimes, what we have to do is write a fierce essay or op-ed about things happening in the world, which can feel really scary. This resilient writing practice will help you do it. It will also keep you from gaslighting yourself around what your experience is. Because what can also perpetuate this is when we have these experiences, and because we don’t want the rest of the world to know it, we end up pretending it’s not happening. We suppress our emotions, we put on a happy face—even in our journal sometimes. We gaslight ourselves. So, do not gaslight yourself.

And in fact, if you need some strategies to help you do that, if you sign up for my Substack, you will get a copy of Write More, Fret Less—the toolkit to help you gaslight-proof your writing process. Be sure to get a copy of that while you’re watching my Building a Resilient Writing Practice series so that you can empower yourself.

That brings me to what happened with Jessica. So, Jessica, after we met a few times, was able to get back on track. And when I asked her what helped her, there were a lot of different strategies I shared that made it easier to write. But the biggest one was just knowing that she had tools she could use, and she had choices in the process. Sometimes, that is the thing we need most.

So, those are some things that you can do if you have found yourself in a place where you are feeling really triggered. This is how you go from a person like Jessica, who is raising your hand high, feeling desperate, wanting to tell a story, and then, when you share your question, feeling really small, to someone who feels expansive, who feels ready, who feels empowered. You know you have the tools at your disposal to write whatever it is you are going to write.

And I would love to hear which one of these strategies speaks to you most. You can send the podcast a text. If you’re on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or if you’re watching this on YouTube, please share your strategy in the comments because I would love to hear from you and know what is speaking to you.

And if you have another question about this, please feel free to also share that in a text or in your comments, because I care deeply about your story. I know that when you take the time to sit down and write it and make new sense of it, you will write a powerful, transformative story that changes your life and, in the process, changes everyone around you. You deserve to have that experience, and we need your story more than ever. So, thank you for showing up to your writing practice and thank you for listening to today’s episode.