Back to: KCB Recovery MasterClass
Transcript:
Have you ever been triggered? Triggers that make you angry at someone, make you want to be quiet, make you want to drink. Triggers can be internal or external.
There are different ways that you can have internal triggers, for example, when you feel attacked, jealous, criticized, lonely, embarrassed, or insufficient.
Are you automatically triggered? When you drink or use it, is it usually tied to an emotional event? Take some time to think about that.
We have triggers for positive experiences and triggers for negative experiences. Maybe you pass by a restaurant and you see someone having a drink and all of a sudden you are triggered to think about alcohol. Or maybe you’re watching TV and there is a commercial that’s advertising a new brand of wine and all of a sudden you’re triggered to want a drink.
If you don’t know how to identify what is causing the triggers then it will make it much more difficult to address the triggers. So the first thing to do will be to identify the cause of your triggers.
And for that, we have a comprehensive trigger worksheet that lists a number of triggers.
What you will need to do is go through each item on the list and identify what triggers you and what does not trigger you at all.
For the items that you believe are connected to your triggers put a tick next to those and for the ones that don’t lead to your triggers, you can leave those blank. For the ones that are a huge factor in your triggers, circle those items.
Then after that, we want you to identify the most relevant triggers that you need to address immediately.
Once you’ve identified the triggers, you can identify the automatic thoughts, and once you have those thoughts, what activities do you engage in to block any anxious, sad, negative thoughts that you don’t want to have?
You start to understand how to break the chain, by identifying the thoughts that come right after the triggers.
For example, once you feel stressed, what are the thoughts that come to you? And once those thoughts are there you need to interrupt the old automatic behaviors and implement new behaviors.
The more and more you work on identifying the triggers and the automatic behavior behind them and interrupting the pattern with new behaviors, the more and more the triggers will become distant and you’ll be able to identify them more easily and more quickly.
Please take the time to do the trigger worksheet.