kazine wrote:On another note, these 'trailheads' you speak of ?? I was wondering if you think this could be one?
Getting kissed on the neck sometimes really repulses me. My dad and grandad have done it since I was a kid and sometimes when boyfriends do it or if my dad does it (he does sometimes, rarely) it sends horror right through my body. Or if my boyfriend is kissing my neck sometimes a feeling of despair will come over me and I don't know why...
My driving instructor kissed me on the neck once too. Yuk. THAT was wrong.
It certainly could be a trailhead. Stuff like this belongs in your trigger inventory. Write not just the general pattern, but specific instances that you remember or as they occur. Write what you remember about the circumstances in which this action brings up bad feelings or even good feelings, any feelings that seem not to belong to the present situation. It seems appropriate to have a bad feeling when a stranger kisses your neck, but you might add that event too, just in case there turns out to be more to it.
If you have a feeling that something is important, record it and explore it. Here are examples from my own inventories, of exploring trailheads.
Panic attacks. By thinking over details of several panic attacks in cars, and comparing them to similar experiences in cars that did not provoke a panic attack, I was able to isolate a very specific trigger that I can relate to a specific traumatic event. The trigger is a car that is not brand new but is ultra clean. Knowing this helps me in two ways. It helps me contain the trigger, so it does not grow (by kindling) to include all cars. It helps me make a plan to expose and desensitize myself to the trigger.
Lost time. One general item in my inventory is strangers who know me. A few weeks ago I had a peculiar urge to talk to an acquaintance from my past, who was not in my lost time inventory, and tell him about my DID. Almost at once he asked me if I now remember how we met. Uh oh. We met 4 years before I remember meeting him! I still do not remember the first time we met but now I do remember that when we met again 4 years later he insisted we had met before. See how this works? I forgot that I did not remember. Now I have yet another piece of lost time involving a man.
Another kind of trailhead is a tor-mentor, a person who triggers you simply by being who they are. The man my Alter 1 is in love with is a case in point. Encounters with this man led me to discover my DID. See the thread Alter in love was a mystery to me.
Kindling is a process by which over time we become more sensitive to triggers and/or our response becomes more severe. The word is a metaphor referring to how a flame can grow from a burning twig to a wildfire. Kindling is an aspect of chronic hyper-arousal of the autonomic nervous system in trauma survivors. Wikipedia has no article directly relevant to kindling of trauma triggers but some articles do deal with related topics:
Wikipedia: Kindling model
Wikipedia: Kindling (sedative-hypnotic withdrawal)
Wikipedia: Post-traumatic epilepsy
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