Show Notes:

As we open today’s topic on the avoidance dance, I want to acknowledge that avoidance is a totally normal reaction to things that are uncomfortable or actively painful. We avoid all kinds of things that we’ve had previous experience with or exposure to that has taught us that we don’t want to do it again. Avoidance is a stress reaction that comes from having learned something. We talked about this last week – if we think back to caveman times, and I go down a path and am confronted with a bear, my brain is going to take a multisensory movie that remembers the smell of sweet berries and the sound of a gurgling stream and the next time I head down a path with the same scent and sound my brain is going to be triggered in an effort to help me avoid another close call with big jaws and sharp claws. In that kind of a context, it can be a really good thing that we learn from our exposure to stressful stimuli in an effort to support our actual survival.

The challenge is that these avoidance prompts can become bigger or more generalized than is helpful to us, and if we’re not careful we can fall into the trap of learned helplessness.

For those who haven’t taken a psych class in a long time, let’s do a quick review. Back in the 1960’s Martin Seligman did research involving dogs. PETA would have a field day with this research, but at the time it was common practice. Seligman’s research was on classical conditioning, which is about the relationship that forms between two stimuli when they are consistently presented together. In this case, when a bell would ring, the dog would get a mild electric shock. After a short time of being presented together, the dogs would show a reaction as if they were being shocked whenever the bell would ring, even if the shock wasn’t administered. The bell became such a strong warning sign of the impending shock that the dogs came to assume and physiologically respond as if the shock happened simply because the bell rang. The researchers then took this one step further. They built a cage with two sections divided by a low fence that could easily be jumped by the dogs. One side of the cage was able to administer a mild electric shock, and the other side was electricity free. The dogs were placed on the side with the shock, and for any dogs who had not previously been in the bell experiment, they would quickly jump the fence and be free from the shock. Meanwhile, the ones who had been a part of the bell part of the experiment just laid down and didn’t even bother trying to find out if they could get away from the shock. This is what Seligman termed Learned Helplessness. The dogs had learned that they couldn’t escape or evade their fate…even though in this case they could have. The learning became so deeply held that they gave up trying and just stayed in it.

Now, here’s where the research becomes interesting for our purposes. After they completed this phase of the research they asked a new question – can we break associations once they’ve been made? Essentially can we reverse learned helplessness…and the answer, is YES. In the case of the dogs, the researchers tried a number of things, including demonstrations of them stepping over the fence, bribery with reward as well as punishment to try to get the dogs to jump over to the non-electrified side of the cage. But the thing that worked was when the researchers physically picked up the dogs and moved them - when the dogs were forcibly given the opportunity to see for themselves that this side would be different. After two times of being carried over, the dogs started to regain their capacity for curiosity and were able to direct this toward their self-preservation rather than trying to conserve energy by lying down and waiting out the pain. Similarly, the researchers would ring the bell and NOT administer the shock, and while the dogs continued to have a physiological reaction as if they were being shocked for a little while, after several repetitions, the dogs learned that the bell was no longer associated with the shock. This process of unlearning a conditioned association is called extinction. We’re extinguishing the connection and the related reaction.

Ok, so what does this mean for us as humans almost 80 years later? Well, there are three key learnings I think we can draw from this that relates to stress exposure and the question of avoidance as a coping tool for dealing with triggering.

First, triggering is simply a more nuanced version of conditioning. In the Seligman studies, the conditioned stimuli are easily identifiable. Bell, shock, fear. Put those three together enough times and bell will yield fear even in the absence of shock. In life, we rarely get such a clean example. While facets of a stress-inducing or traumatic event can feel clear or obvious, others can feel far more difficult to identify. For example, in a car accident it might seem obvious that the survivor might develop a triggering reaction to driving, driving in conditions similar to the accident, like at night or in the rain, and maybe even to just being in a car or thinking about being in a car. Those are the easy ones. But there are far more subtle connections that can be made as well. For example, if the accident happened after leaving the house following an argument with a parent or spouse, the feeling of being angry can become a trigger because it was present at the time of the incident and serves as a connection to what happened. If the accident happened in a rural area with the smell of farms and manure; or near a fast food joint in all its greasy glory…these prompts can be so subtle that they are not even consciously in our awareness…but then we go to grab a burger and experience a flurry of flashbacks and feel totally insane. Remember last week we talked about why triggering exists – that it’s intention within your brain is for survival purposes, which is your brains absolute top priority and objective. While it can be extremely uncomfortable, inconvenient, and sometimes even newly dangerous (having panic attacks while driving is not safe for anyone on the road), it’s for a reason and it’s trying to do the important job of keeping you safe.

The second thing we can take from Seligman’s research is that avoiding exposure on the front end is a good idea. If we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli, we can reduce the power of the connection and the degree of damage we suffer as a result. This is where trigger prevention measures come into play. If we can work to provide ourselves with a buffer, a protective layer that helps us to keep our prefrontal cortex active during stressful events, we can reduce the consistency with which triggers are paired with events that feel significantly negative. What if, in the dog studies, the bell were paired with the shock sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting delicious food sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting pets and cuddles sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting a bath sometimes but not all the time – if the stimuli (the bell) were presented in a host of situations that evoked positive, negative and neutral feelings, it would likely become background noise. Not specifically becoming a hallmark of anything in particular. Similarly, if we can build experiences that evoke a variety of feelings with the things that could otherwise become triggers, we can be proactive at nipping triggering in the bud.

Another way we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli is by reducing our exposure more generally. I’m not saying avoid triggering here – I’m saying limit exposure to the stress and trauma to begin with. Limiting how much overtime you take on, how many additional projects you commit to and so on can help to reduce the likelihood that you will be put in positions to have the affiliations created from the get go. We’ll be talking more about trigger prevention strategies in a couple of weeks, so know that we’ll circle back to this if you are keen to have some tangible tools to support this.

The third thing we can take from Seligman’s study is that we need to step over our own proverbial fences and put in the reps to achieve extinction. …Carefully. The thing about triggers is that they aren’t actually harbingers of traumatic events. Our brain has paired the triggering stimuli with the series of events that played out and was felt as stressful or traumatizing, but this random smell or image or feeling does not in and of itself bring terrible, awful traumatic things along with it. The bell in the case of the dogs, is not dangerous on its own.

This is the problem with avoidance. When we avoid triggers we leave that pairing as is. If the researchers hadn’t rung the bell without administering the shock a bunch of times, the dogs might have gone home and peed the floor whenever the doorbell rang, because the connection was still intact. Out of a dislike for peed-on rugs, the owners might have disconnected the doorbell to save everyone the stress and trouble, but this further entrenches the connection as long-standing and doesn’t give it a chance to unpair. The key with extinction is that the stimuli that was paired to the stressful event (ie. the trigger) needs to be experienced multiple times within a context that is SAFE. That’s right, as we’ve often identified on the show, SAFETY IS KEY.

And this is essentially the working theory behind exposure therapy as a primary approach to trauma processing and trigger reduction. By exposing ourselves to triggers within contexts that are felt and experienced as safe, we give ourselves the opportunity to unlearn helplessness and extinguish conditioned connections. Now there are a few very important pieces that I want you to hear before you go out and start throwing yourself into your worst trigger-provoking experiences in an effort to clear them. Number one, for exposure to work it has to happen with safety intact. You brain needs to be able to keep the pre-frontal cortex on throughout the exposure – if it can’t then you are re-traumatizing rather than extinguishing. Number two, the best way to help our brain keep safety and the pre-frontal cortex online is by making exposure GRADUAL. Don’t start with the worst of the worst, scale it WAY back and as each step toward the harder triggering gets easier and feels safer, you can up the ante a bit. And number three, there are no shortcuts. Extinguishing through exposure can take time…sometimes a long time. If you have been exposed to certain traumatic events repeatedly, where the triggers connected to it have overlap, then it will likely take longer to get your brain on board with believing that maybe this trigger doesn’t mean bad things are coming. This will also be a longer process if any of the triggering is connected to events that were from childhood, or were interpersonal harm as opposed to random accident or other non-interpersonal events. Our brain stores childhood stress and trauma experiences as well as interpersonal ones with more sensitivity than events we experience in adulthood or that are non-interpersonal.

So let’s nail down a conclusion about the avoidance dance. While avoidance is a natural response provoked by our brain to try to reduce our experience of distress, and is used by your brain to try to remove you from situations that it perceives as being possibly related to something bad that could happen again given previous experiences, choosing avoidance doesn’t tend to solve any problems long-term. In fact, it can enhance them. If we continually avoid, we grow our perception of fear – we further entrench a story of fear in connection to the triggering thing. And as we do this, the fear will inevitably generalize – it will go from being triggered by driving the car to thinking about driving the car. And as it generalizes, our world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we continue to be exposed to new stress or trauma provoking events in a line of work where it’s never-ending, the risks of more triggers is ever-present. And this is how we move into the gradual accumulation of traumatic exposure, triggering and dysregulation of the nervous system that leads us into bigger issues like PTSD. That said, while avoidance isn’t going to solve problems and can make them worse, we also need to be careful to not go to extremes in the other direction. Throwing ourselves into traumatic reminders without skills and the intention to keep our prefrontal cortex online runs the risk of re-traumatization, so we need to tread carefully, and THIS is why it’s an avoidance DANCE. It’s nuanced and careful. It also calls for some skills to bring to the party.

That’s where we’re headed next week, into the skills for trigger management and the steps you can practice to master the dance.

Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers will be launching registration ONE week from today on February 15th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, let me give you a really quick run down. It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. So keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be posting about it on our social media, and to our email list, so if you haven’t already, follow me on social media and/or sign up for the self-care dare waitliston our podcast webpage to get notified of when registration goes live. I will add that we are planning to cap registrations this time around, so be sure to register early to claim your spot. I hope you’ll join me for it and kick off 2022 with this investment in you and your wellness, and vicariously the wellness of those who care about you. …Because as we say often during the dare, “taking care of me, let’s me take better care of others.” Ensuring your own wellness is a win for everybody.

Episode Challenge:

Are there triggers that you have tended to avoid? Are there triggers where you could be more intentional about bringing skills to keep your pre-frontal cortex online and your nervous system regulated?

Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.

Additional Resources:

Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook

Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– jump on the waitlist to be notified when registration goes live. We plan to cap registration this time, so register early, it’s only $10!

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