Over on her blog, Julie gave some good advice about Keeping A Behavior Log if you are parenting a traumatized adopted child. She wisely pointed out that the traumatized child often does not even know why he is acting the way he does when he is triggered. Because I have spent most of my life experiencing triggers without knowing the cause, I thought I would write about this phenomenon from the traumatized child's perspective.

A trigger is anything that elicits an emotional reaction from the traumatized child. While it appears that the child is overreacting to a stimulus, he really isn't. Instead, he is reacting appropriately to something traumatic that he experienced but has not yet dealt with. Because you, as the adoptive parent, do not know what that trigger or experience is, it appears that your child is overreacting and just being difficult.

For example, I absolutely cannot stand to get dirt in my fingernails. To an outsider, it might appear that I am just being a little princess who does not want to get my hands dirty. I never knew why this bothered me, only that if I thought I was getting any dirt in my fingernails, then my head would hurt really badly, my heart would race, and I would feel panicky. So, if I had adoptive parents who insisted that I helped with gardening, I probably would have either thrown some sort of tantrum to get out of it or gone along passively but then been very difficult later or used a negative coping tool like binge eating or self-injury to cope afterward.

The answers came later through flashbacks. I was buried alive with nothing but a straw in my mouth to provide oxygen. I had to claw my way out of the ground. As you can imagine, my fingernails filled with dirt. So, my reaction to a request to garden might seem like an overreaction, but if you know why I react so strongly, it makes perfect sense.

The problem is that a traumatized child might have repressed the memory, just as I did, and honestly not know why he is reacting so strongly to a stimulus. And because he cannot articulate why, it creates quite a ruckus for the family. This is why Julie's suggestion of a log is such a great idea.

By adulthood, I knew that I could not react to my emotions because I was seemingly constantly overreacting to things. So, I became good at stuffing them back down. I learned to follow only what my head said and ignore what my heart said because it led me astray so frequently. The problem was that this also shut down my intuition, so one extreme wound up being no better than the other. I never did figure out the balance until I actively chose to remember and heal the causes of the triggers.

Now that I am aware that gardening triggers me and why, I simply don't do it. Of course, this is much easier as an adult. When you are a traumatized child, you need your adoptive parents being attuned to your triggers and helping you heal from them.

Related Topic:

• Trauma Tuesday: Can a Traumatized Adopted Child’s Triggers be Dismantled?
• Trauma Tuesday: Dismantling the Traumatized Adopted Child’s Triggers
• Getting Triggered after Child Abuse

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt