Tools for Overwhelm, Panic Attacks, Trigger Moments, Stress, and PTSD

Heal the issue, don't just get past it.

Most people who have been through something hard know what it’s like to be living their day and then go into a state that knocks the wind out of us, makes us feel like you are living in a past stress moment from a sound, a situation, a smell. It can come in as shock. And can feel like our world falls apart or can be just living with a low level of constant vigilance, looking for threats.

I used to live in severe PTSD reaction, almost every day for decades. Now it shows up mostly as lower-level stress responses because I’ve spent years learning how to work with it and heal the inner layers that once held me captive.

For me, there were different levels of trigger responses, mostly because of the work I’ve done with these tools.

The lower-level ones look like anxiety, irritability, exhaustion, overthinking, or constantly scanning for problems.

The more severe ones were panic attacks, explosive rage, complete shutdown, living for months in a dissociated state without realizing it, or feeling like I was suddenly back inside an old experience instead of the present moment.

There was a time in my life when those severe reactions happened almost daily and I felt terrified and hopeless.

What feels remarkable to me now is that after years of doing this work, they became incredibly rare. For many years in the recent past, I didn’t experience any major episodes at all. During a recent period of intense stress and transition, I had two medium trigger events over the course of two years but was able to move through them with more ease and speed with the tools I had practiced.

That doesn’t feel like failure to me. It feels like evidence that healing is possible and I’ve come a long long way.

Triggers Can Be Healing

Triggers can be used as the most transformational time, but most people just want to get past them.

I found it’s the passing through with tools, a certain supportive and compassionate energy, and new practices that don’t just shut them down, but they become revelatory and deeply life shifting. I really believe it’s why I don’t get the rage attacks, total shutdown, or live months or years out of body.

Over the course of many years of therapy and healing modalities, I found some really powerful tools that helped walk me through it and not just control the trigger moments, but truly face and move what was underneath.

The tools below helped me move from surviving my triggers to understanding them, working with them, and eventually reducing their grip on my daily life. Make sure you read to the end because the last section is where the real healing comes.

Mid-Trigger Tools - in the moment.

HALT: Stop everything and check in if one of these needs, needs some care.

H — Hungry

Eat something and focus on the flavor, the sensation, and the process of chewing.

A — Angry

Go on a walk, throw some rocks, allow the anger to move through rather than suppress it.

L — Lonely

“I’m here with you, I’m with you through this, I got you, I’m not leaving you.” Reach out for help, don’t abandon yourself, Talk to God.

T — Tired

Take a nap or go to bed. Happens a lot late at night when it really is time to just rest.

Sensation Focus

Touch, Taste, Smell

Body awareness and redirecting energy from mental and thought processing to the physical to help ground. I used to always have soothing (lavendar, frankincense, geranium) essential oils put in my hands to take a few breaths. Or I’d have a stone and really focus on its texture, weight and color and feeling in my hands.

Its not about leaving the moment. its about tuning into the sensory body experience to ground into the moment rather than leave.

Smell, touch, tap, stomp feet, wiggle, go outside. Move and feel the wind, notice the texture of the clothing. anything to stay with yourself in the moment but realize you are hear and now in the present physically.

MMM Sound

Calming, soothing, grounding. Low and deep. This sound gives the body a safety and calming of the Maternal/Mama/Material world. Instantly helps with sleep, soothing the nervous system and grounding in a pleasurable and kind way. (it’s also an amazing way to help babies and children fall asleep)

Shake Therapy

Physiologically moves trapped adrenaline/cortisol from cells from previous trauma. Let the shaking move through the body. (There is an incredible study with lions and gazelles that shows that the elevated levels in the blood drop to nothing after a good shake. It the way to move fear and stress out of the body. If it gets caught within, it causes systemic inflammation.

Grounding, Wiggle in the Hips

Feel the butt and hips, the weight and the reconnection to the chair or couch (focuses on the root chakra/base/foundation so awareness comes down into our support system and base).

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Post Trigger Tips

These are all integrative, real-time regulating forces. If you are already able to notice triggers, and move it to music, writing, or shifting thoughts, which would be the first step (good to stop the stress response and refocus the mind… But next we want to reconnect from being in the head and thoughts all the time, to using your entire system: The BODY. Which is why it’s all focused on the body.

Body Scan

Tune in and look through your body with your mind’s eye. See if there are areas that feel hot, pained, shaky, heavy, tight, weighted. This moves your energy and focus from only in the head or avoidance to staying with the sensation within the physical self.

Directed Breath

Breathe into the heart, solar plexus. Visualize: Expanding inhale in all directions. Loosening, softening exhale with visualization of melting or steaming off. Use this if something feels tight, heavy, or stuck when you can actually tune into how your body is feeling. This will quite literally start to lighten the area and will usually follow with some sort of release whather sigh, sweat, cries or some natural mechanism. that allows the heaviness to move.

Notice the State Change

After any of these practices, stop for a few breaths, scan and see if there is more heat, or shivers, or coolness, or lightness in the body. It brings an awareness shift that it works.

The Real Healing

The CLEANSE — The True Healing of Tuning In:
Learning the Letting Go

The purpose of this work is to move eventually be able to sit with the memory that is in the physical cells so the cells can flush what they’ve been holding for so long.

As you bring attention, awareness, and care into the body again, it will start to ASK for things so the next steps are listen, allow and support.

“I need to rest, I need to shake, I need to feel. I need to move. I need to burp.”

The body is wise. It will show you pain you didn’t realize you trapped inside, repressed, or numbed. Many emotions will surface as the body is recognized and remembered because that is how trauma is stored. Many times people don’t even know they are numb. When we start to feel it many things will pop to the surface.

Once the body is recognized, it will begin to POUR out to clean itself. This is the hard part, because the snot, the shame, the tears, the shakes, the rage, the pouring out poop, and the sweats are real. And this is when people tend to panic. I’m in pain! What did you do to me? Nothing my love. Your body is now self cleaning as it was meant to because its alive again.

This is also when people freak out and go to meds that will stop the pour out, numb it, block in and shut it down again to find later.

So please stay with it. And give yourself a ton of grace and extra moments when things are surfacing to be seen.

This clean-out can show up as:

• mucous/cough

• tears

• rage

• sweating

• monster nasty poops (let them out — don’t take anti-diarrheal to trap that gross in the body), but drink a ton of fluids to rehydrate

• stank farts

• twitching/shaking

• pain

• total exhaustion

• and a number of big feelies or nasty things that want to leave your body

The trauma/stress/repression gets literally trapped energy and inflammation releasing in the exact way the body was designed to purify, let go, and clean itself, but we learned subconsciously that those things were weak or unacceptable in the moment.

The Big Feels

Most of our life has been lived not even realizing we are avoiding discomforts, pains and hurts. To sit and allow the feeling means it doesn’t shoot out when we least expect, controlling us or harming ourself and those around us. Sitting with both the physical sensation and the emotional feels, while listening to what the inner track is telling us it the spot to transmute it. It’s inside the thing we were terrified of feeling. Then we go still. and watch it.

The Judgment Layer

It’s important that now we allow these natural processes to fulfill themselves to clean out the body of accumulated toxins, inflammation, and trapped emotions. They need space and they need compassion to go out.

Judgments may arise (”get over it,” “don’t be a baby,” “you look ridiculous” “you are disgusting”). Old things we might have heard when we were kids and our bodies got shut down with outside judgements.

Soothe them and sit with it to reassure yourself. This is how the body cleans out and lets go. Sit with deep compassion and love, saying:

“I’m sorry you went through that. I’m sorry it hurt so bad. I’m sorry it was unjust. I’m here with you. I won’t abandon you through this. I won’t hurt you more or judge you or criticize you through this. You are safe now to feel.”

The Memory

When we allow ourselves to sit and clean out. We also may have memories pop in through this. The fun part is to watch the memory play out again as a witness/observer now that it doesn’t hijack our entire body and stress response. When we allow the memory to play out like a movie we can start to see why it happened, what we didn’t deserve, what we learn from it. But to let the body do its nasty thing is a step we need to pass through so the reaction isn’t filtering or limiting the ability to rewatch the story play out.

Eventually: Getting Ahead of It instead of reacting to it.

Start to track those triggers.

• OH, when everyone talks at once, I feel ____ in my body.

• OH, when I’m overtired, my body starts to shut down because a need isn’t met.

• OH, when I’m hungry, I get really angry and snappy.

• OH, when I smell a specific thing, I feel like I’m back in that old house where I wasn’t safe.

We can be more preemptive to fulfill those needs so our body doesn’t go into a stress zone where being triggered happens unexpectedly and we feel out of control or damage ourselves or our relationships. We also start to notice and see what’s healthy and whats not, what we deserve and what we don’t. and how to create healthier environments to hold us.

And finally The Addiction Layer

One part that is important is not to judge this part.

When our stability and safety has been threatened, and the emotions/pain/feelings feel so overwhelming that we want to make disappear, and there is a part that thinks this memory or sesation will kill us.

Most if not all addictions stem from this- avoiding and resisting the difficult past. And it’s why those who have been through the most trauma have co issues with addiction both affecting our Root Chakra

Most people who don’t use this progress will want to wiggle out of it: So they either go to dissociation (checked out like they are numbly moving through life), attack and control, or addictions on some level to ease the pain.

But then takes us go into the shame spiral of doom.

Some grace to move more gently. Don’t cut whatever thing has been helping you do your life stuff. Most people set an impossible goal, fail and then go into shame spiral. Or they try to cut it without working through the root issue and it just shape shifts into something else or takes people into a 6 month depression. So move gracefully, with discernment, and little by little. Things we don’t resist and fight have space to dissolve with love.

The safety foundation and then easing out once other tools are established can keep you from going into deep chasm.

If the addiction is so damaging that it has to be cut, make sure you have full support of community and mental health resources.

It’s really important to get these tools and information into more peoples’ hands so they don’t feel helpless, hopeless or think something is wrong with them. I thought for a long time all I could do was just manage the damage. But truly, these layers and in this way guides through a very systematic uncovering that can and will heal the original wound.

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