How to deal with a trigger

How could three little words be so triggering?

‘The Tuck Shop’ – it turns out that it wasn’t always the happy place for children in boarding school.

In Tuesday’s workshop I had a flurry of comments about it in the chat:

“awful”

“so true!!”

“wondered why it was being used!”

“horrible”

And then:

“I don’t think Tuck Shop is terrible, it’s just a bit of a trigger”

My reaction was to feel like I’d done something really bad. I felt guilty and ashamed. In picking a name for the new community I’ve set up for ex-boarders, I’d managed to choose something really triggering to them!

In other words I was triggered too.

It’s a familiar feeling. The feeling of being found out – worse even than the fear of being found out. And it was painful.

My response? Well we can change the name – but to what?

I’ll leave that to our first meeting which is next Tuesday, so I don’t have long in which to come up with alternatives. But that’s ok – I can draw on the combined wisdom of the founder members.

But what about those three words? Why were they so triggering and why didn’t I see it coming?

There was no tuck shop at my school. There was a tuck room in each house where our tuck boxes were stored. A tuck box was usually a metal biscuit tin filled with sweets and chocolates provided by our parents at the beginning of each term.

Visits to the tuck room – about two or three times a week – weren’t difficult. Well not for me anyway.

But I now realise that for many ex-boarders the tuck shop has some very painful associations.

I talked about this with my partner and then with my business coach yesterday. The thing about triggers is that they need dealing with!

In my work with couples it always the starts with a trigger. Some little thing happens and it triggers something which feels so much bigger. When you dig back into the original cause – which is almost always in childhood – and deal with it, those little things cease to trigger us.

For me one of the biggest triggers is a sense of being left out – of erasure. For instance being left out or overlooked in a meeting – or not being heard – can be really triggering and now I can see how this links back to a sense of erasure from my own family when I went away to boarding school.

I’m still working on that childhood sense of erasure, but at least now I know that that’s what I’m dealing with.

If you’re an ex-boarder and you’d like to contribute to choosing a better name for The Tuck Shop, join us – we start at 12pm next Tuesday. Find out more here.