Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Okay, so “Crazy,” let’s talk about what that word means.

It means “mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive manner. That’s the Google definition, and it fits pretty closely with the definition I’m referring to when I say “crazy.”

It is really difficult to remain calm in the hum of craziness wrapping around your life, but I’ve found some techniques that help; the problem is that for these techniques to work, you have to break the programming that comes from people who say that nothing will work if they didn’t think about it first.

You must also remember that in a moment of “shit hitting the fan,” you may only have a second or two to decide how you will react. You might not even have that time at all.

When we have mental health issues, we often don’t have time to decide how to react; our brains react before we can think. This can be scary from the outside, but from the inside looking out, it can be completely terrifying.

So all of this leads me to, how do you prepare for the shit to hit the fan without losing your mind? The truth is you don’t. You can prepare for every emergency in the world, and the universe will still find the one way you didn’t think about to throw you off your axis.

You can train yourself, like a ninja, to focus on working out your trauma triggers so they aren’t so effective when you find yourself in a situation where you’ve been accidentally triggered.

Now, let me be clear. There is no 100% guaranteed way to break all your triggers; that takes time, effort, and a lot of emotional work, but you can tame them some so that when you are triggered, you aren’t as reactive.

If being less reactive is the best you can hope for, then let’s start there.

First, identify why you’ve been triggered.

Well, to do that, you have to know what your triggers are – for me; in my case, I didn’t know for years that I was being triggered; I didn’t even know what the fuck a trigger was. I just knew I was irrationally explosive, and I couldn’t control the way I reacted to anxiety-inducing situations.

Meditation, yes, meditation, in harnessed ways, can help you be less reactive. So can hitting a punching bag. The idea is to learn to release the steam, so to speak, in a way that doesn’t hurt you or anyone else.

Meditation can teach you how to breathe and calm your entire nervous system down, and I mean your NERVOUS system, the part of your system that controls your reactions.

Now, so can physical activity. Walking, running, and working out are positive ways to deal with negative feelings about what you’ve been through…in small doses. If you find your body is changing because you’re working out every day because you’re frustrated or anxious, that’s not so healthy. Unless you’re looking for those physical changes.

These are all healthy coping mechanisms.

Negative coping mechanisms might include

• overeating
• not eating at all
• cutting or self-harm
• working out too much
• not talking about your feelings
• not expressing yourself softly
• sex
• drugs
• alcohol

The list goes on. The other day, I told my friend that meditation can only do so much. You need therapy, too, or counseling; you need a variety of healthy coping mechanisms because trauma is unique and complex, and not every solution will work every single time. And yes, there’s a lot of toxic positivity around healing, but in small measures, all things can help heal, including sex and drugs.

There is a difference between:

• Trauma triggers
• Trauma Responses
• Trauma Dumping
• Healing

These things are all under the same umbrella but not the same.

A trauma trigger is when something happens that prompts a reaction from you, often an unintended and sometimes possibly explosive reaction.

Trauma response is how you respond; that seems redundant until you teach yourself to REMEMBER you have control.

Your trigger is not your response, and just because you respond to a trigger doesn’t mean you aren’t healing. It means you slipped; you’ll get up and try again.

I yell. This is a negative coping mechanism. Sometimes, it can be the sound of someone’s voice, whether they mean it or not, but this leads me to realize that I must focus on softening my voice.

Not to the degree that it’s not heard, but to the degree that it causes less harm than I cause.

It’s okay not to yell, but I do it because I feel like I’m not being heard. The little girl inside me is convinced if I yell, then I’ll make myself more clear, but part of it is just that I’m passionate, and when I’m triggered, my anxiety comes out in ways that seem aggressive but aren’t.

Regarding mental health, we must remember that it’s our job as patients to teach folks that being loud isn’t the same as being aggressive.

It should be obvious that not everyone is the same. Unfortunately, many people in the mental health world have dealt with aggression and loud; to them, being loud is often a sign of aggression being next.

We, as the patients, have to be the ones to change that by controlling ourselves and teaching ourselves CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Theraphy, in controlled ways so that we’re actually healing instead of pretending to heal.

I am going into a self-help program where I will learn about this kind of therapy to learn more about it.

I’m excited but nervous because if I don’t get in, I will have to search fo something else, and it already took me 40 years to find this program. But I’m excited because it’s a chance to learn something I didn’t learn before and that’s going to help change my life.

I hope some of my thoughts on mental health have been helpful, if you have other suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall

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If you’d like to read more of Devon’s work, check them out in the following publications.

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