How Are Trauma Triggers Formed?

It has everything to do with Pavlov’s dogs, a bell, and some serious salivating

No, you were not born with them

Before I dive into how trauma triggers are formed, let me give you a bit of background on classical conditioning.

Like many great scientific advances, classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning) was discovered accidentally.

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov observed that when his assistant gave food to the dogs in his lab, his dogs would begin to salivate whenever they heard his assistant’s footsteps but before actually delivering the food.

Ivan theorized that the dogs had started to associate the sound of his assistant’s footsteps with food, so he designed an experiment where he would ring a bell just before he gave food to the dogs. After repeating this procedure several times, he rang the bell without providing food to the dogs, and as you would expect, the dogs still salivated.

What Pavlov discovered was that there are some things in life that a dog does not need to learn. A dog does not need to learn to salivate whenever it sees food. This reflex is ‘hard-wired’ into the dog.

But there are other stimuli, such as the bell, that can be programmed into the dog’s brain through repeated association.