The trailer opened with a statistic about human trafficking. My pulse quickened. I immediately started counting my breathing. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, repeat. I know my triggers, and years of therapy have put me in very good control of them. Impressive control of them, even.

The trailer continued. A girl was talking, begging her mother to believe her.

I was in the room, the walls painted with childhood characters. He was standing at the door, blocking my exit as he closed and locked it.

The trailer flicks to the next scene, my memory flooding back in an instant far shorter than real time. A mother self-medicates, unable to deal with reality and denying her daughter’s claims—something I never had to worry about.

I’m home, sitting outside on the concrete step between our house and our garage. My mother is inside, debating grabbing the shotgun and driving into town. My father is silent. I watch for a red sports car—the car my young mind assumed he drove. I’d told. Surely he knew and was already on his way to kill my family.

The trailer continues, once again moving slower than my mind. People look for a body, describing the violence young victims experience.

I’m hiding under coats. If I stay hidden, he won’t find me. If I stay hidden, he’ll pick someone else. If I stay hidden, I might fall asleep and not have to see his pick-of-the-day’s face.

There’s snow on the screen. A man’s face. He smiles. My stomach plummets. I feel nausea roll over me, waves of disgust crawling across my skin. My heart pounds out of my chest.

I breathe.
In for four.
Hold for four.
Out for four.
Hold for…how many?

I don’t know. Counting is beyond me. I feel my foot tapping, trying desperately to regulate my nervous system.

The man places his hand on the girl’s thigh.

I’m naked from the waist down. I’m cold. His fingers are slick, almost sticky. It hurts.

The girl on the screen says she doesn’t know where he’s taking her.

Time has stopped working correctly. I feel his hand on my thigh, almost thirty years later, as I sit in the theater next to the person I feel safest with—my husband, the only person I believe without question, without hesitation. The last person on this planet I ever want to hurt. The man I’ve punched in my sleep—never hard, never conscious, but still. My body believed I was fighting him off. Not my him. Him. And this man, my husband, got caught in the crossfire.

PTSD doesn’t stay neatly inside me. When I’m triggered, it leaks. It lashes. And sometimes, it reaches him. My husband is the man who laughs off the kicking when the night terrors come. Who holds me through the sobbing. Who grounds me without needing an apology. Who, when I wake up gasping and disoriented, simply says, “You’re okay. We’re home, in our apartment.” And I believe him.

In my head, I’m desperately repeating my mantra.

Now-time is safe. Now-time is safe. Now-time is…

I’m in the room again. The characters on the wall stare down at me. I am dirty and unclean and wrong.

What was my mantra? Can we leave the theater?

Can I leave this room? Can I go hide? Can I run away to somewhere he could never find me? Would he go after my family if I did?

The trailer finishes. Nervous, uncomfortable laughter from behind me jolts me back into my body, back into “now-time.” My hand is gripping my husband’s. Whoever was laughing has stopped, choking out between dying chortles, “Well, that looks awful.”

That evening, my dreams take me back to the daycare. I spend the next day and a half outside of my body. I’m not here, but I’m walking through the world. I go to work. I eat dinner. I get groceries. I am not alive. I am not here. My body is not myself; it is not mine. Food has no taste, blankets no warmth, sleep no comfort. I have dissociated.

I found my way back to my body fairly quickly. Once I realized I had dissociated, I knew what I needed to do to snap back into the world.

THAT is what a trigger is. That is what the word was supposed to mean.