Triggers and Themes

Abstract

As we have seen, the emotion-processing mind is an adaptive module geared primarily to coping with traumatic environmental events, broadly defined. These adaptive efforts are carried out by both the conscious and deep unconscious systems, and they are evoked by triggering events. On the deep unconscious level, the result is the generation of narrative themes that reflect the events and meanings that have been perceived and processed deep-unconsciously. Thus, triggers and themes — the subject of this chapter — are the key to understanding and interpreting the powerful emotional issues that we, as humans, process outside of awareness and that lie at the heart of patients’ emotionally-founded symptoms and resistances. Reduced to its basics, then, the optimal intervention that can be fashioned in order to reach into the deep unconscious realm and obtain deep-unconscious encoded validation involves, first, correctly identifying the trigger to which the patient is responding deep-unconsciously and, second, decoding the narrative themes in light of that trigger. This is done by relocating or transposing the themes from their manifest context in a dream or story into the situation with the triggering event, and treating the resultant imagery as reflecting the patient’s valid, unconscious perceptions of the meanings and implications of the triggering event.