情绪爆发指突然对某事产生强烈的失望、低落、恐惧和愤怒等情绪，然而对其他人而言，这事可能无伤大雅，不必在乎。前一秒还很冷静，下一秒却突然陷入失望和恐惧；几分钟前还感觉未来一片光明，突然却只剩毁灭和灾难，这种强烈的情绪既无缘由，也没带来任何好处，但却反复给我们带来巨大的伤害。你为什么会突然出现如此强烈的情绪，该如何治疗？
How to Stop Getting TRIGGERED Forever
The concept of being ‘triggered’ – though it may, at times, be overused – sits on top of a hugely important concept in psychological life, which demands our respect, compassion and attention. To be triggered is, in its most basic form, to respond with intense fear and anger to a situation in the here and now which, to other people, may seem blameless and unconcerning. One moment we are calm, the next we are catapulted into despair and terror; only minutes ago, the future looked hopeful, now only ruin and disaster seem to lie ahead.
尽管人们有时过度使用“情绪爆发”这一概念，但是它在精神生活中极为重要，我们需要给予尊重、同情和关注。简而言之，情绪爆发是指此时此景对某事产生强烈的恐惧和愤怒，然而对其他人而言，这事可能无伤大雅，不必在乎。此刻我们还很冷静，但下一秒突然陷入失望和恐惧；就在几分钟前我们还感觉未来一片光明，但现在摆在眼前的却只剩毁灭和灾难。
Most of us who suffer from these episodes would very much like to better hold on to calm and hope. It may be important to know how to be scared or angry when situations actually demand it. But the triggered person typically feels after an episode, it’s also deeply counterproductive and just plain exhausting to be visited by powerful emotions that aren’t warranted by what lies before us, and that fail to advance our interests in any way.
我们大多数人都经历过情绪爆发，都想要更好地保持冷静，充满希望。因此懂得如何适时抒发情绪尤为重要，该害怕就害怕、该生气就生气。但情绪爆发过后，被引燃情绪的人并没有好转，反而只剩精疲力竭，他们爆发出的强烈情绪既无缘由，也没带来任何好处。
The way out of being uncontrollably triggered is to understand how the mechanism operates. The mind is triggered when it believes that it recognizes in the world around it a situation that it feels from memory is going to be highly damaging and dangerous. Our triggers are a secret guide to our own private histories: they tell us about things that we were once very afraid of. The triggering element is like a piece of a jigsaw that will precisely fit into an analogous puzzle in the past. We are triggered now by what we were devastated by then.
想克服情绪不受控制地被引燃，就要明白情绪发作的原理。若大脑识别到周围情境与记忆中类似，并认为该事物会造成严重破坏，极具危险，这时便会引爆情绪。引爆情绪的因素悄无声息地迫使我们想起往事：提醒我们曾经害怕的事件。情绪的触发因素就像拼图中的一块，与往事无缝衔接。过去摧毁我们的，现在又再次引爆我们的情绪。
Even if we don’t remember too much about our past, we can guess everything we need to know from reverse engineering our triggers. If we are constantly afraid we are going to be excommunicated and mocked, this will – in some form – be exactly what happened to us at some stage long ago. If we’re terrified that someone is going to overpower us and not listen to our ‘no’s’, this is an almost sure echo of what we once experienced. The precise relationship between trigger and catalytic event may not always be literally equivalent; there can be some displacement along the way. But the link will be strong all the same. The trigger contains and maps onto a traumatic event.
即便我们对害怕的往事印象不深，但是通过引燃情绪的因素进行追根溯源，我们也能猜出大概。如果我们时常害怕自己被逐出教会、害怕遭到嘲笑，那是因为很久之前有过类似遭遇。如果我们害怕受人欺压而且无法做出反抗，那么想必以前也有过同样经历。实际上，引爆情绪的因素和催化因素并不像字面那样总是对等，有时可以相互转换，但是二者之间的联系一直非常紧密。触发因素包含并映射着让人害怕的往事。
Let’s imagine a person who is triggered, that is, thrown into powerful despair and self-loathing, by images on social media of blatantly attractive and popular people. No sooner have they seen these than they start to doubt and despise themselves, reflect on their inadequacies and remember all the reasons why they are fated to be a failure and unloved.
想象一下，你在社交媒体上看到一些照片，照片上的人既有魅力又受欢迎，因而引爆你的情绪，让你陷入绝望，开始批判自己。你一看到这些照片，就开始怀疑自己、鄙视自己、反思自身不足、想到所有自己注定失败、注定得不到爱的原因。
The trigger is not entirely ‘nothing’. There is something a little bit dispiriting about the beauty parade on certain sorts of social media. But the point at issue is the scale of the reaction that is generated. In seeking to account for it, we’ve got to look backwards. The person has been triggered because the contemporary event contains, in a garbled, disguised and unconscious form, the essence of a profoundly traumatic dynamic in earlier life which lies mostly unknown and unexplored – and thereby commands immense and unending power over the victim.
情绪触发因素无处不在，社交媒体上美女如云，这确实会让人有点沮丧自卑。但问题的关键在于你的情绪反应有多强烈。要找到解释，我们就要追溯往事。你之所以情绪被引燃，是因为本就不清楚之前留下的创伤有多大，现在发生的事件又变相重现之前的创伤，而且你无法察觉，因此反复给你带来巨大的伤害。
Let’s suppose that this person had a mother who favoured their more ebullient younger sibling over them and that their looks were part of what damned them to horrible neglect and emotional coldness. It doesn’t, in the circumstances, take much to be returned back to this bleak place. We are animals who are primed to sniff out in the present the slightest sign of the dangers of the past.
假如你的母亲更偏爱活泼的弟弟妹妹，而且相貌导致你受忽视、遭冷落。在这种情况下，你便很容易回忆起凄凉惨淡的过往。人类这种动物，当下哪怕只暴露出一点点关于过去的危险迹象，也能迅速捕捉到。
The tragedy of triggering is that it fails to notice the differences between then and now; between the awfulness we suffered long ago and the relative innocence of the modern moment. In so far as bad things do happen nowadays, triggering also fails to account for the way in which we are no longer children, and are therefore able to respond to the threats that do come our way with a lot more creativity, strength and calm than we possessed as four- or ten-year-olds. Were things ever to get as bad as they once were, we have so many more options than we did…and therefore so many reasons to feel less agitated and vulnerable.
情绪被引爆是因为你并未发觉今时不同往日。很久以前我们经历了糟心事，但那与现在无关。就现在发生的糟心事而言，我们情绪之所以爆发，也是因为没有想到我们已不再是小孩，已有能力解决好问题，而且比4岁或者10岁的时候更有想法、更强大、更冷静了。若事情还像以前那样糟糕，我们现在也有更多解决办法了，所以也就不会像当时那么不安、那么脆弱了。
To be triggered is to lose our powers of discrimination. In the heat of the moment, we can no longer distinguish between A and B. So frightening is A that everything between it and Q is, at heart, another A. We can’t tell that someone is not telling us that we are guilty, that the situation isn’t evidence of doom, that we are not being mocked, that our colleague isn’t attacking us, that we aren’t being reprimanded unbearably, that we haven’t been told we’re an idiot or a monster. We can’t distinguish between looking a bit tired and looking fundamentally unacceptable, between something they’ve done that got them sent to prison and something that we’ve done that won’t ever be noticed. So primed has our history made us to appalling scenarios, we have no ability not to refind them at every turn – especially when we are a bit low or a bit tired.
情绪爆发意味着失去辨别能力。情绪突然变得强烈，我们可能无法区分A与B。A太可怕了，以至于我们没有看到A也以为都是A。很多情况我们都不能分辨出，比如有人说不怪我们、这种情况也不代表厄运、没人嘲笑我们、同事没有针对我们、没人把我们骂得狗血喷头、没人说我们是傻瓜、是怪物。我们看不出些许厌倦和完全接受不了的区别，分不清多行不义必自毙与人在做天在看之区别。我们经历过可怕的场面，所以很难不去回想，尤其是情绪低落或者感到厌倦的时候。
Though we might assume that we’d want to escape our triggers, we are also often drawn to them through a compulsive sense of familiarity. Calm and confidence aren’t our resting places; they don’t feel normal and are therefore worrying in their own way. We want our awful hunches confirmed. It can feel right to put ourselves in environments where people might be mocking, to look out for stories of disgrace or ruin or to befriend people who are constantly on the edge of harming us.
尽管我们认为自己想要摆脱导致情绪爆发的因素，但又经常会情不自禁感到熟悉，再次引燃情绪。我们无法安于冷静和自信，毕竟这不是我们的常态，因此总是会有这样那样的担忧。我们希望糟糕的直觉得到印证，让自己处于嘲笑的人群之中，关注耻辱或毁灭的故事，或是和不断要伤害自己的人成为朋友，就是这种感觉。
The cure for triggering is love; love understood as a process of patiently holding someone and, like a kindly and soothing parent, helping them to discriminate between black and white, terror and calm, evil and goodness. The cure lies too in learning how to work backwards from our current triggers to understanding the dynamics that once created them. Rather than worrying yet again about the future, we should ask ourselves the simple question: What does my fear of what will happen tell me about what did happen? What scenario from my past is contained in my alarm at the future?
爱是治愈情绪爆发的良药。爱是一种过程，在这一过程中要耐心拥抱受伤的人，如慈祥的父母般帮助他分辨黑白、恐惧与冷静、恶魔与天使。治疗之道在于追根溯源，从当前情绪的触发因素追溯出曾经埋下的诸多隐患。与其仍旧担心未来，我们应问自己个简单的问题：我对未来的恐惧和过去有什么关系呢？过去的什么场景让我对未来有所恐惧？
To overcome our triggers is to come to navigate the present with all the confidence and excited curiosity that should have been ours from the start. And maturity could be defined as: knowing what triggers us and why – and a commitment to dampening our first responses in the name of a patient exploration and understanding of our own histories.
要克服引爆情绪的因素，就要充满自信、怀有强烈好奇心地把握当下，而从一开始我们就本应自信、有好奇心。一个人是否成熟可以如此定义：是否明晰引燃情绪的因素与源头，是否敢于为了追根溯源，耐心地探知过往，并承诺控制好自己的情绪。
本期译制团：
翻译：欧欧
总校：小良哥
source: The School of Life