My Work Triggers People. And This Triggers Me Too.
There are moments in every workshop — whether online or in person — when I find myself scanning the room, my eyes meeting faces that look back at me without expression. Blank stares. Still bodies. Lips pressed together. Eyes fixed on the screen or the floor. It’s not that people are uninterested; it’s that something deeper is happening beneath the surface, something the mind cannot easily name.
Even when I might be laughing, sharing a story, letting my excitement about this work spill through my voice —still, the energy in the room feels heavy. No smiles, no nods, no mirroring. Just quiet. And then, suddenly, a question appears in the chat — abrupt, defensive, or strangely impersonal. Or someone begins to speak, not to ask, but to declare.
Sometimes it’s a long, winding monologue filled with opinions, moral reasoning, or personal stories ending with, “What should I do?” Sometimes a person takes up more space than the room can hold, unaware of how much they’re spilling. Sometimes, the content in the question is very extreme. Even when guidelines are provided about when and how to ask questions.
Over time, I’ve come to understand: these aren’t simply signs of personalities in the room or discomfort with the topic of sexual health.
They are trauma responses.
Because my work triggers people - and this triggers me too.
When My Nervous System Mirrors Theirs
Every time I step into a workshop about sexual health, I know that trauma will enter the space. It’s not always named, but it’s always there. I can sense it in the tightening of shoulders, the small adjustments in breath, the subtle resistance that ripples when words like intimacy or pornography are spoken aloud – or when Islam is mentioned in the same sentence as sexual health.
My body senses it before my mind does. And though I’ve been trained in somatic and trauma work, awareness doesn’t make me immune. When the energy in the room intensifies, I notice how my own nervous system moves to protect me. I don’t freeze the way I once used to — instead, I shift into appeasement. I start answering questions as quickly and thoroughly as I can, trying to manage what’s being thrown into the space, responding to every comment, trying to hold it all together. My body moves into a kind of over-functioning — an instinct to soothe what feels jagged and chaotic around me.
In those moments, I rarely pause. There’s no time to check in with myself. My system is busy managing what’s coming at me. And then, when the event ends — when the room empties or the screen goes dark — the reckoning begins. Driving home, or debriefing with my husband, I start replaying every word I said. I overanalyze, overcriticize, asking myself if I said too much, too little, or the wrong thing entirely.
With time and reflection, I’ve come to realize that this isn’t insecurity — it’s the residue of having absorbed all the trauma cues in the room and unconsciously internalizing them as I did something wrong. The truth is, I’ve simply absorbed what others could not hold. And when the adrenaline fades, I’m left with overwhelm, sadness, and often, anger.
That anger used to be hard to feel. For years, I lived in freeze — unable to access the life force beneath the surface. But now, when I feel that anger rise, I recognize it as thawing. It’s my body coming back online — my system remembering how to move, protect, and express. Still, that doesn’t make it easier. Because when the workshops are done, when the gratitude or polite goodbyes fade, I’m left carrying the after-effects — the invisible cost of this public work that touches so many unhealed places.
Through my own somatic experiencing therapy, I’m learning to stay with what arises — to tend to the charge instead of suppressing it, to understand that what I feel is not failure, but the echo of other people’s pain moving through me.
“Brothers and Sisters, Meet Your Trauma Response”
In trauma-informed work, we often speak of four instinctive responses the body uses when it senses threat or overwhelm: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These aren’t conscious choices — they are deeply ingrained survival strategies that once kept us safe. But when old wounds remain unhealed, they can emerge in spaces of learning and healing, even when the “threat” is only a conversation that touches something tender.
The fight response shows up as challenge — the person who suddenly debates, argues, or declares, “But that’s not right,” not because they want to dialogue, but because something inside them feels unsafe. Their body says, defend yourself.
The flight response looks like withdrawal — blank faces, cameras off, polite smiles that don’t reach the eyes. It’s the person who scrolls, dissociates, or zones out, their body saying, escape the moment.
The freeze response can look similar, but it’s more like the body being caught between wanting to leave and not being able to. The person’s breath slows, their eyes glaze slightly, and everything feels suspended. The body says, don’t move — maybe this will pass.
The fawn response is one I encounter often — the urge to please, over-explain, or over-share in an attempt to connect. It’s the “tell me what to do” that comes wrapped in too many details. The body says, if I connect, maybe I’ll be safe.
None of this is bad or wrong. It’s simply how the body tries to protect itself from emotional danger. But when I’m holding a room filled with these responses, I can feel it all in my own body.
Learning to Stay Connected While Holding Space
More recently, I’ve been learning — and truly working — to stay connected to my body and emotions while I hold space for others. It’s something that sounds simple but feels incredibly challenging in practice, because it requires me to focus less on others and more on myself — to stay attuned to what’s happening within me, even as I witness what’s happening around me. It means noticing when my breath tightens, when my chest contracts, when my attention begins to drift outward in an attempt to manage everyone else’s experience. This has become a quiet yet powerful shift — from enduring the room, to being in relationship with it, and with myself inside it.
It now looks like gently interrupting someone who begins to share a long, detailed story and reminding them that this space is for content-related questions, not personal processing. It looks like suggesting that someone revisit the slides and sit with the material slowly, letting it settle in their body rather than rushing to grasp it intellectually. Sometimes, it means asking a person to pause and notice how they’re feeling as they ask their question — to sit with that sensation before seeking an answer. It also means placing clearer parameters around how questions are asked, so the space remains safe and boundaried for everyone, including me.
And more so, it means weaving in somatic grounding practices throughout — a breath, a hand on the heart, an invitation to feel the ground beneath our feet — so that participants begin to meet their bodies, perhaps for the first time in a long while. Because this work inevitably stirs what has been long buried — and embodiment is the bridge back to safety.
This practice has also led me to lean into being more assertive — to set boundaries when needed, to allow people to sit in the discomfort of not understanding, and to trust that confusion is part of awakening. (How can you understand when you’re triggered? But that’s another piece for another time.)
And sometimes, it means meeting people’s energy — especially when fight energy rises in the room. Not with confrontation, but with grounded firmness. I match their intensity not to overpower it, but to anchor it — to remind both of us that power can be held without harm.
There is a sacred balance between softness and strength, between compassion and clarity — and this is where my work now lives.
The Sacred Labor of Staying Human
More and more, I’m realizing that this work isn’t only about sexual health or trauma education — it’s about humanity. About learning to stand in front of others while staying rooted in my own body, my own truth, my own tenderness. It’s about remembering that being triggered is part of being alive, and that healing doesn’t always look graceful — sometimes it looks like silence, defensiveness, or tears that find their way out sideways.
I no longer see my own activation as a failure. It’s a sign that I, too, am human — that I am not above this work but within it. What once left me depleted has become, in its own quiet way, a teacher — reminding me that healing doesn’t happen outside of discomfort; it happens through it.
So when I say, my work triggers people — and this triggers me too, what I really mean is that this is where the real work lives. In the messy, sacred middle. In the breath between someone’s pain and my own heartbeat. In the choice, again and again, to stay open — not perfectly, but soulfully — to the complexity of being human together.
And perhaps this is why the depth of my work is shifting. The conversations I’m drawn to are no longer just about education or awareness, but about what it means to truly meet our struggles — not as enemies to conquer, but as companions guiding us home to ourselves. There is more to come, inshaAllah, about how to meet and work with our struggles — about the art of staying with what we once tried to run from.
Because this work of approaching what is difficult is how healing happens.
For Your Reflection
As you sit with this piece, perhaps take a few moments to reflect on your own experiences of activation and awareness:
When you find yourself in spaces of learning or vulnerability, how does your body tend to respond — to fight, to flee, to freeze, or to fawn?
What do you notice in yourself when you feel uncomfortable — do you rush to speak, to explain, to withdraw, or to please?
What would it look like to simply notice your response, without judgment — to offer yourself compassion in that very moment?
How might you begin to stay connected to your body and breath the next time you feel triggered or reactive?
And perhaps most gently — what might it mean to see your reactions not as evidence of failure, but as invitations to healing?
