The Trigger is Your Teacher

Whatever triggers you is trying to teach you something. It would be wise to stop running away from it, hiding behind the computer games, and lying to yourself about the things that have hurt you throughout your life.

We all carry our fair share of childhood wounding; wounds that are often too painful to open up and deal with. We spend most of our early lives building up walls to try and keep people out of our darkest corners. We think, that by building up the walls, we can prevent people from seeing what hurts us, yet we bite and react any time someone pokes or prods around them. These ‘triggers’ make it clear that there are issue that haven’t been dealt with, and, having learnt to recognise many of my own in recent years, I can’t help but see them in other people now, too.

If we wish to become whole and fully integrated human beings, then we need to find gratitude for the people in our lives that say things and act in ways that make us feel angry or upset. The bigger the trigger, the bigger the wound, and, therefore, the greater the need for us to show this part of us some love, care and attention.

Intimate relationships and familial relationships can often trigger the biggest reactions inside of us, and point the way on the internal map to lead us towards where our biggest wounds are.

The longer that we leave it until we address our wounds, the more difficult each one is to find. They can easily become buried under our many stresses, worries, and the countless distractions that we have at hand in our adult lives. By avoiding, we bury. By burying, we make the pain even greater when it rears its’ ugly head in the future.

By asking ourselves the right kind of questions, and meeting ourselves without judgment, we can encourage ourselves to dig into the archive of our minds to reflect upon many of the events that may have caused us pain and suffering. Perhaps we might wish to revisit the events and change the narrative that we have spent our lives telling ourselves. This kind of action allows us to reframe our view of ourselves from ‘victim’ to ‘victor.’

Inside of all of us, there is a script that is running at all times; often it’s running in the background, in our unconscious mind that rules over most of our lives. Most of our actions and behaviours are run by this programming. In fact, some statistics say that up to 95% of our lives are run by the unconscious mind. It’s why the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung said,

‘‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.’’
~ Carl Jung

Hence, when somebody close to you says something that ‘triggers’ you and makes you angry, and you enter that state of being that doesn’t feel like ‘you’, that is the unconscious mind running the show based on the story that is playing out in the background of your mind.

When someone pokes at an unhealed wound, it can feel like an attack and makes us feel emotions that weren’t dealt with at the time of the initial event. In the instance of the trigger, we may resort back to a previous version of ourselves, and release emotions that have been boiling away for years, and sometimes even decades. That is why, in an ideal situation, we would all have the communication skills to deal with any painful encounters immediately.

Not all of us grew up in ‘ideal’ circumstances, however, and, if you’re anything like me, and you grew up under the guidance of emotionally immature parents, then you learnt early on how to bury your feelings and emotions, and pretend like everything was ok; carrying on as normal and as though nothing happened after painful events, even though you may have been hurt and feeling anger and rage inside.

We often say that we have forgiven people for things that they did or said that caused us pain. As I have found within my own life, however, my mother was right when she used to say things like, ‘don’t bother saying it unless you mean it’, and there have been plenty of instances where I have noticed myself still harbouring unpleasant feelings towards someone that I thought I had forgiven, and not knowing why. Our psyches are incredible at remembering. Sometimes, you might argue, they are too good.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
~ Maya Angelou

I encourage you to pay attention to any moments that you may notice yourself becoming triggered, reactive, and overly emotional. Perhaps it could be worthwhile to make a note of the people towards whom you harbour the strongest emotions, as these are often the ones who are in our lives to teach us the most valuable lessons about ourselves, and lead us towards our greatest growth.

It has helped me to keep a journal, in which I write every day, and particularly when I have been feeling any intense emotions. Writing, for me, has been incredibly cathartic, and I feel like a weight is lifted whenever I sit down with my journal. My emotions, when I do so, are brought forth from the depths of my unconscious mind to the surface, and released into the world. In many ways, I am preparing for a peaceful future by dealing with my emotions in the ‘now’, as much as healing from my past by dealing with many of my existing wounds.

Perhaps, if we all do some of this healing work now, we can work towards creating a more peaceful, loving and harmonious world in the future. So, I’ll end this blog post by asking you the question, what are your biggest triggers?