Ep.15: Dealing with Emotional Triggers

Episode Transcript

Being Triggered Feels Like Square One

For someone on this journey of living more consciously, more self-aware, because you realize how profound it is and how much of a difference it can make in your life, there's one thing that drives us all crazy. There's one thing that, no matter how long you've been on this journey, a month, a year, ten years, makes it feel like you're back to square one. It feels like everything you've done is for nothing. It feels like, what the hell's happening?

We have this idea in our head about who we are and what this journey has helped us become, that we're more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more resilient. And then this thing happens and it gets us questioning everything, questioning the very foundation of our awareness and of ourselves. That thing is being triggered.

Someone says something, something happens to you, and you do a full 180. You could be feeling the most present, the most fulfilled, the most patient and peaceful. You could leave your house feeling that way completely. Then something happens, maybe you miss your train, maybe you stub your toe, some small thing, and you go full 180. You get frustrated, annoyed, overwhelmed, thoughts come flooding back.

It's a nightmare when we resist it so much, because we have an expectation of how things should be, of how we are. And it's even worse for someone on this journey, because at a certain point your definition of yourself changes. You see yourself as someone who is understanding, patient, compassionate. Then you get triggered and this other side of you comes out, and afterwards you're thinking, what the hell just happened? This goes against everything I believe in, everything I think I am. And it causes so much suffering.

My Mic Just Broke Mid-Recording

I can't tell you how well-timed this episode is. I'd just finished recording it about five minutes ago, went on for around 50 minutes, probably would have cut it down to 30. I got to the end thinking, this is a really good episode, I'm quite proud of that. I clicked the stop recording button, and an error message came up saying my mic hadn't picked up the entire thing.

I just sat there thinking, seriously, did that actually just happen? That entire 50 minutes, gone, I can't recover it. So I'm doing it again. In the past, maybe when I started doing this, if that happened I would have gotten so upset and so annoyed. It's a great time to be doing an episode about being triggered, because I could have gone on like that for an hour, a day, a week, I could have been thinking about this next week. Or I could just decide, well, okay, cool, I'll do it again. What's the worst that will happen? If anything, this will be even better than the last one because I've already rehearsed it now. Worst case, I lose an hour of my time and get a bit hungry. That's it.

We've Been Taught Not to Be Okay With It

This stuff happens all the time, you can't get away from it. I think as a society we've been conditioned to feel bad about it, to feel ashamed of feeling those things: getting frustrated, getting angry, getting upset. We have this belief that we're better than that, that it's the "lower self" or whatever you want to call it, that we can't be seen feeling or thinking that way. And it causes a lot of suffering, especially when you have an image of yourself that says "I am all this," and then something happens that contradicts it completely. You go into a cycle of self-doubt, annoyance, irritation, it goes against everything you think you are, and simply because of that, you get so frustrated you make it so much worse.

We've been taught that being angry is a bad thing. If you're a kid in primary school and you start shouting, you get sent to the corner, it's time out, you can't be doing that, it's not appropriate behaviour. We haven't been taught to process our emotions properly. We've been taught very well how to think, how to be logical, how to do maths. But when it comes to emotions, there's not a lot of stuff out there. So we end up holding onto negative emotions, or letting them out in unhealthy ways. Next thing you know, you're 50 or 60 and you've been holding onto these emotions for so long that the stored energy starts causing disease, or some issue, that energy is just stagnant.

So I think it's so important to understand and be okay with feeling upset, feeling bad, being triggered, and then dealing with it in a healthy way so we can learn from it. Maybe next time we don't get triggered as much, maybe we do, either way, it's not about trying to get somewhere, it's about dealing with what comes up.

When you don't know how to deal with being triggered, a few things happen. It's very easy to start blaming the outside world, because something happened to you, and therefore it's not your fault, and therefore your emotion is justified, it's all that person's fault, or that environment's fault. It's also very easy to make it a lot worse in our head, because we're inherently resisting that trigger, we don't want to feel that way. So not only do we maybe avoid that kind of situation altogether, we also make it worse in our heads by consistently thinking about it.

As I'm saying this, you might remember something that's happened to you that really triggered you. Or maybe you can see certain themes in your life, where if something happens around a particular area, you get triggered. Like if someone says, "mate, you need to hit the gym, you're looking terrible," it might have no effect. But if that same person says, "you don't deserve your partner," that really strikes a nerve. So maybe you can start to see themes, categories where you're more susceptible.

When I say triggered, I don't just mean situations where you blew a gasket and started shouting randomly, that's one way of being triggered, but it can be something as small as just feeling a bit off, or thinking in a negative way. Triggered just means you're reacting to your external environment, something out there caused you to feel or think a certain way, normally in a negative quote-unquote way.

But emotions in themselves aren't positive or negative. We think anger is such a bad thing, that people will think a certain way about us. Whereas every emotion is just a tool, a signal for a certain thing. If you feel angry, there's a good chance one of your boundaries has been crossed, or someone has tried to manipulate you, or you feel wronged in some way. That emotion is a signal that's happened to you, and you can use it to either get pissed off at that person and have a go at them, or use it to say, okay, this has happened, maybe I need to reinforce that boundary, maybe I need to do this or that.

Take being overwhelmed. The societal norm is that if you feel overwhelmed, it means you can't handle your shit, or people will think less of you. Whereas the truth is, being overwhelmed is just a signal to maybe change the way you're doing things, to be more efficient. I just want to plant the seed that emotions by themselves are fluid, and the meaning we take from them is situational, and also dependent on how we see ourselves. So how do we deal with triggers?

Two Types of Pain

If you can think of a situation where you've been triggered, or a situation that might trigger you, this would be great to experiment with. There are two types of pain that come with being triggered. There's the pain or suffering of the actual event, someone says something that upsets you, or you miss the train and it makes you annoyed. That's the actual event.

Then there's the reflection of that event, the meaning we take from it, the way we identify with it. It's the thoughts and feelings afterwards, the cycles and loops we keep going through, how we derive our self-worth from that event. If you miss the train and you're late to work, that's a fact, that's happened, and there could be some emotion that comes with it. But the suffering that comes afterwards, feeling like, how can I deserve that promotion if I can't even get to work on time, or what will my colleagues or boss think, that's what causes even more suffering. It's how that actual instance affects our identity, our self-worth.

The truth could just be that you woke up late, or you had a rough night, or you couldn't get any sleep. It doesn't mean missing the train makes you a bad person. But that's not how we see things, we are egocentric, meaning everything that happens to us we filter through ourselves. The meaning we take from a situation gets filtered through our view of ourselves. So when something happens, we take it as a reflection of our self-worth, our worthiness, our confidence or competence.

Triggers happen, and I completely understand if you get triggered and just don't want to feel that way anymore, or you don't want to admit it, like when you have an argument with your partner and the next morning you both have some non-verbal agreement to never talk about it again. It never happened, don't talk about it. That's an aversion to not wanting to feel that way, or even to acknowledge it happened. That's what causes more issues, because if we're not willing to confront it, we can't get clarity into why it happened, which means it will keep happening. Again, that comes from our conditioning as kids, where we're taught that being angry is wrong, being frustrated is wrong, we should be more patient, more forgiving, more accepting. In some ways that's true, but the way to get there isn't to avoid how we're feeling and pretend we feel good about it. Pretending to be something we're not causes the most suffering.

Treating Emotional Resilience Like a Muscle

The way to get there is to deal with the emotions, understand why they're there, understand what part of ourselves we see in that emotion or that situation. It's not a bad thing to feel bad, or negative, or frustrated, or overwhelmed, it's just a feeling. We are bigger than our thoughts, we are bigger than our emotions. But when a trigger happens and it's so overwhelming, because we haven't learnt to deal with our emotions in a healthy way, everything feels overwhelming. It's like never going to the gym and then going once and expecting to lift everything, it's just not going to happen, and then we get overwhelmed.

That emotion consumes us, we think things we regret, we do things we might regret, and then it reinforces the belief that the emotion itself is wrong, because it caused all this. Whereas the truth is, it was just too intense, any emotion, if it's intense enough, is overwhelming. You know the Snickers advert, you're not you when you're hungry. Same thing. Any emotion, if intense enough, and we can't really control ourselves. So if that happens to you, don't feel bad about it.

What we have to do is build up to it. We have to treat emotional resilience, emotional understanding, emotional maturity, as a muscle. Start with when the emotion is not intense, when we stub our toe, when someone says something that kind of annoys us but we kind of forget about it. Don't forget about it. Start with the emotion and ask ourselves, why did this come up? What about this situation made this come up? Because it's not intense, we have some awareness of it and some comfort in it, because we know we can control it. When we're starting off, that feeling of certainty is important.

Missing the Train vs Missing the Dentist

The more we do this, the more we start to distinguish between different situations and what this particular situation emotionally resonates with in us. Take being late to work. You missed the train, you're late to work, that may cause a lot of frustration. But if you missed the train and it made you late for a dentist appointment, would you feel the same way? It's really important to draw these comparisons, because then we start to distinguish what really is the source of the trigger.

Is it missing the train? Not really, because if I missed the train for my dentist appointment, I wouldn't be that upset. Logically, it's about work. What about missing work makes me feel a certain way? It brings up feelings of uncertainty, maybe I get fired because I'm late, maybe I can't provide for my family. And then we start to get to the real issues. What does that say about you? Well, if I can't provide for my family, I'm a failure, I'm not good enough. Then we start to really see the issues.

So clarity is the first part. We have to understand what about the situation is triggering us, because it may not be the thing that happens, it might be something our mind infers from what happens. I hope this is making sense, because it's a very big topic and I'll go into it in more detail in a lot more episodes. In my opinion, understanding our emotions and processing them is the hardest thing we can do. It takes a lot of humility and courage to acknowledge, okay, I feel anxious, or I feel frustrated, rather than pushing it to one side and doing mental gymnastics to justify why we're not feeling that way, or why we shouldn't be.

Remember, all suffering is caused by our expectation being different from our reality. That's it. The suffering caused by you missing the train is only there because you expected to make the train. Same thing with being happy, the reason we're happy is because our expectation meets our reality, because we have a belief or meaning somewhere that says, for me to be happy I have to have X, Y and Z. If you have X, Y and Z, you're happy.

Getting Clarity on the True Source

So the more we become conscious of when it happens and why it happens, trying to get some clarity into it, trying to draw comparisons, and trying to understand what really causes that emotional reaction, the more we can start to deal with it, because we start to understand its cause.

Again, I think the biggest reason people don't do this is because we have some level of resistance to even acknowledging it, even acknowledging that we're feeling a certain way, because we think we shouldn't be. We think it means something about us, that it makes us less competent, less worthy, less lovable. For example, if you get overwhelmed, a big belief is that it means you're not smart enough, not competent enough. That's not true.

When you get clarity on the true source of those triggers, you can straight up ask yourself: is it true? Does being overwhelmed at work mean I'm not smart enough? Maybe not, maybe it just means I don't really enjoy what I'm doing, so I don't put as much attention into it. Maybe it means I need to reprioritise my time. This is where reframing comes in, and suddenly you get to a point where you don't take negative emotions as negative anymore. You take them as opportunities. Like anxiety, what do people think about anxiety?