Do you have emotional reactions or responses to situations that seem to come out of nowhere and you can't figure out why you have them? I certainly did, and as much as you try to act in ways around certain people that you just can't seem to get yourself to stop acting like that. I hated that. And do you struggle with figuring out why you feel certain ways in certain situations when others around you seem to be fine with the situation?
I definitely did that. Well. You can actually figure out where those triggers come from to get more insight and to get more control over the triggers, which is what this video is about. If you identify with growing up in either a blatantly abusive family or a tricky family, figuring out why you get triggered gives us so much more of an ability to have control and to find our best adult self in stressful situations, which is actually the best part.
And I love it when my clients report that they were able to shift outta being triggered for say, three or four days to just figuring it out and just keeping that trigger to an hour and not losing all that time to their trauma emotions. Wouldn't that be nice? And in this video I'll walk you through specific steps and questions to help you figure it out.
If you're new to me or new to the channel, welcome. of below at the end of the video if you want more, deeper, and more concrete examples of what I just discussed.
So let's look at step one where we pause and we simply ask ourselves, am I triggered asking this question begins the process of figuring it out. Do you notice a charge in your body like either anger or shame or a downward spiral or some rushing energy like it's an emergency or something like embarrassment?
Or does the energy go down like when you make a mistake and there's this heavy sinking vibe that kind of goes down to your feet or something? Is the energy of your trigger, like a big WTF where that reaction doesn't call for that in the present so much like if someone harmlessly teases us and it we, but we take it as like a personal, personal deep attack, or did your energy go up like into your head and now you're really pissed off and having an imaginary fight in your head with someone up there.
This is a step that's all about mindful noticing in the here and now. And a good question to ask is, what am I feeling in my body right now? Just asking and noticing that we're triggered puts our frontal lobes of our brain more online, and it's not just like we're reacting from our limbic system, which is our trauma brain.
The stuff happens really fast, like in a nanosecond where your partner is in a terrible mood. The minute you see them in a nanosecond, our inner child goes into a mode. We're now in a trigger, and you don't have to have it all figured out in this step. You just need to know if you're having a reaction, a good frame of reference to know about what a trigger is.
To just think about that. Triggers are when you're just a little bit more of an upset. In fact, huge events like a breakup are easier to notice than the thousands of smaller everyday triggers. Moving on to step two is, is the trigger energy up or down? Does the trigger charge or energy that you're feeling go up or go down?
Try to start thinking if it's like anger, which is up. Or if it's like sadness, which is down. I know that's pretty basic, but hear me out. Then we get into more specific thoughts. A feeling wheel is incredibly helpful when you were raised in households that were really emotionally basic or primitive about emotions.
Also, when we're triggered, we aren't using our calm, curious thinking brain, so we'll need help naming what we're feeling. Here are some examples of up trigger energy. Down trigger energy. This is gonna be important for a later step in the process. So let's just say being resentful would fall under anger, which is up energy, while feeling ashamed falls under sadness.
So that's down energy. A rushed, busy energy falls under like an emergency in my mind. So it's like an up feeling. Feeling victimized may fall under a down sad feeling. I'm not comparing these to each other. I'm just trying to help classify these feelings and feeling say disrespected is an up energy while feeling powerless falls under sadness and being self-righteous, which is a top tier sign of being triggered that would fall under anger and say, feeling invisible might fall under, say, a sad, alone, isolated feeling, not.
Feeling seen when it comes to up and down trigger energy, there can often be a cycle where we say we become reactive and angry and self-righteous and fire off a nasty text, and then we cycle to an intense shame for having done so, and we'll come back to this in a later step. You'll be in better shape to know specifically what you're feeling and we're being able to relate that to childhood instead of just a vague, I'm mad.
Or I'm, I'm a little bit blue, or even worse, saying that you're fine and trying to push it all down or just ignore it. The up and down trigger energy is related to our survival strategy, which is gonna be covered later. Let's move on to step three. What is my knee jerk reaction to this situation that triggered me?
Related to up and down triggered energy. How do you want to, or how do you typically respond when you're triggered? This might require some thoughtful humility. Think of this as what you want to do about the situation. How do you wanna respond to the situation that you are just triggered to? Do you often feel disrespected when people question you and you become passive aggressive?
Do you always assume fault and overly apologize to run coverage or do you fire off long texts that are nasty or even overly apologetic? Do you go to the classic trauma response of like, well, you're dead to me and we're never speaking again? That was a pretty common one for me. Um, do you feel the need to crawl into like the woodwork and just become invisible over something that just came up?
Do you feel the need to build a case like you're now in lawyer mode to defend your existence or something? This step is super important because we all have patterns. We have these automatic conditioning patterns that will get in the way of how we actually want to be in the present. I'm not saying you're always wrong for these.
Many of these things are true at the same time. Like what if you are actually in the present being unfairly criticized? What I am saying is that your behaviors and your reactions are clues, like the idea of that book, the body keeps the score. Our body is reacting from a memory regardless of who was right or who was wrong in the present.
Moving on to step four. What was my survival strategy or strategies growing up related to our knee jerk reaction and related to our energy going up or down? Think of what was a potential survival strategy or strategies that you had growing up. You can think more of your adult reactions in the present if you get stuck and work backwards to some of these childhood ideas about say, childhood survival.
Let's look at fight, flight, freeze. Shame, AKA submit and attach AKA cry for help. These last two can be considered as fawn responses if you know them as such, so fight consists of being controlling or being overly judgmental. Being destructive either inwardly or outwardly. Um, it means to punish others potentially, either in our head or in person.
It means to not trust. It means to go into lawyer mode during conflict. Means being preoccupied with fairness. It can also mean being overbearing verbally and even engaging in some silent treatments. Moving on to flight, which is looks like to be really non-committal. Could be addictive, being addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, or work or whatever.
Being avoidant in general or say during conflict, engaging in self harm, engaging in isolation, we will run from things. We might have even have potential eating disorders. The freeze response looks like being indecisive. Really struggling with decisions being frozen, being prone to panic, difficulty being the focus socially.
Shuts down in general and especially shuts down in conflict for bigger, small reasons. Moving on to shame or AKA, submit The fun response. Ashamed in general and in conflict can get engaged in self-hate, can be passive, can definitely be a caretaker. Really lacks a sense of self and is vulnerable to say, being taken advantage of by others.
Moving on to cry for help. The other fond thing is desperate to connect. Very dependent, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, and can't tolerate any type of conflict really. Now let's look at these same survival strategies, but look at it with what kids have to go through. Instead of all this psych jargon, let's reframe all these to the root issues versus these just seemingly crappy things or behaviors that we're kind of stuck with or engage in.
So fight, did the child have to protect siblings or a parent? Did they experience violence in the household, physically or emotionally? Did they have to fight to get through to their parents, but would lose. Did they grow up in high conflict households where aggressive criticism was like normalized. So the flight response, did the child have to avoid home?
Did they have to cope and raise themself? Did they have to shut off their feelings 'cause they had no help with it? Did they have a childhood without any kind of connection going on? Did they need ways to escape physically or emotionally? The freeze response. Did they have to survive chaos or violence or an unstable parent in experiencing terror?
Did they have to live through overwhelm? Did they have to tolerate direct abuse? Were they frozen due to waiting for some kind of storm to pass from an angry or abusive parent? And shame or AKA submit, were they directly shamed? That stuff was like, how could you say that to your mother? Did they exist in a shame-based family?
Were they unable to save a parent or save a sibling? Was the shame about being powerless to change themselves or the family or give help to somebody? And lastly, cry for help. Was there consistent abandonment? Was there an unstable parent? Was there zero connection to self or parents due to neglect? Given these two charts, try to marry your knee jerk reaction from earlier to ways that you survived but they no longer serve you.
People pleasing, for example, was a great way to survive. And to not sink into shame, or it was a good way to diffuse an unstable environment or an unstable parent honor that your inner child came up with that strategy. But now in our present, we lose our self-respect and our boundaries when we people please.
So knee-jerk reactions are there for very good reason, and they really are Our trauma conditioning and our survival strategies. Moving on to step five, can you now connect the present trigger to a childhood event or dynamic? Remember the common triggers like thoughtless and oblivious people, people being mad at you, other people's moods or saying no?
I had a client once, a few, actually, with this problem, who had a trigger around how they parked their car when they went shopping. The client would avoid spots that were closer to the building and would park inconveniently further away thinking that others would need the spot more and didn't want to look a certain way when I educated them that it's a trigger granted, not like a death con five trigger, such as a sibling attacking you over a text about cutting off one of your parents, but it was one of those triggers where you might stop and ask yourself, why do I do that?
Why do I make such big rules for myself? When others can freely take parking spots without it being a thing for them after educating, that's a trigger. Uh, due to like the big morality of it. Due to the fear of it. Due to the yes shame around taking something readily available to us in the world. We started to connect that shame to their childhood survival response.
It came down to that they didn't take parking spots closer to the building because they were raised with a hyper moralistic shaming and controlling. Parents who had insane rules. There would also be physical violence about any kind of missteps, and in addition, the parents had a consistent negative message that the client was simply just a bad kid who would always make bad choices, which is emotional abuse.
The client would cycle between primarily shame and submit and a little bit of flight. The client made themselves small and they made themselves selfless as a way to avoid being called out or physically hit or both, and that was actually a great strategy to not call attention to themselves while being highly morally good, but later in therapy, it's kind of painful to recognize how unn.
And how gaslighted they were all the way through their childhood. The client's strategy was full on shame and submit, and it kept them safe. They would consistently fawn intimately and with the world. So moving on to step six, separate and reclaim the present. The last step involves reclaiming the present from our childhood beliefs and survival strategies that now get in the way.
What does all that mean? It means the following questions. How is the situation different? How is the present different from the childhood survival piece, like giving up a parking space? How is the person different? How is your partner, boss, friend, your own child or anonymous strangers at the grocery store different than your parent or your family?
Okay, and then lastly is, how am I different? You're an adult now. You can use your power or your voice or ability to leave a situation, or you have the ability to change your own mind or change your values. Lastly, like my mentor mind, Kurt always says, she says that being triggered isn't always a choice.
Like it happens on its own, but we can work on getting to a place of having some mastery over it. I think, um, the six step process is ideally done in the moment, um, when you know that you're triggered, but that's not really always possible. It's good to practice after or at the tail end of a hard trigger or some upset as a goal.
Um, but it is really amazing to try to do it in real time. It would look like this. It looked like, okay, I just got this nasty message from my sister shaming me about not coming, but I can feel in my body start to sink into shame and self-doubt. Is that up energy or is it down like, and then what's my knee jerk reaction?
How do I want to automatically respond to her? Or how do I typically respond? Is that a survival strategy that jumped to apologizing or ly an overly cerebral essay about my choices? Instead of just telling her off or ignoring her text. Can I connect how she's behaving? Just like when we were teens, like, yes, I was scapegoated and she was always way too supportive of mom who was being abusive.
So if this video is helpful to you, be on the lookout for an e-course that I'm gonna be putting together on these steps where I'm gonna be giving more explicit examples for each step. In the event that you kind of get stuck, it's gonna make the whole thing probably go a lot easier if you do have difficulty remembering childhood pieces.
