The Anatomy of a Trigger

How Getting Triggered Deepened My Relationship (With Myself And My Partner)

When we carry unprocessed pain, as most everyone does, it can be triggered by the simplest of things. What’s triggered is a predictable cascade of emotions. Understanding your unique pattern helps people know where they are and what they need to do to come back to center. My pattern looks like this:

This is how it played out for me recently.

Trigger: I was not aware that reading an old letter would trigger me. I was sharing an aspect of my life that I considered well-digested, and I didn’t think it would take too long. I wanted to share an important part of my life story with a new love interest, so I read her a letter I had written to the abbot of a Buddhist monastery where I had lived for a year. The letter, touching on some of the most transformative (and scary) moments of my life, recounted aspects of a kundalini awakening that I experienced in 2013.

“What do you feel reading that?” my partner asked me after I read the letter.

“I feel embarrassed that I shared so much with someone who didn’t earn my trust, and also pride that I chose to be so honest,” I said.

I didn’t notice any deeper emotions (and didn’t really want to). The vulnerability was uncomfortable.

Dissociation: Directly after reading this letter, we sit down to eat the most perfectly ripe peaches. My partner, noticing my silence and lack of appreciation, asks if the peaches taste good. I’m pretty mental, thinking about something with my eyes pointed up and away to the right.

“I’m a bit dissociated,” I say. I don’t think to explore this more, and feel a strong impulse to get on with our next activity: going to fill water jugs with spring water. Sometimes I get lost in thought, and it doesn’t have to mean more than that.

Aversion / Irritation: In the irritable stage everything bugs me way more than usual.

On the drive, my partner asks, “How are you feeling, Alex?”

My negativity must be leaking out, I think. Okay, let me be honest here and at least share some of what I was feeling. “I’m feeling restless because I haven’t exercised today, and may not get to.”

My partner feels some relief knowing that the energy she senses has a confirmed external cause. Still, I subconsciously resist digging deeper, mainly because there is some subconscious programming to not touch the underlying emotions that are coded as dangerous and overwhelming.

Craving: While filling up the water jugs, I notice myself planning, “What grocery store could we go to? What would I get?” I don’t need anything in particular, but the mind reaches for something to help it feel better. I search for music that helps me connect with myself, and yet most everything sounds too annoying to enjoy.

In this experience, aversion was predominant. We cooked in a cluttered, dirty kitchen that continued to trigger annoyance for me. I sit down with my partner for an appetizer of vegan chicken tenders. I meet her eyes and try to feel my feelings, to be honest and authentic rather than hiding. I share that I’m feeling a lot of irritation.

“Is this something that is normal for you?” she asks.

More irritation arises trying to explain something that I don’t understand. I try to suppress the unpleasant feeling so I can answer and not attack someone I love in my distress. “No, this is not normal. Reading that letter touched some deep things. I think I want to go meditate.”

I notice the impulse to cry, but don’t feel safe sharing that or exploring those feelings in front of someone. I give her a hug to let her know this is not about her and go to sit on the deck in the dark of the night.

Cry / Feel Deeply: Alone, I feel much safer to feel and express. So I open to my heart and explore, “What am I feeling? What did reading that letter evoke?” And deep loneliness comes remembering how alone I was in my life, how there was no one I trusted, and no one who could understand my experience. Compassion for the person who I was and the pain I experienced when I lacked solid support.

Immediately, there is relief because now I am in touch with what is really going on. I know I am on the way through and will feel better soon, after some minutes of silence, crying, breathing, and being. I piece together what happened, connecting the dots between a trigger I didn’t notice to dissociation to irritation, and finally to emotional honesty.

Integration: I invite my partner to join me, and I share my experience and hear hers. This is an opportunity to get to know each other, so we can better learn how to navigate our (sometimes unconscious) emotions and trauma histories. Being welcomed back into relationship after an experience of trauma is an important step in initiatory experiences, and talking to her about my day fills this need.

I note how I tried to minimize my emotions from the start. What if instead of reading that letter with the thought, “This won’t take too long,” I had asked myself, “As I read, how can I more deeply feel the emotional currents of this period of my life? Can I step into an alive vulnerability and intimacy, and not just recount some dead tale?”

Catching this pattern earlier and earlier requires mindfulness and honesty. And once we recognize it, can we offer kindness rather than judgment? Here are suggestions for each stage:

Trigger

• To what extent is this event triggering emotions from the past and to what extent are they totally from the present situation?
• If you can separate the emotion from the present-day events, you are less likely to project past pain onto people and think it’s real. This space lets you give the pain the attention it deserves without causing more pain or drama.

Dissociation

• If you notice you are pretty mental, bring some attention and movement into the body. How are you feeling? Being in your head isn’t wrong, but maybe there is more balance and wholeness if you include your body, and emotions.
• Invite honesty: If you were feeling more, what might it be? Did something just happen that might have upset you?

Aversion / Craving

• This is the stage that is usually easier to notice because it’s obvious and unpleasant. With awareness, you can notice the possibility of being hijacked by the feelings. If craving drives the bus, you might engage in old addictive patterns. The way through here is to see this and be curious about the root cause.
• Find a safe place and/or a safe person and gently explore what’s really going on.
• Journaling, breathing, dancing, or meditating can all be helpful.

Cry / Feel Deeply

• Although some part of you has been avoiding this very pain, the pain itself has been calling out for attention. There is often a feeling of rightness or relaxation that comes with communication between the ostracized pain and our conscious selves.
• Remember to bring gentleness, compassion and love, as if you were sitting with a scared child.

Integration

• What beauty comes from your pain? Are your relationships deepened? Will you make art or write? A pearl begins with an irritant, just as our gifts are polished with life experience.

Collective Prayer

Being conditioned male primes me to dissociate, express anger, and seek addictive outlets rather than feel and integrate. There is an underlying fear that feeling emotions is not okay. How do we help men (and people generally) cry and feel deeply? Why do I feel so unsafe crying in front of another person? What would help me and others feel safe?

We need a new story of masculinity that embraces feeling and expressing emotion. We need examples of men who cry (thanks Obama!). We need healing experiences of crying and being received with care and respect.

In the quest for collective liberation, we need containers that teach children, teenagers, and adults how to hold and express emotions. Holding, as in allowing them to be, is one skill meditation cultivates. Expressing, as in it is healthy and valuable to cry, yell, hit, dance, and physically embody emotion. Allowing the expression of emotions in a safe, therapeutic way, helps us actually know the depth of our feeling. It celebrates our humanness and reminds us that we are all more similar than different.

We need sacred embodied witness because it is this, more than anything else that will give us the empathy to heal racism, oppression, exploitation, and end power-over dynamics without replicating them.

We need to honor emotions, the feminine, intuitive side of life, so we can be whole beings living in harmony with ourselves and the Earth.

We need to honor the action-oriented, masculine energy too and to shake it free from its unfortunate history of violence and arrogance.

So here’s my prayer: May we choose honesty and turn towards our vulnerability. May we know the depths of our emotions to the point where we again trust ourselves and life. May we create a world that reflects our inner devotion to truth and love. May all beings everywhere experience more peace because we have chosen to be with ourselves, exactly as we are, with patient acceptance and love.