Triggers

Today I’m thinking about triggers. When I read a post, what does it trigger in me that causes me to connect with it or have a negative reaction towards it. When I find myself panicking, what does it really mean, what deeper worry/anxiety is triggering the panic? When I yell at my kids or my husband or myself, what’s really being triggered? When I get mad at someone’s words or react disproportionally to something I hear/read, what’s that really about?

It’s rare that a quick reaction is about what just happened. One of the main aspects of coaching is figuring out what we call the big-A agenda. (as in agenda vs Agenda) The client might come to you with a topic that they think is what’s on their mind but when you dig and ask questions, you often realize there’s something much bigger and more fundamental underneath. And it’s only when you uncover that, look at it head on, that a true shift becomes possible. When you don’t know what it’s really about, you’re only changing it at the surface and that’s rarely sustainable.

That’s why knowing my triggers is important to me. It allows me to step back and see what’s underneath this reaction. When I make a mistake at work, my panic is about feeling like I don’t belong or that I can’t do my job well. If I can step back and realize that the one mess-up doesn’t actually generalize in that way, I can take this one instance as what it is: one instance of a mistake. I am human, no matter what, I am likely to make mistakes. When my sense of belonging and worthiness is solid, I can shake off the mistake as a one-off. But when I am on shaky ground internally, each mistake is really feeding a much deeper feeling underneath. It’s yet another example of how I don’t belong. This means that until I fix the foundation of belonging, each mistake will trigger. And the issue to tackle is the worthiness, not the particular mistake and how to fix that.

The same goes for my kids. For example, last year, my son would regularly forget his jacket at school. Each time, we would get in the car, drive back to the school and pick it up. The whole drive there I would be screaming and frustrated and just not even seeing clearly. It was such an insane routine that I am sure most of the teachers thought I was crazy. Many of the other boys in the class forgot/lost their jackets all the time. Most likely, my son was truly just being absentminded. He, unfortunately, loses and misplaces and forgets stuff a lot. (And, to be honest, so did I at his age.) But once I was able to step back and reassess the trigger, I noticed that, to me, this jacket had become a symbol of his lack of respect. If he knew that things cost money, he’d treat them with more care and would surely not lose them. Did he think jackets were just free? Why was he not paying attention to the value of the things he owned? There are many ways I spend a lot of money on things and don’t mind but there’s something about waste that’s a genuine trigger for me. I don’t like to throw away food. I don’t like to buy something and then not use it. So, to me, the way he kept forgetting his jacket felt like he didn’t care. He didn’t bother. He was being disrespectful and wasteful. As soon as I realized what it was about, I could think of many other ways to instill this value in him. I could sit down and explain it to him. And it stopped being about the jacket.

We recently visited this with doing homework, too. Handling things with care and self-respect. Writing in his best handwriting. Not bending the edges of his papers. Just respecting his things and giving them the attention they deserve. I know he’s just a kid and this will take time, but now that I know what matters to me and what value it was stepping on, I can work on it with him and create a shift in both me and him.

While I would ideally love to get to a place where I never ‘trigger’ on anything, and while I’d love to be responding and not reacting, I know that I have a long way to go on all that. And as I work on that, I am also trying to take the time to learn from my triggers. Which is a much more productive way to approach my “mistakes” than punishing myself for not being perfect (or even as good as I’d like to be.)

This way, I might be able to learn from my mistakes and make different ones next time.