Triggers

by David Richo

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  www.shambhala.com

  © 2019 by David Richo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Book design by Kate Huber-Parker, adapted for ebook

  Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Richo, David, 1940– author.

  Title: Triggers: how we can stop reacting and start healing/David Richo.

  Description: First edition. | Boulder: Shambala, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007666 | ISBN 9781611807653 (paperback; alk. paper)

  eISBN 9780834842588

  Subjects: LCSH: Behavior modification. | Emotional conditioning. | Stimulus generalization. | Emotions.

  Classification: LCC BF637.B4 R53 2019 | DDC 155.9—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007666

  v5.4

  a

  For Beverly

  Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

  —Helen Keller

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  ONE: WHAT TRIGGERS US AND WHY?

  Real and Imagined Triggers

  When the Trigger Is Inside Us

  Inner Demons

  What Makes Triggers So Disturbing

  TWO: TRAUMAS AND RESOURCES

  Childhood Wounds and Neuroscience

  Healthy Ways to Connect Our Then and Now

  How Much of Me Is Me?

  THREE: HOW TO HANDLE A TRIGGER

  Handy Tools

  Shadow, Ego, Early Life: What’s Really Going On?

  Practices That Increase Our Personal Inner Resources

  FOUR: THE SADNESS TRIGGER

  Grief about What We Missed Early On

  Mourning a Death

  When Others Are Sad

  Tears in Our Mortal Story

  FIVE: THE ANGER TRIGGER

  Is It Anger or Abuse?

  The Angry Ego

  Why We Fear Others’ Anger

  A New World

  SIX: THE FEAR TRIGGER

  Both Desires and Fears

  When Closeness Is Scary

  Practices for Freeing Ourselves from the Grip of Fear

  Mindfulness and Loving-Kindness for Fearlessness

  SEVEN: RELATIONSHIP TRIGGERS AND RESOURCES

  True Companions

  When Our Feelings Are Hurt

  Difficult Patterns in Relationships

  States of the Union

  Danger in the Electronics Sector?

  Practices That Increase Our Relationship Resources

  EIGHT: SPIRITUAL RESOURCES

  When the Time Has Come

  Neuroplasticity and Spirituality

  Practices That Increase Our Spiritual Resources

  EPILOGUE: THE FIRES THAT SHOW AND TELL

  Appendix: Affirmations to Free Ourselves from the Grip of Fear

  About the Author

  E-mail Sign-Up

  INTRODUCTION

  Someone says something to us, and we are suddenly struck with a sinking feeling in our stomach. Someone does something and instantly we become enraged or alarmed. Someone comes at us with a certain attitude and we go to pieces. We hear mention of a person, place, or thing that is associated with an unresolved issue or a past trauma and we immediately feel ourselves seize up with sadness, anger, fear, or shame. When any of this happens, we can be sure a trigger has been pulled. We find ourselves in a stimulus-response experience that happens to all of us. The stimulus is referred to in metaphorical terms, as either a “trigger” or a “button”: “What she said triggered me,” “What he does pushes my buttons,” “I got hooked again.” We might also say, “I have a charge on this,” using an electrical analogy.

  A trigger is any word, person, event, or experience that touches off an immediate emotional reaction—for example, sadness, depression, anger, aggression, fear, panic, or humiliation, shame. Words, behavior, attitudes, events, even the presence of certain people, can incite reflex reactions in us over which we have no control. For example, we are suddenly surprised by a noise and we are startled. The noise is the stimulus/trigger; the startle is the reaction. Our reaction can be brief or long. Sometimes we can move through our reaction in a moment. Sometimes it becomes an obsession, hard to shake off. This disempowers us and plunges us into a sense of being unsafe and insecure.

  Our reaction to a trigger is often excessive, larger than what is warranted by the stimulus, longer-lasting than what fits the triggering event. The extent to which a trigger affects us is proportional to how thick- or thin-skinned we are. The more sensitive we are to others’ behavior toward us, the more fiercely does our fear, anger, or shame erupt. As we become stronger, more self-assured, we notice that the arrows of others don’t penetrate so deeply. In a wider context, regarding ourselves and society, we need to develop a thick enough skin to cope with our world and its shadow side rather than hide from it. Then we can face the onslaughts of our imposing world with courage to deal and heal. This book can help us do this. We can come to notice what triggers us and understand why. This is how we reclaim our power, have more choice about our immediate reactions, find healing from processing a trigger experience. When a trigger stays the night with us, lasts too long, it is a signal. There is something to look into, to deal with. For instance, someone at work has triggered us and it is keeping us up at night. We are finding out that we need to have a conversation with him, work the conflict out, speak up for ourselves. This is an example of how a trigger can beckon us to healthy assertiveness.

  Our reaction is also based on our belief about how serious the trigger is. Examples of beliefs are assumptions, illusions, projections, suppositions. Our reaction moves from belief to expression first as a feeling and then sometimes with a follow-up of words or actions. Usually all this happens without our having a chance to consider what makes the most sense for us in the situation. Triggers and reactions happen so fast that we don’t have a chance to pause, look at what is really happening, and make a wise choice. This is because triggers activate our limbic system, where the emotions reside, not our prefrontal cortex, where rational thoughts preside. We might say that the limbic system is like a horse, at times spirited, at times wild. The prefrontal cortex is like reins. We are the riders, with varying, but certainly improvable, levels of skill.

  “Trigger” is an appropriate metaphor for what provokes these immediate reactions because the “gun,” the catalyst of our reaction, is in the hands of someone else. Using the “button” metaphor—as in “He pushes my buttons”—suggests that someone does something and a nuclear reaction is set off in us. When the trigger is a “hook,” we are pulled into a reaction we regret or are angry at ourselves for biting it again. All three metaphors show how we lose our personal power. Someone or something has hijacked our equanimity, gained power over our feelings and actions. This is why triggers exaggerate our feeling, reaction, and belief about their meaning. All this is totally normal. Being triggered is not dysfunctional, though our reaction to a trigger might be.

  In my work as a therapist and teacher I have heard clients and students talk about being triggered with increasing frequency in recent years. Some trigger experiences can be quite serious—for example, a soldier with PTSD tr
iggered by a sound that reminds him of combat, or a sexual assault survivor triggered by a touch that reminds her of her abuser. Other triggers may be connected to less-dramatic experiences, but people’s reactions still seem to take control over them. This book explores all kinds of triggers and reactions. I hope it will help you find greater understanding and relief, but it is important to note that some triggers and reactions are so deeply ingrained and powerful that working with a trained therapist may be an essential step in finding healing.

  A person triggers us in direct proportion to how important he has become to us in reality or in our minds. For instance, someone we care deeply about may trigger us by showing any sign of abandoning us. Someone who threatens or scares us will easily trigger us, even when he does not intend to do so. Someone we have a crush on and obsess about will trigger us by almost anything she does. When we have given power to someone, we have placed his or her finger on a trigger—and sometimes it is a hair trigger. But this does not mean that we should avoid caring about people—rather, we can learn to understand and work with our triggers and reactions.

  Sometimes a trigger can be immediate, here and now, with no earlier example of it. For instance, the first time we hear of a person in our family dying, we are stricken with grief and we weep. Usually, however, a trigger is a replay of an earlier experience. The original stimulus can be anything from a minor distress last year to a major trauma decades ago, especially in our childhood years. Those early experiences evoked grief that we have not yet fully felt or resolved. Thus, triggers can arouse post-traumatic stress that we wish to avoid. Yet, they also thereby give us a lively chance to recognize and mourn our losses, disappointments, and abuses. Indeed, every trigger is a catalyst for grief. Our sudden reaction—for example, sadness and chagrin—is how we begin to show that grief.

  A triggering event that is a throwback to an archaic trauma feels like it is happening in the present. The brain’s amygdala, part of our limbic system, stores original traumas and fear reactions with no sense of time, of impact, or of our intervening years of growth and self-strengthening. This is why triggers today can give us the sense that we are still as powerless as we were in childhood. We forget that we have inner resources to help us deal with challenges, or we neglect to use these resources because that part of the brain is not online; the amygdala has commandeered all the channels. Sometimes when we are triggered, for instance, we become mute, dumbfounded, numb. Our amygdala has silenced our thinking mind. We rebuke ourselves later as we gain back our full mental powers. We think, “I should have said…” But we did not have access to that calm thought process because the limbic system had blunted it. Triggers activate the sympathetic nervous system. We are moved toward flight, fight, or freeze. Stress hormones chime in, all beyond our immediate control—another reason we feel powerless.

  Today, thanks to neuroscience—and more specifically, research on brain plasticity—we are aware that we can reprogram our neurological pathways to change our self-defeating patterns. The prefrontal cortex can come up with healthy ways to respond to events. Then we do not have to be at the mercy of immediate, irrational, and unplanned reactions. Yet, nonetheless, the impulse to react does not disappear easily even when we lay down new neural patterns. Our spiritual practices may also help somewhat, but not even they are always robust enough to cancel our limbic reactions entirely. So we do not have to be hard on ourselves when we still react in ways we are uncomfortable with. Instead, we can observe, learn, and practice.

  Indeed, with conscious attention, our prefrontal cortex can reframe events and experiences so they do not have to be so triggering. The prefrontal cortex in full activation can calm some of the amygdala’s overblown reactions. To move from our primitive brain to our “reasonable cortex” we can evoke an alternative thought that is positive and resource-enhancing. Gradually, the new thought takes over. St. Paul wrote, “Brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8).

  A trigger can, of course, be positive—a stimulus arousing joy, erotic excitement, or optimism: We are triggered with chills and a lump in our throat when our team scores a win or when we see an example of the triumph of the human spirit. A photo of happy times gone by might trigger a warm sense of nostalgia. We are triggered when we experience love at first sight or feel the magic of a kiss. But today we use the word “trigger” mostly to refer to what is disturbing and unpleasant. Our topic in this book is that negative triggering—triggering that arouses not only sadness, anger, or fear but also, at times, hurt, shame, guilt, disappointment, letdown, regret, despair. In these cases, our reflex action might be fleeing, fighting, or freezing—but all overdone. Our experience feels negative when we flee too fast, fight too hard, freeze too long.

  A trigger can dead-end by leading only to a reaction, with no resource that would allow us to cope with our reaction. In this book, we shall see that triggers don’t have to end that way once we have tools to handle them. We can insert a third option between stimulus and response. We can move from a two-part experience to a three-part practice:

  Trigger → Reaction

  Can become:

  Trigger → Reaction → Resource

  Then, gradually, it might happen this way:

  Trigger → Resource

  We can mobilize inner resources not only to cope with triggering events but even to work through the traumas that caused them, to heal some of our post-traumatic stress. The triggers then have less power over us. We move from feeling unsafe to safer and from feeling insecure to more secure, the essence of self-trust. Triggers thrive on the illusion that we can’t trust ourselves. With inner resources we find out we can trust ourselves indeed—and in deed.

  Trauma never goes entirely away but it can become what happened rather than what still hurts. We will not eliminate triggers altogether, but we no longer have to react to them so extremely. We can modify both our susceptibility to being triggered and our reactions to being triggered. We can learn to catch ourselves before we react blindly. The impact of triggers can be blunted, and our reaction time can be shortened. We can disable the trigger mechanism so that we are not wounded, only scratched.

  All this happens when we engage in serious work on our traumas, especially in therapy. We then become more aware of the connection between triggers and what we have to work on in ourselves: Our goal is not to root out all our triggers but to find a trailhead from them into the psychological and spiritual work that has been so long awaiting us. This is how we turn our triggers into tools.

  As we marshal our inner resources, more and more of our daily triggers can turn into information with no further invasions into our peace of mind: “Oh, he said that.” “Hmm, she is doing that.” “Looks like they have that attitude toward me. How interesting.” We keep in mind in all our discussions about traumas, however, that some were so serious and severe that they might not easily go away and resources may not easily kick in.

  In this book, we learn how our inner resources are capacities that help us handle what we feel, what we experience, what others do to us, what happens to us, what life sends our way. A resource is a technology, a competency that we can learn to access with ease, aplomb, and swiftness. When we’re triggered, we do not have to be victims of what others say or do. We are equipped to handle the “slings and arrows” that come at us. The chapters that follow will help us “take arms against a sea of troubles.” Tender arms, of course.

  Inner resources are like aquifers nourishing us. They help us trust that what happens will not do what triggers can do: throw us for a loop, plunge us into despondency, turn us into targets, or make us collapse in fear or shame. Our best inner resource is our natural resourcefulness, our inventiveness and ingenuity in making the most of any hand we are dealt or in dodging any bullet headed in our direct
ion.

  This does not mean that we will not sometimes have more to face than we can handle. Inner supplies can, at times, be so minimal that they cannot match the trigger or crisis that has assailed us. When that happens, we activate the inner resource that gives our immediate inadequacy a boost: We ask for help. We turn to our outer resources, our support system, to help us through.

  We turn within for valuable resources, both psychological and spiritual. Psychology helps us develop inner resources like awareness of our needs and the ability to express and fulfill them in all the right places. We can learn to manage our feelings, to free ourselves from inhibition, to trust our ingenuity. Spirituality offers resources such as meditation, mindfulness, freedom from attachment, letting go of ego. Each of these can become a characteristic of our personality. Our psychological work and spiritual practices work together to increase and enrich our inner resources. Eventually we become what we practice.

  The alternative responses might include turning to an addiction in the face of anxiety or threat. We might use food, sex, alcohol or other drugs to deal with the curve balls life pitches to us. All this diminishes our resourcefulness. But no matter how rusty our tools have become we can restore them to full luster. Here is the path we will find in this book: We focus first on triggers, what they are, why they happen, and where they come from. Then we look at the tools that help us handle them, both in us and around us. These resources are psychological, neuro-scientific, and spiritual. We then pay particular attention to the triggers that lead to sadness, anger, and fear. Since these are the three main feeling components of grief, we explore that dimension. We also look at how triggers happen in relationships. In all the sections, we will find useful practices, including ones from Buddhist teachings. As the reader, you may be struck by passages in this book that you highlight or underline. I recommend noting these ideas in a journal or on an iPad and pondering their meanings. You can also write them out on cards and create a set of flashcards to work with daily. What strikes any of us in a book is a positive trigger that can point to our work on ourselves. Healing in many areas of our lives is the welcome result.