Triggers

by David Richo

  The five As outlined below are the elements of an ideal holding environment, the qualities of secure attachment. This is not meant to describe the usual experience of a childhood. Fortunately, as children we can experience safety and security and have our needs satisfied with “good enough” parenting. We do not need perfection, nor is it possible.

  Yet, when there were major deficiencies in early life we find grist for the mill of our personal work of grief and then self-parenting. As part of this work we let go of blame or resentment toward our parents for their inadequacies.

  If you are a parent, you may want to use the listings below to look into your own parenting style. Share this practice with your children if they are old enough to understand it. Ask them for an honest take on your parenting of them and open a dialogue about it.

  Finally, the five As also describe what we need from our adult partners. You can, therefore, adapt the following points to your relationship needs and longings: you to your partner, your partner to you. Again, we healthy adults are satisfied with good-enough, not perfect. In the “True Companions” section in chapter 7 there is more help with this topic.

  Here are some ways our parents might have fulfilled our needs for the five As in childhood. Each is stated as an ideal. All are to be understood as including healthy limit-setting:

  Attention

  You felt that your parents, or at least one of them, directed an engaged focus on you.

  You felt they were paying mindful attention to you with no judgment or reproach of you.

  They looked not at you but into you to know your feelings and needs.

  They asked you what you felt and needed without trying to convince you otherwise.

  They attuned to your feelings and needs in a mirroring way.

  They checked in with you about your reactions to them and to family events.

  You knew you would be heard, that your story and emotions were of genuine interest to them and would always have a welcoming response.

  They loved knowing you.

  Acceptance

  You knew that whatever you were or would turn out to be was acceptable to them.

  You knew they were not trying to make you into what they wanted you to be but instead were curious about what you yourself would grow into.

  They showed you that your interests were totally acceptable to them.

  They accepted your feelings, needs, lifestyle.

  They accepted your sexual and gender orientation with no reprimand or suggestion you be otherwise than what you were.

  All your feelings were OK with them, rather than some being judged as wrong—for example, “Boys don’t cry.”

  You were not shamed.

  You did not have to try to fit in to the family; you always knew you belonged—no matter how different you were.

  Appreciation

  You were valued by your parents for yourself, not for your accomplishments.

  You did not feel that you were a burden or “another mouth to feed.”

  Your parents did not play favorites.

  They appreciated your uniquely important place in their lives and in that of the whole family.

  They acknowledged your gifts, gave you credit for them, did what they could to boost them.

  Your parents backed you up if and when others turned against you.

  They understood your joys and tears and held them in an equally warm embrace.

  You knew you could always trust them.

  Affection

  Your parents hugged, held, and kissed you.

  They showed their love in physical ways without being inappropriate.

  You often heard them tell you that they loved you.

  No one was embarrassed by eye contact or touch.

  You felt that your experience was cradled with benevolent fondness ever-expanding.

  You knew without a doubt that your parents’ caring connection to you would never end.

  They welcomed affection from you in your way of showing it.

  Their ways of showing love evolved in accord with your age but never lessened in sincere tenderness.

  You know they had wanted you even before you were born and that they always will.

  You felt you were irreplaceable.

  Allowing

  Your parents tried their best to know your deepest needs, values, and wishes.

  They were not insisting that these needs, values, and wishes had to mirror their own.

  They were not trying to control you, but they did set reasonable limits to guide you.

  You felt free to explore the world around you rather than being held back or obliged to caretake them.

  They loved having you find new ways of thinking and imagining even when your ways did not match theirs.

  You were approved of whether you were marginal or mainstream in your lifestyle.

  You could trust your parents to encourage you in your personal journey and to support you in it.

  They provided a safe home to be in or come back to while launching you out of it when you were ready.

  You knew they would help you fulfill your life goals by contributing, in whatever way they could, to your finding your unique path in the world.

  They could let you go.

  Can I now love others—and myself—in these same ways?

  As a practice, whenever we happen to remember an instance of our parents showing us one or more of the five As, we can say internally, “I appreciate how you loved me. May I show myself, you, and others that same love.” In this statement we show appreciation for our parents and extend it into a loving-kindness practice toward ourselves and others. Whatever love we receive from anyone can encourage us to give it to everyone.

  How grateful I am for [my mother’s] buoyant example, for the strong feeling of roots she gave me, for her conviction that, well-grounded, you can make the most of life, no matter what it brings.

  —Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking

  Searching Questions

  The second practice is to ask yourself the following twelve questions, ponder them, and write your responses in your journal. Exploring them in detail will help you realize how some of your childhood upbringing is still influencing your adult relationships. This is the same as asking how much of who you are in the world is the real you:

  What is unresolved in my own life that I am imagining being in a relationship might fix?

  How does my own story about my family of origin influence my sense of who I am now?

  How does my experience with my own parents influence my way of being with others?

  What attitudes from my family have remained in me and now influence my ability to accept others as they are?

  How were these feelings expressed in my childhood: sadness, anger, fear, or joy?

  How comfortable or uncomfortable am I with each of these four feelings in others?

  How am I comfortable or uncomfortable with any of these feelings in myself?

  How skillful am I at stating and maintaining personal boundaries?

  How do my family biases get in the way of accepting those who differ from me politically or religiously?

  What behavior can lead me to become so judgmental that I find it hard to feel or show compassion for another person’s plight?

  How skilled am I becoming in self-parenting or in parenting my own children?

  How much and what of me reflects my own deepest needs, values, and wishes?

  After I answered these questions, I asked myself what makes me happy about myself in these later years of my life. I answered this way: “I am happy that I have had my chance to be this person I am.”

  HOW MUCH OF ME IS ME?

  A person wishes to b
e confirmed in his being by another person…. Secretly and bashfully, he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come only from one human person to another. It is from one human being to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.

  —Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation”

  Triggers point to unresolved conflicts. Resources help us hold our conflicts and heal them. How do triggers and resources relate to childhood issues? Here are some of the experiences in childhood that lead us to a healthy adulthood: Our feelings and personal qualities are honored, mirrored, attuned to. Our parents are admirable, and we idealize their greatness. We merge with it so that we too feel powerful. As we take over more and more of their functions, from tying our shoes to comforting ourselves in distress, we grow to be their peers. All this moves us from dependency to interdependence, from seeing ourselves as grandiose to having healthy self-esteem, from distrusting our feelings and intuitions to trusting ourselves more and more.

  Our inner resources are not accessed in a vacuum. They come to us from the hands and hearts that love us. We touch into our inner resources most profoundly when we are fully ourselves. Since we all have parents and a history, we automatically carry traits and attitudes that have been inserted into us from them—some assets, some liabilities. No one is only an individual identity without past influences that have affected her personality. “Am I impersonating my mother when I judge others this way? Am I impersonating my father when I react this way?”

  We are free from our parents’ and others’ influence when who they were to us is no longer inhibiting our choices, diminishing our self-esteem, ruling our adult relationships, invading our peace of mind, designing our behavior. When all these are free of any drag on them from parents or anyone else, we are released into being ourselves, our best resource. In that freedom to be we are less easily triggered by the past. We are so lucky when we have lost, one by one, all the mighty fortresses offered by churches, institutions, and parents because now we can be explorers of our own real world within.

  Likewise, we know we have become full-on adults when the long-standing issue we have had with a parent is no longer something we have to work on with him or her. There is a time for family therapy. Hopefully, in that setting a parent hears us and, optimally, apologizes for any harshness inflicted on us in childhood. But with or without that helpful experience, as the years roll on, our resentment about how our parent treated us becomes our issue only. It is no longer a transaction requiring his or her participation or remorse. It is now a personal issue to be explored internally. We are adults when we have stopped blaming Mom or waiting for Dad to say the magic words that will “make it all better.” We ourselves are now the only Ali Baba left standing at the cave of resources that can make us rich from here on in.

  Maybe some tranquil day we might muse about our parents: “Nothing you have said or done or will say or do now takes away my peace of mind or lessens my self-esteem.”

  In the 1942 film comedy I Married a Witch, Jennifer is a witch and her alcoholic father is a warlock. He dislikes her choice of a husband and continually upbraids her. He wants to upset and end their union. Jennifer tricks her father into entering a bottle of alcohol. She then stoppers the bottle so he can no longer interfere with her or her relationship. But Jennifer places the bottle on the mantle in the living room of her marital home. Thus, her parent remains in the house but can no longer cause harm to her or her relationship. This is a metaphor for our relationship to our parents. We are never free of our connection to them, for good or ill. But when we are no longer under their influence or badgered by their opinion, we can have our own relationship in our own home. Their presence remains but it is safely bottled; it won’t go away but neither can it cause harm.

  At the same time, as adults we can see that our present problems cannot be blamed on how our parents acted, except in cases of severe trauma that still debilitates us in some way. We do not react to ourselves and others based on what our parents were like. Our trigger-reactions arise out of what we are still holding onto from what happened to us in their home. Thus, a way to be free of childhood influences is to separate the opinion of Mother about us from the reality of who we were and are. This is part of the work we do in therapy on childhood issues. We might explore such questions as these: “Was it safe to be me?” “Was I loved as myself or as the self they demanded I be?” “Did my parents patrol me or hold me?” “Did my parents acknowledge me for my accomplishments or for being me?” “Do I now see myself as my parents saw me or as I really am?”

  We can use the metaphor of our past life being a school. Some of the childhood courses were these:

  Who Are You?

  How Relationships Work

  Money

  Sex

  Food

  The teachers had such authority and drilled us so often that the curriculum information was imprinted into every cell of our bodies. None of these five “courses” can ever be expected to be fully updated or resolved. But we can explore and gradually break most of the old ties. Here is an analogy: The times tables were drilled into our minds so that now it is impossible to hear “What is six times six?” and not think “thirty-six.” Likewise, the attitudes we inherited from our parents govern how we see ourselves, our relationships, money, sex, and food. Both the information from grammar school regarding the three Rs and the attitudes about the five topics from our unofficial “homeschooling” are deeply ingrained. We can’t and don’t want to change the grammar school information. But we can gradually change the homegrown attitudes. It is a slow process because the attitudes are automatic, mostly not in our conscious awareness. But it can be done, however tediously and awkwardly. Therapy and self-help techniques are our resources.

  Most of us are not accustomed to being really free, not in childhood nor even now. Being in a family in which we are loved allows and encourages our freedom to be who we are. This allowing style of love is both conditional and unconditional. Our loving parents set limits on us—conditions—and we learned boundaries. They loved us unconditionally and we learned that we were worthy of love. Their constant “yes” to who we were led to self-esteem. Their occasional “no” to all we wanted to do fostered personal discipline.

  We are also aware of roles in our family life: We might find ourselves playing the role of the caretaker or the victim or the rescuer. When we have an established role, we actually gain a sense of power. We are important now to the family; our place is secure. We noticed that being who we are did not succeed in making us valuable to other family members. Fidelity to our role becomes our way of being important: “I can’t be loved here as I am but when I play the part they want me to play, I feel loved.” Eventually we may realize that a role is a makeshift version of importance. Importance is a wannabe version of feeling loved. And both are dollar-store versions of authentic power.

  As a humorous aside, we might hear ourselves say that our parents implanted a belief in us that we are unworthy. We declare that, as a result, we now believe we are indeed undeserving. But when it comes time to reward ourselves with a late-night treat, we have no problem convincing ourselves we “deserve it!” Perhaps this contradiction can now bring us to a shrug and a smile—two essential ingredients of contentment.

  THREE

  HOW TO HANDLE A TRIGGER

  Between two and three million years ago our ancestors learned to make and use tools. Since then every generation has invented more and more sophisticated implements. Today, we own a collection of sophisticated tools to handle household or automotive needs. We also care for our tools, store them for future use, and add to our collection when necessary. Some of us have only a minimal collection; some of us have the full complement of instruments that outfit us for almost any hardware challenge that may arise. We are also able make tools in a pinch when ordinary tools can’t do the job or are not available. We might have some tools we don’t know how to use to t
heir full capacity. All these options are a metaphor for our inner resources, the human toolbox. Thus, each of us stores useful inner tools, strategies to handle the challenges that come to us from people, events, and circumstances. We might have a minimal or a state-of-the-art collection. We sometimes have to invent our own tools in the face of crises that the self-help movement doesn’t adequately address. We care for our toolbox by upgrading our knowledge and skill level through practice, as we are learning so far in this book. We have some inner resources we have not yet used to their full capacity.

  We can learn how to make, use, upgrade, care for, and store the tools that can work for a lifetime. Without tools we are at the mercy of many triggers. With tools ready at hand we deal with what happens with grace and effectiveness. We can trust that we all have tools, inner resources. For instance, we have noticed that we have it in us to handle bad news. We know this because we hear or read of bad news daily and we are still able to get on with our day.

  The hammer in my own toolbox belonged to my grandfather. This touches into the tool metaphor, also. Some of our inner resources are passed down to us from our forebears. Some families have qualities that survive the generations—for example, being unafraid to speak up in protest against injustice. A solidarity with all humanity is an example of a splendid spiritual asset. In other words, we ourselves feel the sting of injustice felt by an oppressed group. This is an example, by the way, of being triggered in a healthy way.

  We know we were born with innate resources. We could cry out our needs without yet having the advantage of words. We could find the breasts that kept us alive without a map. Here is a simple way to remind ourselves that we had resources from the beginning of our lives: Close your eyes and picture yourself being carried across the room as an infant. Now picture yourself crawling across the room. Then picture yourself trying to walk across, falling, getting up again, and finally walking successfully. Open your eyes with the knowledge that you had and still have the inner resource of moving along on life’s journey even though you occasionally fall.