by David Richo
Am I seeing my own shadow? Do I do the same thing he is doing? Am I looking into a mirror that shows me my hidden self? What in him or in how he is acting signals something unacknowledged in myself?
Is my inflated ego being wounded? Am I thinking, “How dare she not honor my greatness, not acknowledge my entitlement to special treatment?” Is she getting away with something I can’t do anything about or can’t get away with too?
Does this remind me of an early life experience? Am I hearing my mother’s or father’s voice? Am I putting their faces on this innocent bystander? Am I back in my childhood home?
When we are triggered, we can ask ourselves, “What part of my fear or anger or sadness reaction is about what just happened and what part is trigger energy—that is, what is activated by my shadow or my distressed ego or my early life issues?”
Fortunately, we also have three resources to help us handle the three targets: befriending the shadow, letting go of ego, working through transference by grieving past hurts. Let’s look at practices for each of the three:
Befriending Our Shadow
When we befriend the shadow, we trace our projections onto others back to our own issues and traits. We acknowledge them in ourselves and admit them to the other. We then look for what is creative and useful in them. We are not weeding out or eliminating our “unacceptable” parts but instead accepting them and putting them to better use. For instance, I admit I am controlling, name that in myself rather than blame others for how controlling they are. My next step is to look for a better use for my controlling energy. For instance, I can be more efficient, good at follow-up, aware of details, have leadership or coordinating skills—without controlling others.
We keep in mind that no matter how much of our shadow we bring into the open and befriend, there is still more—vastly more than we can ever know. The shadow is our entire unconscious, too big ever to resolve or even open in the course of one lifetime. Yet, we don’t need to know it all anyway, only how it is operative in this moment. Being healthy does not mean being perfect; rather, it means continually remaining committed to taking one more step in a healthy direction.
Reducing Our Ego Reactions
When we reduce our ego reactions, we notice our arrogance, our competitiveness, our insistence on being top dog, our being in charge. We admit that we feel entitled to special treatment by others, to be honored as superior and treated that way. We look at how we tend to retaliate against anyone who does not bow to our greatness or who hurts us in any way. We look for the spiritual practices that can help us find the virtue of humility.*
The ego does not bend to psychological work alone; it takes a spiritual awakening. We feel suddenly ready to honor equality rather than domination. We have found the “amazing grace” that saves us from the compulsions of a frantic ego trying to maintain its turf. Another avenue to healing opens when we are given a comeuppance, especially by someone we think is below us, and our ego is totally deflated. This time instead of retaliating or re-inflating we take the opportunity to learn a lesson and become more modest, less pretentious.
We do not forget that no matter how much we tame our ego to make it functional there will always be flare-ups of ego inflation because the ego is a much bigger animal than anyone can ever fully tame. We don’t rebuke ourselves for that. We only become more humble about our inadequacies, and that makes us more lovable. Then others too help us let go of ego.
Working through Our Transferences
In order to work through our transferences, we look deeply into what happened to us in childhood. We use our inner resource of grieving to process and resolve our ancient hurts. This leads to letting go of resentment toward our parents. Such letting go is the pathway to freedom from transferring resentments onto others. We also do not transfer onto others a demand or expectation that they fulfill the needs our parents failed at. This grief and letting go is a lifetime work but it is very doable and certainly necessary if we are to have healthy relationships.
We remain aware that no matter how much work we do on ourselves, how much exploration of our past we engage in, even with the best state-of-the-art therapy we will never know all that happened to us, all we felt, all we missed. We will also never see all the cunning ways childhood still influences our life and relationships. Nor do we need to. We can live a satisfying life just knowing a little more with each passing era. Yes, we do evolve and become less controlled by our past and the triggers it provokes.
The following outline may help us understand why we take a sudden like of or dislike to someone, which are both examples of triggering:
The three origins and resources also work in reverse. Other people can be triggered by these same three influences in their dealings with us. Our partner, for instance, might be triggered when we bring her face to face with her own shadow by our behavior toward her. Our ego might be competitive, so we activate a reaction of competitiveness in the other person’s ego. We act like a parent and our partner at home or fellow worker on the job has a transference reaction to us. In these instances, all we can do is ask the other how what we said or did affected him. If it is a relationship of trust, we can inquire about the three origins—but very carefully. Our question can come across as a judgment rather than a sincere attempt to find our common truth and work on it together. We are in sensitive territory so we have to tread lightly indeed. Lawrence Durrell, in his novel Balthazar, wrote: “It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code…as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness…a relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken by the inquiring mind.”
Now we can trek into a deeper dimension of this topic. When we stay with the practice of checking in with ourselves about the three main origins of our triggers, we notice something immensely enlightening: Each of the three can be a darkening screen we use to defend ourselves against a direct gaze at reality:
The shadow creates a lens of projection. We humans see one another not as we are but as we project.
The ego is a lens of entitlement. We see each other in accord with what we demand of one another.
Early life becomes a lens of transference. We put our parents’ faces on innocent bystanders in our life story.
As long as our shadow or ego or early life is up and running, we don’t see the bare bold reality of what is happening inside us. We don’t see what we really want, who we really are, who others are, what is really happening. When we finally glimpse what is actually happening within us, by recognizing the shadow, ego, or early life element, the issue is not such a big deal. Our reaction vanishes quickly.
I have personally experienced this, and it has been enormously liberating. I think I want a person or group of people to like me, include me, or make time for me. I am also quite certain that I want to spend time with them. I am sure I will feel disrespected if they avoid or exclude me. Then suddenly, in an awakening, I get what is really happening inside me: My ego wants some narcissistic recognition, some assurance that I matter to others—maybe as I wanted to matter in childhood. When I see those two elements—ego and early life—as my real concerns, I immediately understand that I don’t really want time with that person or group. I only want the sense of being included. The desire is for ego-fluffing and for getting what I missed out on years before. It is not truly about their approval of me or my wanting their company. In other words, I find out what is really going on within me once the ego and early life issues are removed. It works this way with any of the three origins of triggers we are discussing in this section. All three may be used as buffers against an unobstructed contact with reality. Let’s use one more example: Suppose we have a childhood-instigated transference that makes someone quite attractive in our eyes. Once that transference disappears and we see him or her simply as an ordinary person, the attraction fades out fast. The swiftness of the change is t
he clue to our having landed on our own reality.
Transference gains such a powerful hold on us precisely because it remains unconscious. This is why we find release so quickly when we become conscious of what is really going on, when we see, at last, whose face is really in front of us. We then understand what has been happening. Yet, we can end the game. In this process we might come to realize, for instance, how we are still trying to make our parents love us. We come to see how deep our wound is, how profound our ancient longing is. We know our work is to grieve more of our past. We will then feel compassion for ourselves and our parents. Soon we notice we are less vulnerable to the trigger. We might even see the droll quality of the game we have been playing with someone who never guessed what we were up to. We know we got it right because all the fears and plans to manipulate the other ended overnight once we caught the demon red-handed. We know we have forded the ancient stream when we can smile, shrug good-naturedly, let go, and move on.
This also applies to the forced ending of an intimate relationship. When we truly grieve and let go of the partner who no longer wants us, we notice we no longer obsess about her every minute of the day. Letting go reduces her size in our psyche. She will not be taking so much room in there as she was wont to do. That is the result of—or reward for—letting her decision no longer trigger us so much. The triggering ends when the obsession ends. Letting go is indeed advantageous since it is simultaneously a release from being triggered.
We only see reality—or one another—in the moments when the three veils have been pulled away. Then the house of cards composed of triggers and reactions collapses on its own. Without the foundations of shadow projection, ego aggrandizement, and early life transference our habitual, conditioned constructions of reality and relationships will surely fall. In the newly opened space, I see you and you see me. Was a direct panoramic view of reality what I feared all along? Have I built shelters that guard me from being nutritiously rained on by the real me or the real you? How fascinating that I thought I knew so much about me and you but actually had so much more to learn about both of us.
PRACTICES THAT INCREASE OUR PERSONAL INNER RESOURCES
In this chapter we have explored specific practices to deal with triggers in general. Then we found practices that help us handle three mind-sets that may lurk behind our triggers. Now we round out our treasury of resources by finding ways to enrich the human resources available to all of us. We will do this again with regard to relationships in chapter 7 and then with regard to spirituality in chapter 8.
Paths to Deepening Ourselves
Initiatory painful experiences that we allow, feel fully, and learn from are a boot camp just for us. This is the equivalent of “doing the work”: addressing, processing, and resolving present problems, concerns, and painful experiences rather than letting them pass through us unexamined. What makes a soap opera superficial is that nothing is ever processed and resolved. Each chapter opens a new chapter without a full resolution and a completion—the process that would allow for deepening.
As we mature, we come to accept the legitimacy of the deep hole in our psyche and we cease trying to fill it with people, work, food, alcohol, and other distractions. This radical assent is an unconditional yes to the fact that there is an existential emptiness that is common to all of us earthlings. We all find ourselves sometimes lost in a void-of-meaning inside us. That void has other names; it might also be called: openness, fullness of possibility, self-discovery.
We can assent to that desolate place as a fitting feature of our inner landscape—just as we assent to the legitimacy of the Grand Canyon with no attempt to fill it. If the earth reflects our human nature, an unfillable hole must be as important to our inner ecology as it is to the planet’s ecology. If I were to descend into the Grand Canyon, I would want to stay there long enough to explore the flora and fauna. Why can’t I treat my own inner Grand Canyon with the same fearless curiosity? The Grand Canyon does not tell us that something is missing, only that not everything has to be filled.
The result of deepening is that our psychic dimensions expand, and we become better equipped to activate our potential, a central inner resource. Rainer Maria Rilke refers to this beautifully in a 1914 letter to Magda von Hattingberg as “the boundless resolve, no longer limitable in any direction, to realize one’s purest inner possibility.”
Serenity, Courage, Wisdom
The affirmation used by twelve-step programs—a prayer originally written by the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr—can, for our purposes, be phrased this way: “May I have the serenity to accept what can’t be changed, the courage to change what is ready to be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” We are affirming our loyalty to reality just as it is. Sometimes it invites us to a full surrender to what is beyond our control. That surrender gives us serenity. Sometimes it invites us to take action in order to change something, including ourselves. That action is courage. Finally, we are continually asking the universe, Buddha, Holy Spirit (or other power) for the wisdom to know which flag to salute to: Acceptance or Action. We are not only praying to have serenity, courage, and wisdom—those are already and always in us—but we are also aspiring to activate them in the here and now.
We imagine or hope that we can be in full control of all that is changing. Such control, were it possible, would cancel our chance at building inner resources. Our not being in full control is one of the paradoxical ways our psyche helps us find and increase our inner riches. Along these lines, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations makes a suggestion for dealing with what upsets—triggers—us, based in the precepts of Stoic philosophy. He proposes continually distinguishing what we have control over and what we do not have control over. Then we can find the appropriate path. His suggestion mirrors all three of the elements of the prayer: accepting what we cannot change, changing what we can, wisely knowing the difference.
Strange how we get so attached to what makes no difference.
—Mona Stevens (played by Lizabeth Scott) in the 1948 noir film Pitfall
Yes to What Is
As we saw above, every trigger is a given of life. To say yes to the probability that people will say or do what triggers us is to face life and relationship as spiritually conscious adults. We understand that anything can happen to any of us. We cannot expect a special deal or an entitlement to an exemption. Yes is also the only link between what happens to us and what good we can make of it—that is, as an opportunity for fearless love. Our affirmation or practice is one I use daily: “May I say yes to all that happens to me today as an opportunity to love more and fear less.”
This is a willingness to embrace our daily reality with no attempt to evade or deny it. We have become radical realists both psychologically and spiritually. Such a style allows us to have moods and feelings we are not in control of while still feeling safe and secure. Then, what matters most is not whether bad things happen but rather how we keep building the inner strengths that ground and anchor us. Every time we align our minds and feelings to reality, accept its urgent demand for unconditional respect, accommodate its newest challenges, we increase our inner wealth of assets. “Yes…and” rather than “Yes, if…” turns triggers into resources.
Our happiness and sense of security can’t be based on how much we are in control of our lives and relationships. That contradicts the fact of uncertainty. Our happiness and security have to be based on realism: Since anything can happen to anybody our only safety is in saying an unconditional yes to the way the chips fall and then doing our best to make the most of the way they fell. Then we may notice happiness as a by-product of our yes.
Self-Soothing
When we are triggered, self-soothing can be an inner resource that we put into words: “I manage my anxiety. I can wind down from a crisis. I can calm myself.” We have it in us do this without having to use drugs or alcohol. Psalm 131 reminds us of this resource in our
selves, “I have calmed and quieted myself…. I am content.” Contentment with our present reality is precisely how we calm ourselves. Contentment is being satisfied with what is without wanting more and being satisfied with what is not without complaining about it. When Buddhism recommends letting go of craving and clinging, it is offering us the path to contentment.
As we modulate our feelings we find our power to balance and stabilize ourselves. We do not have to fear our feelings or moods. We can realize they do not have to run us. We can manage them rather than be fragmented or devastated by them. (The fact that we have a neocortex assures us we have this capacity.) The techniques are the standard ones we have found in the self-help movement: breathing exercises, Yoga, relaxation techniques, contact with trusted friends, bodywork, self-assuring affirmations, time in nature, and so on.
Simmering
Triggers evoke an instant reaction. If, whenever possible, we pause and don’t react but wait a day or two, the delay allows us to gain a much wider perspective—that is, we access our prefrontal cortex rather than react to the messages in our amygdala. We let the event or experience simmer for a while. The rolling boil ceases and the waters become tranquil. We may still be in reaction, but we are not acting on it. We are letting it become lighter, clearer, not so discomfiting. Our ability to shrug things off kicks in. We thereby feel stronger. Triggers hurt because they disempower us. Simmering recollects our powers and applies them to the issue that triggered us. The sense of having what it takes to deal with what happened goes a long way to reducing the impact of that particular trigger in the future.