Triggers

by David Richo

  With the simmering style, we forego the temptation to make big life-destabilizing decisions when a crisis hits (for example, moving out of town because our spouse left us). With patience as our inner resource we wait till the smoke clears and we trust that a flood of new resources will surely flow in.

  Staying with Our Feelings

  Life has some givens that we all have to face: Things change and end; life can be unfair; suffering is part of everyone’s life; our plans can fall through; people are not always loving or loyal. Each of these givens may trigger a painful reaction. Yet each, by a felicitous grace, can also activate an inner resource, a healthy feeling response. Our feelings are resources because they help us work through and resolve a conflicting experience. Indeed, feelings are our tools, always available, to handle what will definitely happen to us in the course of life. Each feeling can be a technology to help us face life’s givens, as in the following outline:

  When we have spiritual consciousness, the resourceful responses in the right-hand column do not apply to ourselves only. In spiritual consciousness, we are happy when others find happiness. We care about the losses, injustices, and threats that affect others, both our near and dear and all people on our planet. We feel a universal compassion and we respond in the action-style described in the column on the right. One wounded person makes us bleed too. Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’ wrote: “Our goal is…to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”

  Feelings can trigger us to run or hide. But we can always find our resources; our body has not thrown them away. All it takes is sitting in what we feel. When we let ourselves feel the trigger of loneliness, for example, we are building the inner resources to handle it next time. This is the advantage of our practice of mindfulness as “being here now.” We do not seek an escape or blame ourselves or others for how isolated we feel. We do for ourselves what Romeo did for Juliet, saying to ourselves, “I still will stay with thee.”

  Some of us are only fully aware of our inner resources when we are focused on a project or purpose. We don’t know how to handle the blank spaces. But we can find an inner resource to help us find contentment during the times when we feel empty and lost. This resource involves staying with ourselves as we go through our lonely time. “Staying with” means showing ourselves the five As, the components of intimate love that represent our earliest needs: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing. It also means not jumping to an escape or distraction but simply staying put. “Staying with” is a physical form of self-acceptance.

  We may also notice that we easily tap into our resources when all goes smoothly, is under our control—but not otherwise. We can learn to be ready for times when we are not in control. Again, we stay through. When we hit a wall we go to our inner resource of sitting still. We don’t try to break through what resists us. We don’t even try to break through our own resistance. We call it by name and stand pat. We let it fall of its own accord and in its own time.

  Help from the Past and from Our Memories

  Past events can trigger us, especially with shame about particular choices we have made. The “past is prologue” means that all that has happened to us, even (or especially) our mistakes, can be called upon as inner resources. All that happens ultimately has value because we can learn from it. Likewise, no matter how bad things are or what mistakes we have made we can turn to inner resources, one of which is “start over.” Finally, every event or experience is valuable because each one gives us yet another chance for spiritual practice.

  We do not have to be feeling comforted here and now to find comfort. The memory of what worked before can comfort us. We can recall how we felt with someone who really loved us, with whom we always felt safe, who gave us permission to be who we really are. We hear Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Harvard Divinity School address of 1838: “We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.” Who tuned into tones in us that had not yet been sounded, notes we never dared to sing aloud? An encouraging practice is to picture these special people in a circle around us cheering us on.

  Indeed, all that people say and do has either comfort or challenge in it and both build resources. Comfort keeps us in the container of ease and security; challenge engages our potential to face our dragons in a courageous way.

  We also find inner resources when we imitate the resourceful people we have known. We see them showing courage and we affirm that we have that same potential in ourselves. We practice being brave and find we can step up to the plate as they have. Our heroes show us the resources hidden in ourselves.

  The Power of Poetic Imagination

  Situations or events trigger us. We are then not able to understand them fully. It may help to write a poem or a journal entry focused on a trigger and our reaction. We thereby access our unconscious riches and make a deeper connection with the issue at hand. A poem especially mines the concrete concern and finds gold in it. This staying with a life question until a decision emerges is how a poem can evoke our inner resource of wisdom. Indeed, a practice of writing a poem to process a triggering situation in our lives, or to respond to an event in the news, evokes a dimension that our rational mind will usually miss. Our poem can be a response to questions like these: How do I handle this trigger resiliently? How do I respond to what just happened to me? What do I feel about this political event or person in the news? In spiritual consciousness, we can ask, How can I experience this in the mind and heart of Buddha? This is an example of combining poetry and practice. We all have the ability to do this; practice increases our ability, our resource.

  Resources Need Protection

  Material riches need guarding. This is why there is a guard on night duty at financial institutions, why there are walls around buildings, why there are safes, lockboxes, vaults. Temples and tabernacles contain spiritual riches. Thus, they too have walls and locked doors. Our layer of skin likewise guards important internal organs in our body. In traditions with a belief in guardian angels, the angels are guarding our souls. Personal riches may also require hiding; we hide our valuables. It does not make sense to keep wealth unprotected. To do so would be a denial of the shadow side of humans, the predatory side we are all prey to.

  Inner resources also need guarding at times. We gladly share our resources with those who need them but not in ways that lead to our being taken advantage of. We set and maintain boundaries around our resources lest they be lost. The danger in being codependent is giving so much that nothing is left in us or for us. A codependent person is triggered by others’ needs into excessive generosity or self-sacrifice. If he believes he has not given enough or given priority to his own needs, even once, he is triggered into guilt, shame, and fear of rejection by one he “loves so/too much.” When we let others keep crossing the line we have drawn, the line fades away altogether. Then we have nothing left of ourselves or of our adult relationship. We need to protect our valuables, our inner resources, so they can continue to serve us and those close to us.

  Self-discipline is a way of protecting our goals in life. There is a part of me that does not obey me. I make choices that can harm my health or self-esteem. Yet at another level, I don’t want to keep doing what hurts me. I can turn to an inner resource we all have but one that atrophies when we don’t use it: discipline. This does not mean repression; it only means letting go of our resistance to our evolutionary drive to grow and thrive. In mindfulness, I can, in addition, notice the health-negating urges without having to act on them.

  William James wrote in “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals”: “Every good that is worth possessing must be paid in strokes of daily effort. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the littl
e daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.” We don’t have to reject this statement as an old-fashioned work ethic. We can see it as encouragement to open to our richest potentials. We can frame our idea of discipline as meaning willingness to open to all that we are. Discipline is then the reasonable cost of being all we can be. Discipline is the resource in us that keeps us on track in our magnificent human task to keep on evolving.

  * For more on this, see my book You Are Not What You Think: The Egoless Path to Self-Esteem and Generous Love (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2015).

  FOUR

  THE SADNESS TRIGGER

  If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift.

  —Eavon Boland, “Pomegranate”

  The three most common feelings that arise in our reactions to triggers are sadness, anger, and fear—the main feelings in grief. In this and in the next two chapters we explore these emotions and find the resources to move through them in healthy ways. Indeed, we are not on track when we try to get rid of distressing feelings. We can hold these feelings in ways that foster growth. To “hold” means to experience something fully without becoming overwhelmed or diminished because of it.

  It is a given for all of us that life and relationships will toss us losses, endings, disappointments, deficits, deprivations. Each of these, like all the givens to be expected in a human life, becomes a trigger into the healthy response of sadness. This feeling is a built-in technology, an inner resource designed to help us deal effectively with these triggering events. When we let ourselves be sad, we live through our experience of being bereft. The result is that we can get on with our life—that is, we continue on our journey toward lively wholeness.

  Throughout this book we distinguish limbic reactions from cognitively based regulation of them. The prefrontal cortex is instrumental in regulating our sadness. It is also, however, used to suppress our sadness. As healthy adults, we choose regulation over suppression.

  The word “emotion” means “moving out of” in Latin. Sadness is an emotion. We feel sadness coming on; we allow it to have its full career in our body-mind. We do this when we shed tears, tell the story of our loss, let ourselves mope around as long as we need to. Gradually, our sadness reduces and then releases. Our sadness, like all feelings, arcs over a bell-shaped curve from arising to cresting to declining. This is how it moves through us rather than be bottled up inside us. When we do repress our sadness, we might be vulnerable to depression. Then we find ourselves stuck in an inner vacancy that seems to be inescapable. We cannot feel happiness; we lose interest in our life goals; we slow down in all our activities; we fall into despair. Our levels of serotonin and norepinephrine reduce so much that neural information fails to come through. This is a type of depression based on events that are not processed with the healing experience of sadness. There is also a chemical depression that can last for years, irrespective of events, and for which medication may be an important resource.

  Regarding repression of our emotions, we recall that loss automatically triggers sadness, injustice automatically triggers anger, threat automatically triggers fear. When we repress these healthy responses, we interrupt a natural sequence. We lose our chance to ride the arc of an event and to experience its consequent feeling. We forfeit our opportunity to work through what has happened and find closure. Repression is not just part of depression; it blockades us on our heroic journey.

  GRIEF ABOUT WHAT WE MISSED EARLY ON

  When losses happen, our grief includes being sad that something is gone, angry that it was taken away, and afraid that we will not survive without it. This applies not only to losses of what we had but also to missing out on what we needed and did not receive. For instance, in early life we brought our needs to our parents who, we hoped, would respond with resources, fulfillments of our needs. If they did not do this, we instinctively knew we were not getting what was coming to us. We felt this in one of two ways. It was a deficit—that is, a lack of fulfillment because our parents did not have it to give. Or, it might have been a deprivation—that is, they were holding something back from us that they could have given to us. In either instance, we felt grief.

  When the five As—attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing—were not forthcoming we had reason to grieve. But, instead, we might have blamed ourselves, believed that there was something wrong with us. In our adult life we come to see that it was not about that. It was always about the given that some parents don’t or can’t come through as we need them to. It was always about our path of mourning for what was missing and our giving the five As to ourselves as we grew into adulthood. In that self-nurturant style, we were readying ourselves to receive the five As from a partner in a healthy adult relationship.

  A practice that helps us grieve our losses, hurts, and misattunements from childhood begins with attention to early memories. We use a memory as a cue to the practice: We summon up the three feelings in grief whenever a memory arises of how our caregivers did not come through for us or how they hurt, abandoned, or disappointed us. We can ask ourselves the following questions in an immediate response to the memory, pausing after each, noticing our sensations and feelings:

  How did that sadden me? How am I still holding the sadness now? Where did I feel it in my body then and now?

  How did that anger me? How am I still holding the anger now? Where did I feel it in my body then and now?

  How did that scare me? How am I still holding the fear now? Where did I feel it in my body then and now?

  As we progress in this exercise, we are no longer at the mercy of disturbing memories. We are placing them in the container of grief. In other words, we are processing them, not just stacking and storing them in our minds and bodies. We are not hoarding memories; we are making room for them to flow through us like lightning through a lightning rod. They then go safely to ground, that is, back to the earth. We are relocating our painful memories into a healing context. In the neuro-scientific style, we are moving them into a remedial practice. We are taking advantage of what in neuroscience is called “reconditioning,” taking an old habit and reworking it. We thereby construct new neural pathways in our brain so that a memory is expanded into a liberation from the hurt it reminds us of. The three feelings, experienced over and over, will gradually give us a sense of completion. The practice helps us foster trust in our bodily timing, another exquisite resource within. If this practice, or any practice in this book, restimulates trauma, we do not continue to use it or we find a way to soften it so that it is endurable.

  Our grief practice helps us deal with three givens of life that might also have been features of our childhood: loss, injustice, threat. Sadness is our built-in resource for handling what we experienced as deficits and losses. Anger is displeasure at what we felt was unfair to us in how we were treated. Fear signals danger or threat and activates our resource of self-protection and self-safety, what we are doing in this practice.

  An avoidance of grief about what was missing from our childhood home might sound like this: “If I can find someone now to give me what was missing in childhood I don’t have to grieve not getting it back then.” We might direct this need or demand to an adult partner or even to our parents, now our fellow adults. Most of us have found out that does not work. The only path through is the journey we take on our own, the journey from encapsulation in childhood to liberation into adulthood.

  We might also avoid grief by holding onto grievances against our parents or others. In healthy psychological development, however, we let go of the grievances themselves but experience our grief feelings of sadness, anger, fear.

  We eventually come to understand a great irony: how little it would have taken to satisfy our need for love! We could have lived for ten years on one caress from Dad. But he just could not or would not bestow even that. There is grief in this for ourselves and for our parents too
. When we grieve the past and let it go we finally access the central inner resource that makes us adults, the ability to parent ourselves. It was always in us; now we put it to use and there is someone to hold and protect us and no one left to blame.

  Finally, we remind ourselves that any grief process involves a profound and thorough acceptance of the givens of loss, change, hard knocks, unwelcome events, and endings in our human story. We grieve, let go, and say yes to what has been and what is. This is an unconditional yes: no fault, no blame, no protest. Processing, whether it be of grief or resolution of a conflict in a relationship, finds closure only in a final and abiding yes to bare, bald, bold reality: “This happened. It is the way things go sometimes. My only response now can be surrender to this fact. When I finally allow myself to say yes I notice a deeper-than-ever letting go happening within me. It comes with aligning myself with reality rather than wishing for what could have been or regretting what has been. I have found serenity by accepting what cannot be changed.” We find a profoundly spiritual suggestion in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “End in what All begins and ends in: Yes!”