Why you get emotionally triggered when you start committing to achieving anything important and what you can do about it
Last week, while I was loudly banging pots and pans in my kitchen, I ended up with a dented handle of my mother’s favorite saucepan. There was no doubting my mood; I was pissed off. Now you would imagine that for someone who is reasonably mature, a major setback must have been responsible for this fire. Maybe a stressful work call or personal argument? Nope. The reason – The seconds hand of my wall clock stopped because of a dead battery. “Surely she’s overreacting?” might be your initial thought. But before you make that assumption, think back to the last time you might have banged the metaphorical pot or pan or slammed a door. Was it preceded by a major life event? Perhaps. Yet sometimes, a seemingly trivial incident will set off a response that seems way out of proportion to its context. If this has ever happened to you, then you my friend (like me) were triggered.
Emotional triggers can derail us, causing considerable loss of time and energy. So let’s understand how a trigger is set off, especially in the context of goal achievement (think weight, business, relationship goal…you get the picture). In my previous article, I spoke about beliefs. Especially the limiting kind. In our lives, when we start gathering beliefs about ourselves, we develop a sort of psychological immune system*, not unlike our physical ones. Its job is to fight any evidence contrary to our firmly established belief and reinforce the said belief with any additional information which might support it. The objective is always to give our belief (in this case, a limiting one) a spin that makes life bearable when we live it.
Meet Kanchan: Aged 26. Failed at her first solopreneur venture.
Her business went sideways in the first 6 months for various reasons. Now she believes she’s not cut out to be an entrepreneur. She’s really good at what she does (her passion) and her desire to showcase her talent never really went away. She applies for a job that she clearly knows is a safety net but doesn’t fuel her passion. It’s steady and pays the bills. She justifies her decision to herself by constantly citing the perks and benefits of her full-time job and often recalling horror stories of her entrepreneurial venture with a “what was I thinking!” tag. She’s unaware that she’s avoiding acknowledging the elephant in the room; the fact that her belief about herself (she’s not entrepreneur material) may not be founded at all. It lies there, buried as a full-blown fear, ready to potentially erupt at any time. The trigger.
In my experience of countless coaching sessions with many like Kanchan, there are 3 undeniable truths I find in every triggered incident:
1. There’s usually two conflicting beliefs (or fears) at odds with each other
If you dig deep enough, there’s always a conflict of choice that the triggered person is experiencing, but their psychological immune system is deliberately trying to keep out of their awareness. In Kanchan’s case, it’s her yearning for freedom versus her fear of loss of security that gnaws at her subconsciously every time she encounters this conflict.
History has shown us that is usually the seemingly innocent and small groups of people, thoughts, plans, ideas that cause the most death and destruction.
Cuban Revolutionary Fidel Castro brought the mightier existing regime to its knees and took over the Cuban Government not in spite of his small band of 20+ guerrillas, but because of it. Emotional triggers and terrorism work on the same principle.
To function effectively, our psychological immune system has to learn to be practical. So its radar is always on the lookout for the BIG events. Huge trade-offs like job security and the statistics of small business failure are significant enough to keep the status quo in check. It’s the little experiences that slip through the cracks and fall short of the critical threshold that launches a trigger. It’s when her new job requires her to report to an overbearing manager whom she clearly outshines or the novelty of the job wears off and the commute seems like a shackle or her best friend goes out and successfully launches her own business. These are not big enough to mindfully process, but significant enough to leave Kanchan feeling anxious (the outward symptom of an imminent trigger). The remedy here is to act from awareness. Rather than simply putting yourself through the experience, which is at best draining and time-consuming, try and become more aware of what’s in conflict about the situation that’s provoking the trigger. Once the conflicting beliefs have been identified, then it’s fairly easy for your coach and you to work on changing the belief which doesn’t serve your interests anymore. Perspective is everything!
2. Meet the “What choice do I have” syndrome
Our psychological immunity is also in charge of our defenses and there’s is a higher likelihood that we will look for and find a ‘positive view’ for situations we consider ourselves stuck with. Which is why we can go through seemingly ” happy” patches when things are going really good even during an underlying conflict because we are receiving information that either fuel the fear (look at that, yet another business closed during COVID) or enables the belief (thank God I now have my weekends to myself). Now, if Kanchan genuinely cannot change her circumstances, a strange and wonderful thing would likely happen. She suddenly would find herself making peace with the situation and actually learning to love her new job. The fact that she feels a sense of dissatisfaction suggests one and only one thing – the choice to take another shot at entrepreneurship is still on the table (for Kanchan, in her mind). And it’s this sense of being in no man’s land which is the breeding ground to launch a trigger. I often have to remind my clients of their choices (in every situation they believe they have none). Sometimes, even believing that you have no choice, is a choice in itself. Chew on that!
Triggers always follow a boomerang trajectory
Back to dear Kanchan. In our conversations, I often noticed (and pointed out to her) that she complained and blamed her friend (the entrepreneur) for bringing her down. “She’s obsessed with her work all the time” “She’s forgotten how to be fun anymore”. As I mentioned before, it wasn’t ever the big stuff. She was thrilled for her friend. She encouraged her on her venture. And yet, there was that stray comment which would set her off. Till one day I asked Kanchan to identify where in her own life she felt most provoked by her friend’s offensive behavior. Believe it or not, all the parts about her friend that she didn’t approve of were the parts she (Kanchan) wanted so desperately to approve of in herself. She wanted to be free. She wanted to try again. She wanted to overcome her fear of failure and take a risk. Here, the only way to work through a trigger is, wait for it, to get triggered. And then ask yourself “what about this dissatisfaction that I’m projecting actually resides within my own life and circumstances”. Once these parts have been identified, it becomes fairly clear what you can do about the situation.
So now you know why I retreat into a hole (or call my coach) when I am banging my pots and pans about. There are some golden nuggets there that could be life-fulfilling. Happy extracting.
*Reference material – Much of this article has been inspired by an amazing book I recently read – Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and my own life experience with self and clients.
