Do you have someone in your life that you’re forced to interact with who, at times, triggers a strong, negative, emotional response? The reality is that we all have a version of this person in our life and, for whatever reason, we don’t always have the option of simply ceasing our interactions with them or cutting them out of our lives completely. Maybe it’s a coworker? Or someone who runs in the same social circle that you see at events from time to time? A family member perhaps? Even our partners and kids can elicit strong, negative emotional responses when they don’t listen to instructions or say things that are hurtful.
I pose the question: How should you navigate this? How do you find a way to live your life reasonably unaffected and unphased by this person’s behavior, so that you’re not taken on an emotional rollercoaster ride?
In this blog post, I not only aim to answer those questions but also provide you with the resources and techniques you need to successfully navigate these triggers, allowing you to live a more untriggered, peaceful life.
Table of Contents
Why Work Through Emotional Triggers?
How to Work Through and Neutralize Emotional Triggers
Resources to Help You Do Shadow Work
The Importance of Setting Healthy Boundaries
Why Work Through Emotional Triggers?
First things first, let’s talk about why it’s important to work through our emotional triggers.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly enjoy being triggered. Maybe there was a time in my youth where I got off on the drama but, as I’m quickly approaching 40, I have less energy and less of a desire to engage. At this point in my life, the only drama I want to be involved in is as a consumer of reality tv.
Being triggered robs me of my peace, at least temporarily. When we’re triggered we experience a physiological response as well as an emotional response. Afterall, our emotions actually start in our body and not in our mind. For example, when I’m triggered, my heart starts racing, my breathing changes from relaxed to pressured, my temperature rises. I start to feel an energy inside me to where I feel like my skin is buzzing and I can’t sit still. Sometimes it feels like I could literally jump out of my skin! The worst is when my brain begins to feel hijacked, all consumed by what this person said, did, or didn’t do (but I felt they should have). It becomes harder for me to control my thoughts and, as a result, my productivity on important tasks takes a backseat for the time being while I ruminate on these thoughts. And when I’ve finally come out the other side of my spiral and calmed down? I crash! Literally! The physical and emotional exhaustion that follows can take me a day or more to recover from…it’s really not worth it.
What I’ve described above is a stress response where my sympathetic nervous system has been activated (fight or flight) and has taken over. While our fight or flight response served a purpose hundreds of years ago to keep us alive when we were being chased by predators in the wild, it has not evolved to recognize accurately when we are in true physical danger or are maybe just having an emotional reaction to a trigger.
Now, not every stress response feels this extreme but even the smaller stress responses can take their toll, especially if we aren’t doing things to reset our nervous system and restore calm after we experience a stressor. If we don’t take action to reset and restore calm, these stress responses build and can become chronic.
We all know that stress has negative impacts on our physical and mental health, especially if stress is experienced for a prolonged period of time. Let’s take a second to identify what those negative impacts are:
Increased Heart Rate & Blood Pressure: Stress causes the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which can increase heart rate and blood pressure. Over time, this can strain the heart and blood vessels, increasing the risk of heart disease, heart attacks, and strokes.
Weakened Immunity: Chronic stress can suppress the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to infections and illnesses. This is due to the prolonged release of cortisol, which interferes with the production of white blood cells that fight off infections.
Muscle Tension & Pain: Stress causes muscles to contract and stay tense for extended periods. This can lead to headaches, back pain, neck pain, and overall muscle stiffness. Chronic tension can also contribute to conditions like TMJ (temporomandibular joint disorder) or fibromyalgia.
Stomach Problems: Stress can cause a variety of digestive issues, including acid reflux, heartburn, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), nausea, or even stomach ulcers. It may also affect the appetite, either leading to overeating or loss of appetite.
Skin Problems: Stress can contribute to various skin conditions such as acne, eczema, and psoriasis. Cortisol can trigger inflammation in the skin, making existing skin conditions worse or causing new ones to develop.
Sleep Disturbances: Stress can disrupt the sleep cycle, leading to insomnia or poor-quality sleep. This lack of rest can cause additional stress and result in fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and mood swings.
Hormonal Imbalance: Chronic stress leads to the constant production of cortisol, which can disrupt the balance of other hormones in the body, including insulin, thyroid hormones, and sex hormones. This can result in conditions like diabetes, thyroid issues, or problems with reproduction.
Weight Gain or Loss: Stress can lead to changes in eating habits, either causing overeating (often of high-calorie foods) or a loss of appetite. This can lead to weight gain or weight loss, depending on the person’s response to stress.
Mood Swings: Stress often leads to irritability and mood swings. Small frustrations can trigger disproportionate emotional responses, leading to feelings of anger, frustration, or sadness that are difficult to control.
Memory and Concentration Problems: Stress impacts the brain’s ability to form new memories and recall information. It can make it harder to concentrate or focus on tasks, which can affect work, school, and daily life.
Reduced Cognitive Functioning: Chronic stress can cause a decline in cognitive functions like problem-solving, decision-making, and attention span, making it difficult to handle challenges or make clear choices.
Social Withdrawal: Stress can lead to social isolation. People may withdraw from relationships, feeling too overwhelmed to engage in social activities or connect with others. This isolation can worsen mental health issues, as social support is important for emotional well-being.
Anxiety: Stress often triggers feelings of unease, worry, or nervousness. In chronic cases, this can develop into generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic attacks, or social anxiety. The constant sense of being overwhelmed by stressors makes it harder to relax or think clearly.
Depression: Prolonged stress can contribute to the development of depression. Chronic stress affects the brain’s ability to regulate mood, and when paired with feelings of helplessness, it can cause deep sadness, hopelessness, and loss of interest in daily activities.
You may be reading this and think, “I’m not really triggered that often, therefore, why should I work on this?” I can validate that thought/feeling. As I’ve gotten older and done the work to neutralize a lot of my triggers, I no longer experience the types of stress responses I described above often. Therefore, it is easy for me to become complacent about working through triggers. However, I can say that when I do find myself triggered in a big way I can experience some of the above complications from a single triggered event. For example, I’ve gotten colds or other viruses right after crashing from being triggered. I’ve also lost sleep over having been triggered. Overall, my ability to choose healthy coping strategies to manage my stress is affected when I’m triggered. Finally, my important relationships have been impacted, when I’m too preoccupied with the trigger or acting short with other people because I don’t have the capacity to respond to their needs or requests in a loving, patient way.
No matter how much work you have done on yourself to shed your emotional and physiological responses to your triggers, I believe there will always be, at minimum, maintenance work that needs to be done. Plus, one of the exciting things about life is that it is ever changing and evolving…therefore new triggers can present themselves at any time.
When considering whether or not a particular trigger is something you should dedicate time and energy to work through, consider: What’s the ripple effect it has on your life?
- How does me being triggered impact me physically and emotionally (in the moment as well as days or even weeks afterwards)?
- How does it impact my productivity at home or at work?
- How does it impact my ability to show up in or respond to my important relationships?
- Is this trigger something I’m willing to let affect me, even on such an infrequent basis? Why or why not?
How to Work Through and Neutralize Emotional Triggers
Now that you’re bought in on the importance of working through your triggers, let’s start digging into how to work through them.
Shadow work has been instrumental in helping me neutralize my triggers; therefore, it is what I recommend to anyone looking to step off the emotional rollercoaster and live a life more unbothered.
First, if you’re unfamiliar with shadow work, what it entails, and the benefits it offers, check out my previous blog post titled: How I Did “The Work” to Feel More Connected to Myself and Improve My Relationships. I will not be taking the time to review this info in this blog post.
The specific steps I take to neutralize my triggers while doing shadow work include:
- Uncover the limiting belief
- Identify where I might be “projecting”
- Recognize my Ego
- Complete an exercise to let go and move forward
Now, let’s review these steps in slightly more detail.
Uncover the Limiting Belief: As children we create “core beliefs” that are then reinforced all throughout childhood, adolescence, and carried with us into adulthood. They’re inflexible, rigid, and incredibly sensitive to being challenged. Our core beliefs can become limiting when they hold us back from achieving the things we need and want in life. They can also trigger an emotional response when someone else acts in a manner which contradicts a core belief we hold.
Core beliefs are started and stored in our subconscious mind which is a non-analytical function of your brain. This is problematic because, being that there isn’t any sort of filter in our subconscious brain to help us know the difference between what is true and what is false, we just end up blindly believing without question. To make matters worse, much of the information used to form core beliefs is gathered in early childhood while we’re taking in a lot of information from our surroundings and our caregivers about life. This allows them to take a very firm hold over us because, as children, we also don’t have our frontal lobe developed enough to think analytically. This is why children are such black and white thinkers and generally believe everything they’re told. For example, a fat guy in a bright red suit squeezes down the chimney on Christmas and brings you presents. So we hear some comment from or see some example modeled by our parents, who we trust, and we believe it to be true without question.
As we slip into our teenage years and into adulthood, we don’t often give our beliefs much thought. If anything, we have a tendency to seek out evidence to support our beliefs instead of questioning them, which just engrains them even further. Even when we’re not consciously questioning our beliefs, they’re being subconsciously reinforced directly or indirectly by our parents, caregivers, teachers, friends, etc. The process in which our beliefs are formed is called “Conditioning.”
Since our limiting beliefs are stored in our subconscious (again, the non-analytical part of our brain) we have to work to identify and bring these limiting beliefs to the surface, in order to deconstruct (or de-condition) them, thus making them less powerful and helping us to neutralize the trigger.
Identify where I might be “projecting”: Projecting is an unconscious psychological process in which someone witnesses their own thoughts, feelings or behaviors in another person. This is done as a way we detract from or ignore the fact that we too behave this way sometimes, instead allowing us to focus solely on the other person’s behavior. This is a defense mechanism used to cope with uncomfortable emotions, such as shame, guilt or fear (that often stem from a limiting belief).
For example, one trigger I’ve struggled with over the years is arrogance or superiority. Upon reflection, I formed a belief in childhood that these traits were bad and humility was respectable. I watched my father demonstrate humility time and time again in his interactions with and the way he would speak about others and his professional career. I learned in church that humility was an admirable quality as well. As an adult, I found people who gave off an air of superiority or arrogance to be insufferable. It wasn’t until I began to do shadow work, where I challenged myself to consider how even I have acted arrogant or superior in the past, did I realize I do project these traits onto others.
Being able to recognize times in our past when we have acted similarly to the triggering person helps us neutralize the trigger because it helps us to create empathy. It reminds us that we too are human, are capable of acting the same, and reserve no right for judgment.
And if you think for one second there is no way you have ever acted even remotely similarly to the trigger…you’re not reflecting on your past hard enough. The reality is, we are all walking around with some pretty huge blindspots at times. If you don’t believe me, research the law of duality. As humans, we are always capable of acting in ways that are on both ends of the behavior spectrum (quiet and loud, extraverted and introverted, greedy and generous, etc).
Recognize my Ego: Your Ego plays a major role with regard to helping you uphold a positive self-image and is oftentimes the culprit behind such defense mechanisms like projection. While doing shadow work, it’s important to acknowledge the role your Ego has been playing because it helps to increase your self-awareness.
You can think of your Ego as a loyal friend who can also be a little bit toxic. They mean well. They tell you what you want to hear to make you feel all good and special and validated. They try to keep you in line by helping you identify with noble morals and values. But they’re never going to hold you accountable for any “bad” behavior or be fully honest with you. And what’s more, they can even cause you to act judgmental and insecure about others (when we project our undesirable behavior onto them and ignore our own).
If you’re not familiar with Carl Jung, he was the founder of analytical psychology and is considered one of the most influential psychologists in history. His work was instrumental to shadow work. He theorized that within us lies two parts of a whole: the person we want to be and some part of us that conflicts with that ideal version of ourselves.
He was heavily influenced by Dr. Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Id, Ego and Superego and, in fact, Jung and Freud worked together for years before Jung split off and ventured out down his own path.
Now, Freud theorized the Id was always either seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. It lacked impulse control and was solely fueled by its own desires. The Super Ego was our moral conscience. And the Ego was stuck in the middle of the two, trying to appease both parties.
In Jung’s work, he theorized The Ego (or the Ego Ideal as he called it) develops over time. When we are born, our ID rules all. If you’ve ever had to endure a screaming baby for the 5 minutes it takes to prepare them a warm bottle, you’ll understand the ID. The baby does not want to wait, they want that warm bottle NOW, and they scream in protest until they receive it. That’s their ID talking. Now as we age and mature, we develop our Ego. Our Ego is our identity. We are conditioned through lessons we receive in childhood and adolescence from our parents, mentors, and teachers about things we should and shouldn’t do or we receive social cues from our friends about how we should and shouldn’t present ourselves. And all the while, our Ego is taking notes. As we approach adulthood, our Ego spits out a report about who we are (or at least who we think we should be), and we try like hell to act accordingly and fit into that mold. We try to fit into that mold so much that we end up ignoring, minimizing or denying the behavior which is contrary to that mold. It can warp our reality and even invent stories that justify our more undesirable behavior, when said behavior is called to our attention.
Being able to recognize the story your Ego is trying to feed you about who you are, as it relates to the emotional experience you have when triggered, can be incredibly healing and help you neutralize your triggers.
It is important to recognize that our personalities are highly influential (influenced by those we spend our time with, media we consume, etc.) and are therefore ever changing. Therefore, it is important to stop asking ourselves, “Who am I?” and instead shift the question to, “Who am I right now?” or “Who am I becoming?” and “How does this behavior serve me at this very moment?”
Complete an exercise to let go and move forward: Once you have taken the time to become more self-aware by identifying the limiting beliefs, behavior you may be projecting, and your “Ego Story,” the healing can truly begin. This is where you want to complete a meaningful exercise to help you to make peace with your “shadow” (the triggering or undesirable behavior you have come to find isn’t so unfamiliar to you) and set an intention to move forward with a new perspective. For me, this usually involves journaling of some sort.
Resources to Help You Do Shadow Work
Now, I’ve given a very high level overview in this blog post of each of the steps I take when completing my own shadow work. If you’re looking for more specific details, including step by step instructions and specific exercises to help you uncover your limiting beliefs, identify areas of projection, recognize your “Ego Story,” and embrace a new perspective, check out the eBook I have written called: Journey Within: A Guide to Strengthening the Connection to Yourself and Others.
This eBook is a complete guide to doing shadow work, including laying out the pre-work that is needed to set you up for success prior to even beginning shadow work. If you’re curious about what this pre-work entails and why it’s so important, check out my blog post titled: The Importance of Preparing for Shadow Work: 5 Essential Steps to Take Before Starting Shadow Work.
A little more about this eBook…I designed the Journey Within eBook to help you improve your relationships with others, starting with the most important (yourself). It helps you to break that stress/burnout/shut down cycle, increase your self-awareness with shadow work exercises, cope in a healthy way, and reconnect to and ground yourself, thereby improving your ability to connect with others and, as a result, improve your relationships. This eBook:
- Educates you on what coping with stress in a healthy way entails
- Teaches you strategies to cope with and react to stress in a healthy way, preventing it from carrying over into your relationships
- Helps you to implement healthy coping strategies which reduce anxiety, frustration and burnout, so that you can show up as the best version of yourself in your relationships
- Guides you in personal exploration of conscious and subconscious beliefs which hold you back in your personal, professional and romantic life.
- Helps you to increase self-awareness of your behaviors that are negatively impacting your relationships
- Guides you in identifying characteristics or aspects of yourself (your shadow self) that you feel don’t align with your identity. Then, it helps you to embrace and more appropriately integrate them into your life so they no longer impact your relationships
- Helps you to identify emotional patterns which can affect your relationships, their root causes, and then heal them to move forward
Finally, I had mentioned earlier that if we don’t take the time to reset and restore calm after a stress response, we can become plagued with chronic stress and all of the negative side effects from it. This eBook helps you with that reset and restore piece, as it lays out instructions for:
- Creating healthy coping strategies
- Implementing a solid self-care routine to increase your resilience
- Meditative and breathing exercises that help you to reset your nervous system and restore calm.
Prefer to have someone come alongside you and help guide you through how to do this work? Explore 1:1 coaching options with me on my Work with Me page of my website.
The Importance of Setting Healthy Boundaries
Lastly, it would be remiss of me to not discuss this last, important piece in the process of neutralizing emotional triggers: setting healthy boundaries for yourself.
You’ve done “the work” (shadow work) to identify why you were triggered, make peace with the similar behavior you share with the triggering person/behavior (projecting), identify your “Ego Story,” and reframe a new perspective that helps you move forward. But the reality is, this is most often not a “one and done” situation.
You will be triggered again, probably by this same person or the same behavior. That’s because our limiting beliefs are SO strong and, remember, they’re housed in our subconscious (our non-analytical part of our brain), so it only makes sense that we will have to occasionally pull them back out into the analytical part of our brain to pick them apart from time to time. What can I say…deconditioning to let go is a process! That’s why boundaries are so important.
Now, a boundary is a rule that you have for yourself, not one you impose on others. It’s what you plan on doing to respond to a behavior.
For me, some boundaries I set for myself when I am triggered are:
- Creating some physical distance between myself and the trigger until I’ve calmed down and processed the experience
- Taking some time by myself to focus on resetting my nervous system to get out of fight or flight (deep breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, guided meditation, a grounding nature walk outside, etc.)
- Journaling about my experience to process it
- Review previous shadow work journal entries I have written about this particular trigger (to remind myself of how and why I am triggered and continue to engrain my reframed perspective to let go)
- Commit to re-doing or completing a different shadow work exercise that helps me reprocess and move forward
These boundaries help me to reset and move forward, and each time I encounter a similar trigger, the emotional impact is less and less because I’ve taken the time to work through it.
You can also take some time to set more specific boundaries that indirectly involve the triggering person. For example:
- I will excuse myself from being in the same space with this person (creating some distance) to help myself calm down
- Once I am calmed down, I will ask the triggering person to have a conversation where I explain how the behavior made me feel, ultimately allowing them to accept or reject my experience (because we cannot control how other people perceive their behavior and how it impacts others).
- I will limit my time with this individual as I can, as needed
- Before encountering this person, I will prepare for my interaction in advance, reminding myself with specific affirmations of the work I have done to neutralize this trigger
- I will exercise extra self-care after interacting with this person to help me manage my stress
Recognizing Abuse
In the beginning of this blog post I posed the question, “Do you have someone in your life that you’re forced to interact with who, at times, triggers a strong, negative, emotional response?” I want to be clear that you are in no way obligated to interact with or keep social ties with anyone whose behavior is triggering because it is abusive. There are circumstances, for example, between parents and adult children where the adult child no longer interacts with their parent due to the emotional, physical or sexual abuse that has occurred.
If you have a relationship with someone, whether that be a romantic relationship with a partner, family relationship, or platonic relationship with a friend, and you’re wondering whether their behavior constitutes abuse and if you would benefit from no longer interacting with that individual, you deserve some support with that decision. A licensed Therapist can be a great support and resource for helping you sort through any trauma associated with past or current abuse, heal, and set and enforce healthy boundaries for yourself moving forward. If you’re located within the United States, www.psychologytoday.com is a great resource for getting connected with therapists in your area who can provide this guidance.
Additional Resources
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