Understanding your triggers

Understanding your triggers

The Stoics remind us to take responsibility and to buy tranquility. The only way we can establish tranquility is through self-understanding and application of tools. Without understanding ourselves and applying tools to manage our lives, we will be affected by any and everything, which leads to unhappiness. We cannot change everyone around us, but with tools and self-awareness we can find a way to navigate our environment feeling safe.

Understanding your triggers is of benefit for healing. Just like understanding an environment that is unsafe for your physical health, or gems that contribute to disease, know your emotional gems or triggers that make you ill.

Furthermore, it is helpful to recognise that it is not the situation itself, or the triggering situation that might affect you. The impact of your trigger is based on your perception of the situation.

It is not necessarily what happens in the presence of a triggering agent, but your readiness with tools to manage triggering situations. In other words, your emotional baseline and healing affects how you perceive situations.

Your pretriggers are the contributory factors of how triggered you can get. Unhealed, stressed, hungry or tired, or simply when your emotional baseline is off; you bring your past bodily traumas, your thoughts or story into the situation. This results in you feeling triggered or more triggered by a situation, just like someone whose immunity is compromised and they are exposed to gems.

You might have a problem with the person, associate your identity with the story or challenge the validity of the story.

When you have not actively addressed your traumas, you might find many situations triggering for you, even those that have nothing to do with you. You might take many situations personally.

It is of benefit to explore inner child work and tools such as SIFTSEM. This helps you to familiarise yourself with your triggers, and to begin to understand how you can navigate triggers initially. Trigger management can be post trigger evaluation, intra trigger evaluation and pre trigger evaluation.

As you recognise triggering situations and the way you respond and behave towards them during a post reaction evaluation, you might also decide how you can manage in future.

With daily evaluation of triggers or SIFTSEM and journal, you will recognise situations you might need to avoid. Additionally, you can prepare before entering unavoidable triggering situations at work or parenting, and other relationships. This preparation helps you to parent yourself and adopt a mindset that can minimise occurence or impact of a trigger.

With intentional objective evaluation, you will learn to detach, breath, notice the bodily manifestation of your triggers and evaluate accompanying thoughts. You gradually learn to explore root cause, parent yourself and soothe, apply solutions and reframes.

Repeated practice of objective evaluation reduces the impact of triggers even when your baseline might be off. It also helps you to gradually minimise and consequently eliminate some triggers.

You are not going to be perfect or not to be affected all the time, being human and ever changing in your emotional currents.

However, you are likely to take responsibility for how you feel, own your experience. You are not likely to let your triggers rule your life and get you constantly in victim mode. That does nothing for your peace of mind.

With the application of tools to manage present and minimise impact of triggers, you take ownership of yourself and do not let everything determine your peacefulness.