I Feel Triggered.
Let me get right to it: No one triggers you.
And no one triggers me.
I know that’s how it sometimes feels. I even wrote a line in my book that "we have triggers and people who trigger us,”but that’s an incomplete statement (and partly why I wanted to write this blog).
Let’s start with an experiment. Think of a time when you felt really angry about something. Think about what was said, who said it, and how you felt. I’m not talking about a time where you were slightly annoyed, but a time when you were really triggered… Don’t move on from here until you’ve identified it.
Do you have it?
Good. Now go back to that moment in your mind’s eye and really try to tap into that emotion, then read these words aloud:
“No one triggers me… I sometimes feel triggered.”
In a world of “trigger warnings,” the idea that other people don’t trigger us, particularly when we feel that they do, may sound counterintuitive and feel frustrating. Or, you may have felt quite neutral reading those words out loud because you think that this framing is a distinction without a difference. Or, perhaps you know exactly what I’m driving at, which is that no one makes us feel what we feel (Please note: I am not talking about marginalized communities, people who have endured significant trauma, and/or those who may be suffering from PTSD. I am speaking of the triggers the average person may experience in the course of a normal day).
Regardless of your immediate reaction to this little exercise, from an emotional intelligence perspective, the distinction between owning our feelings vs. disowning them is of particular importance. We feel primarily to self-inform. This is a crucial component toward understanding and building our emotional intelligence profiles - to learn to see that in spite of our affinity for certain animated movies, our emotions aren’t simply walking around inside of us, waiting for someone to light their fuse, trip them, or switch them on or off. Instead, they are constructed in the moment to help us make sense of a given situation and/or to show us a need that is, or isn’t, being met [1].
Emotions give us insights that we cannot get elsewhere. The bigger the emotion, the bigger the potential insight. According to neuroscience research, our brains are constantly predicting what is about to happen based on past experiences, and our bodies are constantly sending bottom-up sensory signals to our brains about what we are experiencing through a process called interoception. Some of our biggest emotions happen when there is a difference between what the brain is predicting and what the body is experiencing, creating a type of “error” signal. These error signals must be fully experienced and then curiously and compassionately interrogated for the information that they hold in order to discover what need is or isn’t being met in us, and whether or not the need is real or simply something we perceive to be real - something that is tied up in a misplaced desire driven by the demands of our ego.
Putting positively-felt emotions aside for our purposes here, when I feel triggered by something, it is easy for me to place the blame on the person or situation that has caused my nervous system to activate and my brain to go on tilt. In fact, it feels better for me to disown my reaction and externalize the reason that I feel angry, offended, disgusted, etc. If I can externalize the reason for my discomfort, I can hold onto an idealized perception of myself, believing the best about me and the worst about the other person or situation. Unfortunately, this isn’t at all helpful, and this way of thinking means that I never give myself the chance to truly understand what my emotions are telling me - namely, that when I feel triggered my sense of value, which is tied up in my beliefs about myself and how the world should work, is under threat [2]. Underneath this feeling of threat, are both real and conditioned (exaggerated) needs.
Beyond the basic physiological survival needs common to us all, some emotional needs that we humans share are listed below (this is not an exhaustive list).
1. Lisa Felman Barret, “How emotions are Made”
2. Jean Gomes, “Leading in a Non-Linear World”
Core Needs:
Safety
Trust
Acceptance
Touch
Intimacy
Autonomy
Purpose
There are several more common needs we could list here, but let’s turn to the other side of the coin. As alluded to earlier, we also each live our lives with personally conditioned, or “exaggerated” needs. I don’t say “exaggerated” to suggest that they are without merit. What I mean is that we have needs that evolved to a disproportionate size and perceived importance to us because of certain messages we internalized growing up. We then consciously and unconsciously set out to have these needs consistently attended to through various coping strategies until they became distorted in us.
Years later, we may still be holding onto a narrative about what we need that simply is no longer true, or perhaps never was, but which feels true because we experience the associated negative emotions when those needs go unmet, and we haven’t yet learned to recognize that we’ve been conditioned (through internalizing and interpreting wounding messages that we received as a young person) to over-index on the importance of these particular needs. These perceptually exaggerated needs evolved to compensate for a perceived lacking in our lived experience, and are now automatically directing much of our repetitive and predictable thoughts, attention, feelings, and behaviors.
When these perceptual needs go unmet or are blatantly ignored, we experience a feeling of having been “triggered” - our perceived sense of our personal value, or what we value, is under threat - and we feel the compulsion to remove, rebuke, or destroy the source of that threat. In other words, we externalize the negative emotions onto what we believe is the source of our nervous system activation and react accordingly, often without even contemplating the real stories underneath the overwhelm we are experiencing.
So, how do we learn to distinguish between the core (real) and exaggerated (perceived)to see clearly the ways in which our experience of feeling triggered is often tied-up in our ego’s attempts to protect us from these identity threats? Well, a good place to look for a bit of sense-making is the enneagram. The enneagram system depicts needs/motivations that are of particular importance based on our personality type.
Exaggerated Needs (by Enneagram Type):
Type 1: I must be good, correct, & appropriate.
Type 2: I must be liked, wanted, & loved.
Type 3: I must be valuable, successful, & admired.
Type 4: I must be authentic, special, & unique.
Type 5: I must be capable, knowledgeable & self-sufficient.
Type 6: I must be secure, supported & protected.
Type 7: I must be content, unrestricted & happy.
Type 8: I must be self-protected, self-sufficient, & in control.
Type 9: I must be at peace, connected, & balanced.
From the vantage point of our particular enneatype, we feel these needs deeply - they seem so essential - and are now part of our brain’s prediction system, as we have come to expect to have these needs validated, and exclude people and experiences who interfere with these (often unconscious) ambitions. We can easily assume that everyone else shares these same needs even when they don’t, and then evaluate and blame people for speaking and treating us in ways that are inconsistent with these perceived needs.
However, when we learn to see that our enneagram type’s needs and motivations are personal and different from others - often our greatest fears dressed in clothes of desire - we can then grow our capacity for developing patience and understanding of other people’s words and actions. Instead of automatically feeling offended by someone’s apparent neglect of our particular need or assault on our worldview, we might instead ask ourselves, “given their perceived needs, what they believe, how they think and feel, how does their perspective and/or behavior now make sense to me?”
I am not suggesting that all behaviors should be tolerated or excused. However, when we recognize that most of our triggers are about us we can finally stop writing mental stories about other people in order to justify our dysregulated state. When we stop doing that, we have the opportunity to reconnect to our own stories and the wounding messages underneath our identities and perceptual needs. Fully owning our stories helps us to feel less automatically triggered by the usual culprits and situations. People who learn to identify and release the stories behind their personality’s perceptually distorted needs, may now experience something closer to what is described below regardless of what others around them say or do.
When Exaggerated Needs are Released Each Type May Experience:
Type 1: Acceptance of self, others, and what is. Not trying so hard.
Type 2: Felt sense of value without the expressed approval of others.
Type 3: Embodied sense of personal worth without external validation.
Type 4: Grounded, balanced, and comfortable in the ordinary.
Type 5: Open-handed, generous, and going with the flow.
Type 6: Open-hearted, self-assured, willing to accept uncertainty.
Type 7: Focused, in the moment, accepting boundaries and limitations.
Type 8: Openness, vulnerable, and non-reactive.
Type 9: Embodied sense of self, action-oriented, and willing to disrupt.
Of course, our sense of value is far more nuanced and complex than these aforementioned headlines. When we work with the enneagram as a tool for deep personal discovery, we unlock a world of often hidden motivations, fears, wounds and self-limiting beliefs that have been fueling many of the biggest reactions in our lives. Moving from automatic reactivity to healthy response happens when we learn how to feel something deeply, particularly a negatively-experienced emotion, and then allow these emotions to do their job, revealing to us any unhelpful frames we are holding up to the situation, without blaming others for what we are experiencing. If we let them, our biggest triggers will point us toward what parts of ourselves need the most healing.
What are your emotions telling you about what you truly need, what you need to heal, and what you need to release?
Want to dive deeper? Get your copy of The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence: A Journey to Personal and Professional Success today.
