Triggers as trail heads
Our reactions are a doorway. Our work is on the other side.
Last week I returned to Iona, a magical island in the west of Scotland. A place I consider my spiritual home. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend a week living with the Iona Community, staying in the Abbey with 40 other guests. We were living in community, eating, working, and exploring the depths of the Easter story together.
At each meal, I sat with a different group. I loved meeting so many new people and hearing new perspectives and life experiences.
One evening, I sat next to a young American woman. Let’s call her Natalie, although that’s not her real name. I had been keen to get the chance to chat to her - she seemed full of life, energy and spark.
“So”, I asked, looking for an opening in the conversation, “where’s home for you?”
“Really, Kenny”, Natalie replied, with a cheeky spark in her eye, “is that the best you’ve got? That is a really boring question. What other inane questions do you have in your deck? Can we just work through them all now and get them out of the way?”
I was taken aback. My heart rate increased. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. How to respond to this? I tried to be light-hearted about it, tried to laugh it off. But I couldn’t.
I was triggered. Really triggered.
My head was spinning. It was just an opener. Admittedly, not the most interesting question ever, but it was just a “bid for connection”, a place to start.
Why was I having such a strong reaction?
Living in community is difficult. A lot of the challenge of it comes from the ways people trigger us.
Being at work is no different.
That thing your colleague said. The way the room went quiet. The look your manager gave you, or didn’t.
Most advice about workplace reactions treats the reaction itself as the problem. Breathe. Count to ten. Don’t respond in anger. Manage your emotions. Get better at regulation.
All reasonable advice, and I used to get myself centred again when I had been so triggered by Natalie. But it doesn’t go anywhere.
Which is a shame, because the ways we are triggered by other people are gifts, if we are able to receive them.
David Richo is a psychotherapist based in California. He offers this:
“Our goal is not to root out all our triggers but to find a trail head from them into the psychological and spiritual work that has been so long awaiting us. This is how we turn our triggers into tools.”
A trailhead is the place where a path begins. You walk into it.
Richo’s working definition of a trigger: any word, person, event, or experience that touches off an immediate emotional reaction. Anger, fear, sadness, shame.
The diagnostic feature of the ones worth investigating is this: that the reaction is excessive relative to the stimulus.
A loud noise produces a flinch. That’s proportionate.
A loud noise produces an hour of shaking. That’s excessive relative to the stimulus. And that excess is the signal we are looking for.
It shows us that something older and deeper is in play than just what’s going on in the moment. The reaction is the doorway. The work is on the other side of it.
Triggered reactions fire in the limbic system before the prefrontal cortex has a chance to catch up. Richo’s metaphor: the limbic system is a horse, sometimes spirited, sometimes wild. The prefrontal cortex is the reins. With a big trigger, you have lost the reins entirely.
This is why just breathe falls flat in the moment. The horse has already bolted. By the time you remember to breathe, you are chasing it.
The interesting question is not how to catch the horse faster. The interesting question is where the horse was trying to go.
Our triggers don’t cause our reactions. They are catalysts. They place us in a position where our particular reaction will happen.
Someone else in the same conversation with Natalie, hearing the same words, would have felt nothing. Or something completely different - perhaps just amusement.
Our reactions are like fingerprints. They are unique to us.
Which means that when someone does something, or says something that triggers us, without meaning to and without deserving any credit for it, they have handed us a piece of information we could not get any other way.
I was, quite quickly, able to ground myself with Natalie, and realise this:
There is a part of me that is afraid that, actually, I’m really boring.
And I remembered all the ways this old fear has turned up before in my life.
And this is showing me that I have some work to do to own, love, and integrate this old, afraid part.
Most workplace cultures treat this information as noise to suppress. The performance review rewards the people who have learned to hide it. Corporate training teaches you to work around it. The wellness newsletter tells you to log off early and try a mindfulness app.
Richo’s frame turns the whole apparatus inside out. The reaction is a trailhead. The work has been waiting for you, and this is how you find it.
What made you go quiet in that meeting? Not what the other person did.
What part of you did their action reach?
That question is the first step on the trail.
Nothing in this frame excuses bad behaviour at work. Some workplace reactions are accurate responses to real injustice or toxic workplace behaviours, and the correct move is action rather than introspection. Richo is clear on that distinction, and I’ll come back to it in a later article.
Most reactions are something else. Most are a signal that something old is still alive and still looking for a place to land.
The good news is that you get another trail head tomorrow. Workplaces are generous this way. If you missed the one this morning, there will be another one by lunch.
The question is whether you walk into it.
As for me, I took five minutes to step away from the conversation and reground myself. I realised that this was my trigger, and it was here to teach me something. It had nothing to do with Natalie. I returned to the conversation and hit the reset button.
“So,” I said, “tell me something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year”.
“That is a much more interesting question”, she replied.