This past week was challenging. All is good now, but I allowed myself to be triggered by my perception of three unrelated events involving friends. To put it bluntly, I felt betrayed. Let’s have a look together at triggers.
As I sit here now on a perfectly foggy Saturday morning, I am no longer in a triggered state. I am relaxed and reflective. I feel inspired to share some wisdom that I have gained over the years, and was reminded of this week, on how triggers work. 
I have developed a theory about triggers. It’s that the one’s that hit the hardest are when we perceive that someone we care about has violated one of the attributes we hold most dear.
For instance, I hold respect, gratitude and integrity as my highest values. They are non-negotiable standards that I hold myself accountable to. So, if I perceive that someone has either carelessly or intentionally served me up a shitty cocktail with my three kryptonite ingredients of disrespect, lack of gratitude and lack of integrity, this had the potentail to result in a triggering event for me. If I care enough about that person to see it as a major betrayal, then its game on!

Notice how I use the word ‘perceive’ multiple times above. Why? We would like to believe that triggers only happen when somebody else wrongs us. And while that often is certainly true, sometimes they result from what we perceive to be the reality of an unfortunate occurrence.  Sometimes it’s even possible that the offending person is woefully unaware that they are participating in a major dispute. They are likely totally unaware that their friendship is on the line.
One thing I know for sure is that when we allow ourselves to be triggered, we invite our Ego to take charge of the situation. This means that we no longer have full control of our emotions, our thoughts, or our actions. As a result, we become messy!
Our Ego loves drama! It excels at making each trigger more intense than it need to be. It is world class at ratcheting up the pain and suffering! How does it do this?
Here are the telltale signs that you are triggered and the Ego is in charge.
1) We Blame
2) We Recruit
3) We Horrify
We immediately start blaming the other person(s) with every accusation under the sun. We then reach out to others to recruit. Our objective is to get them to take our side in assigning blame to the other party. Once we scratch this itch, we feel emboldened enough to take things to the next level. We begin to horrify the person or people in question. This is when blame shifts to character assassination! 
From this journey of negativity, the Ego only wants two things. It wants to be right and it wants to be superior. What we most desire though is to feel better! We think that we will achieve this by going down the rabbit hole of telling ourselves over and over again, in a very obsessive way, that “It shouldn’t be this way!”, rather than simply accept the fact that, quite possibly, it is this way! Perception vs. Reality! 
Unfortunately, our Ego does not know a pathway to joy, peace, or self-love. So by allowing it to manage the situation on our behalf, we are really just serving up ourselves a cocktail of anger, resentment, and anxiety. And once we finish our first drink, we’re gonna want another and another and another until we are finally able to calm ourselves just enough so we can go to sleep! Sound familiar? 
What can we do about this when it happens? There are many presence practice maneuvers that will certainly help ratchet down our emotional reactions when we are inside a trigger or prevent them altogether.
One very good one is to attempt to dissect whether our perception of the situation is actually reality. If we determine that it is, then the judo move is to simply accept that it has happened rather than deny it. There’s something very soothing about staying in reality versus perception.  This one maneuver can actually prevent the trigger from taking hold. Denying that something has happened though (when it has) opens up the door to all kinds of negative emotions. 
This tactic either requires gaining more information before jumping to conclusions or a level of presence practice mastery. 
I have learned that despite being hyper aware of such techniques when I’m entering a trigger, I still occasionally succumb and it’s not pretty. This is when I have to relearn everything that I’ve already learned about triggers and presence, again! 🙈
I am proud of the fact that I have learned to deploy counter measures that reduce the amount of time spent in triggers. I am grateful for my ability to observe my thoughts and take steps to calm myself. But, I am also hyper aware that there is still plenty of work to do to improve on my ability to diffuse or prevent triggers altogether.
I allowed three separate events to get the best of me this week. Unfortunately I acted out in ways that I am not proud of. It happens! I will likely lose three friends as a result, as my perception of each situation may actually be steeped in reality, unfortunately. I hope not, but time will tell. Sometimes our perception of betrayal is simply spot on and it is the right decision to part ways.
I think it’s important to talk about these kinds of things after we go through them to be able to take away the learnings. Else, we end up misinterpreting moments like Will Smith charging the stage at the Oscars to slap Chris Rock in the face over what he perceived to be an injustice, while the reality was that it was just a bad joke!
Unfortunately, we’re all gonna experience triggers in life, but we also can learn to reduce their number and impact by talking about them rather than pretending they never happen. Even better if we can learn to do this with the very people that participate in our triggers.
