On Triggers & Psychic Indigestion
How Feelings Create Time--On Time & Mind, Part 2
Let’s start with a definition.
trigger
/trĭg′ər/
noun
The lever pressed by the finger to discharge a firearm.
A similar device used to release or activate a mechanism.
An event that precipitates other events.
(Electronics) A pulse or circuit that initiates the action of another component.
transitive verb
To set off; initiate.
remarks that triggered bitter debates.To fire or explode (a weapon or an explosive charge).
The word trigger is an interesting one, with its uptick in modern parlance.
Triggers, in the context of the present discussion, are unresolved emotional packets from past experiences.
A quote one of my mentors liked to share is “you’re never angry for the reason you think.”
Triggers are like portals bridging past and present.
Of course, this happens on a spectrum, from reliving past trauma on one end, to all manner of various emotional perturbations that arise in daily life, from waiting in line to getting cut off in traffic, and so forth.
At least, that’s one way of looking at it.
Strictly speaking, both the future and past arise here in the present moment as mental fabrications, as I elaborated in this post, like a kind of overlay competing for what’s happening right now with our limited attention.
Again, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this state of affairs, as the mindfulness movement would perhaps contend with its exhortation of “Be Here Now”.
There is literally nowhere else you can be, though reminiscing about the past or fantasizing about the future is a kind of hypnotic reverie that filters our experience.
The way I see it, it’s a matter of choice and optionality, to experience life with more degrees of freedom.
How is it that one event can evoke such a wide range of emotions among different individuals?
Any given scenario interacts with each observer’s nervous system, in a way unique to that individual’s history, though there are common enough patterns that speak to our shared humanity—fight, flight, freeze and fawn, though that covers more of the sympathetic nervous system and stress response.
While positive emotions seem harmless enough—who doesn’t want to feel good?— there are certainly potential consequences that stem from excess—mania, addiction, ADHD and the whole host of cultural issues that stem from an overly stimulated society chasing dopamine come to mind, as I explored in this piece.
To the extent there is a strong emotional reaction, i.e. a trigger, it would suggest that there is some unresolved emotional pattern being activated.
Christopher, ‘Hareesh’ Wallis, a classical Tantric scholar-practitioner, uses the term undigested, likening our emotional baggage to a kind of psychic indigestion.
If you’ve lived long enough, it’s likely you’ve had a case of indigestion or some unpleasant experience related to eating.
The idiosyncrasies of our personalities can be likened to undigested experiences that linger in our psyche.
How do we bring resolution to such triggers, rather than being doomed to endlessly repeat them?
The more I learn about different approaches, it seems the more they converge—whether it’s polyvagal theory, somatic experiencing, holotropic breathwork, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, plant medicine, hypnotherapy, Chinese medicine and internal arts.
What is common to our lived experiences? We all have bodies, and all bodies have nervous systems.
Our phenomenology consists of at least our bodies, behaviors, cognition and metacognition.
Cognition comprises a lot in my view: thinking, emotion, attention, memory, sensation and perception. Metacognition, put simply, is awareness of our cognition.
Whether or not that is exhaustive I’m sure is open for discussion, and I am not particularly attached to how you want to slice the pizza of experience.
One such modality is inner child work, of which there are numerous approaches.
A powerful framework I’ve written about before is the work of Brent Charleton.
He combines and iterates on two therapeutic frameworks to create what he calls the ego states matrix. Those frameworks are Pia Mellody’s Model Of Developmental Immaturity and John Watkins’ ego state therapy.
In Charleton’s adaptation, his model contends that in any given moment, there are four issues that are ever present, moment to moment:
worth
safety
perfection
needs and wants (desires)
While the first two I think are fairly straightforward, I’ll elaborate briefly on the latter two. Perfection has to do with competence – not making mistakes, doing things perfectly or being flawless – and is involved in any perfectionist tendencies. A useful distinction between needs and wants that Charleton makes is we can tend to our own needs while we bring our wants to other people, though developmentally many of us learn that our desires are quashed, rendered either unimportant or less important than others’.
While there are some systems that maintain there are numerous parts included within our psyche, Charleton simplifies it to three stages that correspond developmentally to the ages of 0-6, 7-17, and after 17: the wounded child, the adaptive teen, and the functional adult.
The following is Charleton’s matrix that matches ego states with the corresponding core issues.
Wounded Child 0-6 | Adaptive Teen 7-17 | Functional Adult 17+
Worth: less than, better than, equal.
Safety: exposed, closed, protected & contained.
Perfection: defective, perfect, realistic.
Needs/Wants: needy, needless, aware of and can make known.
What the above allows is to map a particular issue letting you explore them before writing what Charleton calls a correction.
In a way, it’s a kind of reparenting approach, where we write a letter to our inner children to give that aspect of ourselves what we didn’t receive then through identifying the relevant thoughts, emotions and behaviors involved in the triggering incident.
How does this relate to negotiation?
In Jim Camp’s book No: The Only Negotiating System You Need For Work & Home, he identifies that the number one killer of any negotiation is neediness.
And in a way, working with our psyche is a kind of internal negotiation. Most of our neuroses, insecurities and foibles could be construed as various flavors of neediness: the need to look good, the need to be right, the need to be accepted and so forth. Wherever you notice patterns of recurring apprehension, ask yourself what the underlying need could be.
I’ll use myself to illustrate. As I was positively reinforced for intellectual achievements growing up, a corresponding need to know, need to be right, and need to have the answer develops within the budding “intellectual” identity. Correspondingly, the need to not look foolish, stupid or incompetent tags along. Ironically, this often leads to either quickly abandoning pursuits without some evidence of predisposition or not even trying—more of a fixed versus growth mindset, though Dweck’s work came out much later than my childhood.
We have only to listen to our inner dialogue the next time something doesn’t go our way (or maybe even when it does), or we make a simple mistake. Pay attention to the quality of your thoughts and feelings.
This shows up in all sorts of ways – from people pleasing, to conflict avoidance, to undercharging or having difficulty asking for what we want, or upholding our boundaries.
So, the next time you feel any emotion stronger than the situation warrants, (though this may be noticed after the fact, if at all) consider what need is being activated in the moment and what childhood experience remains psychologically undigested.
I invite you to leave your remarks in the comments.