Is it wrong to trigger someone?
The question came up for me recently when I realized that I had accidentally triggered someone in a big way. For the sake of privacy, I’m not going to tell that story, other than to say this: It was not fun being on the receiving end of the fall out.
In my early adult and career life, I had NO idea what being triggered even meant, except that Trigger was Roy Roger’s horse. These days, I’m seeing the word used a bit like a hammer. Instagram is flooded with “trigger warnings”, and we frequently see someone say “I’m so triggered.”
So what is a trigger? One way to think of it is a reaction to a stimulus. For example, imagine I gave you a lemon, and asked you to cut it in half and then squeeze some of that lemony juice into your mouth. Could you almost taste it? My mouth started watering just writing the sentence. I could feel the sourness hit my tongue.
Another way to look at it is that a trigger is agitation with a story attached to it. In the example above, if you had never had a lemon, the “agitation” I provided with the picture of a lemon would have had no story to attach to. You might have been curious about the lemon and how it might taste, but you would not have a history to inform the experience of squeezing lemon juice in your mouth.
We all have thousands of triggers, because we all have a history, and we all have a nervous system designed to warn us of danger. Combine the two and we create a sort of auto pilot to guide us through life. Some of our triggers are very useful. Automatically hitting the brakes when a ball rolls in front of our car is useful.
Triggers are not inherently good or bad. However, if we are not aware of them and treat the story as the truth, they can interfere with us taking the best actions in the here and now.
Years ago, I was a participant in a leadership program where we discussed the ways the past can interfere in context of our leadership effectiveness. Not only was it enlightening to me, but it was also highly relevant. (While we didn’t use the term triggers back then, the idea was the same.) It turns out that I was full of buttons that would set me off. Throughout the first day of the program, we discussed a variety of triggers that we had. For example, some of the leaders had an issue with people they perceived as lazy. At the first sign of slack, they would launch into their automatic pilot. One would silently stew, building resentment against the “lazy” worker. Another would yell like a football coach “Come on, give me one more!” Yet another found herself being overly helpful, often taking on the work of the slacking team member.
When we unpacked why each chose that particular strategy to address the perceived laziness, there was always a story from the past. “This was how my Dad did it.” “This is what my teacher did when I was slacking off.” “No one ever showed me how to address it; in our family, we kept our mouth shut. We were champions at resentment though!”
They all had similar data points, yet the response from each was informed by their past. Rarely were their responses based on what was truly going on with the person they deemed lazy.
There are countless ways we get triggered. Some are big and some are small. In that pivotal leadership program, I shared something deeply triggered me. Without realizing it, I assumed that now that I let them know this very important detail, the people in the program would cooperate with me by making sure they didn’t do the thing I had told them bothered me so much. In other words, I had issued my own personal “trigger warning.”
We all went out to dinner that evening, where I found myself very upset with all of them. This is a really embarrassing story to tell, but I was so upset that I found an empty table to go pout for a few minutes. I was triggered and blaming them. I was thinking “how dare they do the very thing I told them triggered me!”
I felt so justified in my anger. After all, they knew better.
Now I can look back on it with much more balanced eyes. No one intentionally hit my buttons. Even if they were aware, none of their behavior was remotely out of line. More importantly, by refusing to take responsibility for my part, I gave all my power away.
In other words, I pouted hoping THEY would fix MY problem.
Triggers are like little invisible time bombs, waiting to go off at the very moment we most need our power. We freeze up when the boss asks what we really think. We don’t hear the lovely compliment because we are beating ourselves up over not being perfect. We miss the moment the customer has already said yet because we haven’t finished the pitch yet.
Some triggers fall into the category of capital T “Trauma”. Those usually require professional intervention.
However, most of our triggery time bombs were planted when we were kids, figuring out how the world works. They were useful in their day. Reaching into the past to solve a today problem is a little like bringing an easy bake oven to cater a 5-course meal for 250 people. It just isn’t the tool for this moment.
So were my friends and colleagues responsible for triggering me? They were not doing anything out of the ordinary. Nothing they did was personal, nor was it intentional. I was the one that got hooked.
But what if it WERE intentional? What if they knew their behavior would trigger me and they deliberately did it to get under my skin?
Before we dive into the implications of whether it’s wrong to trigger someone, let’s look at the possibilities. There are several possible options:
- They had no idea they were triggering me
- They knew they were triggering me, and chose to continue the behavior anyway because there was nothing wrong with what they were doing
- They deliberately chose to trigger me to get me to do something that benefits them; ie they were manipulating me
- They deliberately chose to trigger me to hurt me in some way
I’m sure there are more possibilities than this, but this list covers everything from being completely innocent to being total jackasses. However, it’s important to note that in my story – and in a high percentage of moments that trigger someone – the behavior of the people fell into completely acceptable parameters. My trigger had to do with an aversion to crowds. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
Back to our question: Is it wrong to trigger someone? It’s not a fair question. The nature of triggers is such that we can’t help but trigger each other.
So then, what are we to do with this dilemma? It seems to make more sense to work the puzzle from the other ends. Quick side note: when learning to draw, one of the most effective techniques for teaching someone to see what’s really there is to draw upside down. This bypasses the shortcuts the brain offers, and melts the story in favor of teaching one to focus on the relationship of one thing to another. Try it, it works!
We are going to use that trick to work the puzzle of dealing with triggers.
What would happen if instead of avoiding triggers (or being mad, manipulated and powerless) we learned to recover more quickly? What if we could even make ourselves less likely to be triggered?
A few weeks ago, I posted on LinkedIn three strategies for how to recover more quickly from being triggered. The three methods are Breath, Four on the Floor and Pocket Questions. You can read more about it in the post.
I’ve found that there’s an even deeper strategy that can put an aikido move on our triggers. There’s just one catch. We have to be willing to feel the pain, and we might be exposed for a bit before we get to the other side.
After a big hail storm this spring, we are getting a new roof this week. I had NO idea how exposed and uncomfortable it would be to be “roofless”. Taking off the old roof and putting on a new one is the right way to do it, but a huge part of me would have preferred to just patch the one we had or put a new veneer, leaving the dysfunctional roof underneath.
It’s like our strategies for navigating life; we put up a new wall (metaphorically speaking of course) rather than address the reason we struggle with stuff.
The next level of eliminating triggers typically requires some support, yet on the other side is freedom. To a large extent, this was the topic of my book Dancing the Tightrope.
Eliminating a trigger requires a profound shift in perspective. When we feel agitation that triggers us, we catch that first thought and pivot to the second thought. Instead of the trigger producing anxiousness, we can recognize that the old brain wiring is available to change. Instead of coping, we can reach for our courage. Yes, we will feel exposed. But not for long. With a few repetitions, our brain will lay down new neural wiring that says “You didn’t die. Here’s the new way.”
Seen this way, every moment of pressure, every time we are triggered, we are given an opening to change at the root level. Doing so gives those who would trigger us nothing to hook on to.
So it is wrong to trigger someone? I’m not sure it can be helped. If you push other people’s buttons to get your way, especially at their expense, that’s a behavior worth considering.
What we CAN do is work on our own triggers, which provides much more protection that simply getting mad or manipulated. And by the time you read this – hopefully – my roof is also protected!