Don't Get Tripped Up by Triggers

Originally posted December 7, 2022.

As a part of our commitment to a quality relationship, Rich and I have enjoyed traveling together and investing in courses, classes, and workshops to study emotional regulation systems.

We discovered many crossovers between The Hendricks Institute and Marshall Rosenberg's work on non-violent communication.

Ten years into our marriage, Rich and I have mastered the art of having successful conversations that don't end in drama. How do we avoid running the bases of the Drama Triangle of Victim, Villain, and Hero and find resolution with collaboration and mutual agreement?

We often return to these core ideas as we enjoy successful conversations with our partners, coworkers, and families.

When we live in the same house, share our kitchen table, bank accounts, and bedrooms, our minds trick us into thinking the rules of relationship we learned in our families apply to this relationship.

Our first experiences with relationships taught us how to adapt to the person who could give us the attention, affection, and assistance we needed to survive. We believed we were the cause of what the people around us were feeling. We had no power. We were playing a game with the cards stacked against us.?

Our survival depended on figuring out who we needed to be to get what we wanted and needed from our parents, who were often in the midst of their own struggles.

When you are five, and your mother gets angry, as a five-year-old, you are left to interpret the situation from your position of utter powerlessness. You genuinely are a victim of circumstances in this dynamic. The fear of loss of love when we are children is by design. We could quickly die if we are not adequately cared for in infancy and early childhood.

And we do adapt quickly. We learn how to play roles. We are the good daughter when Daddy is home; that is how we get his attention. When Daddy leaves home, we are the jokester with Mom when she needs to be cheered up. With our brother, we are the baby sister, the big sister, the bossy one, or the bookworm.

Any number of combinations of these roles are available to us. And when we are with our young friends, we instinctively pick roles that are extensions of who we are within our birth families. As adults, we carry forward the mistaken belief that we not only cause other people to feel things, we assume that other people are causing what we are feeling.

The people around us trigger but do not cause our feelings. We can also trigger feelings in other people that we do not drive.

Learning to sort those two files is an incredibly liberating experience.

A key characteristic of emotional intelligence and personal growth is to see triggers for what they are and not let them possess you or run interference with genuine connections.?

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