Emotional Triggers Are About You, Not Them: Taking Your Power Back
Triggers are never about “what they did.” They are about how you trigger yourself in response—what you say in your mind, what you do with your body, and the story you keep repeating. When you see this clearly, you stop living like life is happening to you and start remembering you’re the one in charge.
Triggers: How You Do It To Yourself
Two people can go through the same moment; one is calm, the other is spiraling. That alone tells you the trigger isn’t in the event—it’s in the meaning your system creates.
You can name it directly:
“How I trigger myself is… I say to myself, ‘They don’t care. I’m not important.’”
“How I trigger myself is… I replay their tone in my head and decide it means I’ve done something wrong.”
“How I trigger myself is… my jaw locks, my chest tightens, my breath gets shallow, and then I shut down or attack.”
Someone else’s behavior may be neutral, imperfect, or even unkind—but the triggering is an inside job: your thoughts, your physiology, your habits of reacting. There is nothing to blame out there for what unfolds in here.
A Client Story: From “You’re Doing This To Me” To “I’m Doing This To Myself”
(Details changed to protect privacy; the pattern is real.)
Maya, a high-achieving founder, came into therapy saying, “I get so triggered when my partner needs space. I feel abandoned and furious. He’s doing this to me.”
Here’s what actually happened:
The moment: After a long day, her partner said, “I’m wiped, can we talk tomorrow?” and went to the other room.
How Maya triggered herself:
In her mind: “He doesn’t love me. I’m too much. I always end up alone.”
In her body: Her chest collapsed, stomach clenched, she stopped breathing fully.
In her behavior: She followed him, raised her voice, and then later felt ashamed for “overreacting.”
As we slowed it down, she remembered being a child with a depressed parent who would disappear behind a closed bedroom door for hours. Her young nervous system learned: “When someone pulls away, I’m abandoned.”
Her partner stepping away for the night touched that old template. But the sequence—what she told herself, what she did in her body, how she reacted—that was hers. As she began to say in session:
“How I trigger myself is… I tell myself I’m about to be left.”
“How I trigger myself is… I clamp down in my chest and go into fight mode.”
Things shifted. She still had preferences and boundaries (“I’d like some reassurance before we take space”), but she was no longer enslaved to the pattern. The same situation became an opportunity to notice, breathe, and choose—rather than proof that he was “doing something to her.”
Nothing Is Being Done To You
Realizing “nothing is being done to me; my system is reacting” is not spiritual bypassing and not self-blame. It’s about ownership.
Until then, you’re living as if:
Other people’s tone determines your worth.
Their timing determines your safety.
Their behavior controls your nervous system.
That is a kind of emotional captivity. You become a slave to the pattern: trigger → story → body reaction → automatic behavior → regret.
When you see, “I am the one saying this to myself, I am the one tightening my body, I am the one running this movie,” you wake up to your own consciousness again. You remember:
I can pause before I finish the story.
I can choose how I breathe and what I focus on.
I can decide what this will mean about me and about us.
The other person becomes a stimulus, not a puppeteer.
Stress: Are You Using It, Or Is It Using You?
No one escapes extreme stress. Nervous systems get pushed to their edge; life includes loss, conflict, uncertainty. The real fork in the road is here:
Do you use stress, or do you let stress use you?
Do you create more stress by what you do in your head—catastrophizing, predicting abandonment, replaying every word?
Or do you de-stress enough to move forward and use that same energy as rocket fuel to make your life deeper, truer, and more aligned?
From a research perspective, practices like cognitive reappraisal—gently updating the meaning of a situation—are some of the most effective ways to regulate emotion and reduce reactivity. In daily life, that sounds like, “A part of me is convinced this means I’m being rejected. Is that actually true right now?” instead of, “Here we go again, no one ever stays.”
In that moment, you decide: Will I let this stress run the old story, or will I use it to see what still needs healing?
Reclaiming Your Power To Author Your Story
When you forget you’re the one in charge, your consciousness goes offline and the pattern takes over. The same old loop runs:
Something happens.
You trigger yourself with a familiar story and body response.
You react in ways that don’t match who you know you are.
When you remember, you become the author again. You can:
Notice the first few seconds of activation.
Call it by name: “How I trigger myself right now is…”
Choose a different inner response—more breath, kinder words, a clearer boundary.
Write a different story about what this moment will mean in your life.
Someone else can move through the same situation and not be triggered at all. That doesn’t make you weak; it simply shows where your work—and your power—lives. You are not at the mercy of your triggers. You are the one creating them, which means you are also the one who can transform them.
Here are some simple, direct prompts you can add so readers can see exactly how they trigger themselves—and what they want to do differently.
Reflection: How Do You Trigger Yourself?
You can invite readers to slow down and write about these:
“How I trigger myself is…”
Finish this sentence three ways:“I say to myself…”
“I picture…”
“I do this in my body…”
“When I feel triggered, the story I tell myself about me is…”
For example: “I’m too much,” “I’m not important,” “I’ll always end up alone.”“When I feel triggered, the story I tell myself about the other person is…”
Notice how quickly your mind makes them the villain or the savior.“If I didn’t add any extra story in my head right now, what would actually be happening?”
Separate the facts (what they did or said) from your meanings.“If I chose to use this stress instead of letting it use me, what one action would move me forward?”
That might be taking 10 slow breaths, sending a clear request, or stepping away to reset instead of escalating.
You can close by reminding readers: each time they notice “how I trigger myself is…” they’re already less enslaved to the pattern and one step closer to living from their own clear, conscious authorship rather than old reflexes.