Are you experiencing increased conflict in your life? What are you triggered by? Do you know what takes you out of a conversation or interaction when you have conflict with a friend or colleague? Let’s unpack this thing called “reactivity’ and help you restore some of your power.
Stop Blaming the Mirror: Why Reactivity is Normal
One of the greatest gifts of a developmental program like the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness Program is helping people understand and truly get underneath their own reactions, to experience more joy, productivity and peace of mind. In the normal course of life, reactions are often wrongly judged as a character flaw. When the truth is, this is a normal human phenomenon, grounded in neuroscience.
People are often hard on themselves for having reactions. However, they just happen because of mechanisms built into the design of the human brain. They aren’t something to be ashamed of. Yet, people often feel shame about what their reactions look like, or what they represent—or because they feel exposed or constrained by them.
The fact that you have reactions is normal. In the fact of having an uncomfortable reaction, we need to be kind to ourselves, and develop our mental fitness in order to effectively grow our ability to respond. A mindful response aligns with the kind of person we aspire to be and how we want to behave with other people.
The Blame Game: How Triggers Become Cyclical
Consider a dynamic between two friends, Johnny and Claire. They had an altercation at a recent social gathering, a disagreement about a situation they were both involved in. They came together to talk about it afterwards in an attempt to resolve the conflict. Instead of reaching an understanding after voicing their views, they both reacted, and became equally upset and hurt by each other’s reaction, which only inflamed the situation. Unfortunately, when one person gets triggered and experiences emotional flooding, all that discomfort often gets blamed on outside circumstances or others involved, instead of being owned.
This mutual triggering is not unusual, and can lead to interpersonal conflict which can linger if not addressed. If you notice you are in discomfort, the right tools can help calm your nervous system enough to help you examine what’s actually going on within you—as opposed to the Saboteur hijack that wants to blame the person in front of you as the cause of your upset.
It’s true, in part, that there is an external cause, but it is actually not the root cause. The root cause of the upset is the trigger that’s happening inside your own mental architecture. Most often when you unpack these kinds of reactionary patterns between two people, you can see that it’s not the intent of one person to upset the other. It’s just a cyclical, self-referential, and feeding cycle of one trigger launching another trigger.
It’s like two people climbing the ladder at the same time, fast and competing to get to the top. That’s a useful metaphor to help us see the way reactions can trigger reactions in other people.
Self-Compassion: The Key to Mental Fitness
Let’s take a deeper look at this dynamic. First, try to think about a common situation that you are perplexed or upset by, giving yourself permission to know that you’re not a flawed human being when this thing happens. It’s like the way flowers blossom or the way leaves fall off of trees; it’s part of nature. You wouldn’t blame a tree for losing its leaves anymore than you would blame a flower for blossoming.
Unpacking the Unsolicited Suggestion
Consider an interaction where a colleague, friend, or partner offers an unsolicited suggestion or directive about how you should handle a task.
Perhaps you are presenting a new project idea, and someone immediately jumps in with, “That’s good, but you should really start with step X first,” or, “Here is a better way to do this.”
While their intent may be helpful, your instant, internal reaction might be feelings of anger, defensiveness, or a crushing sense of inadequacy.
- The External Trigger: The person offered a suggestion/directive.
- The Internal Reaction: Your self-worth is activated (by your Judge, the master Saboteur), hearing this as, “You aren’t competent enough to figure this out yourself.”
Can you see how the simple act of a colleague giving a suggestion can trigger a deep-seated feeling of being criticized or judged? The resulting negative emotions arise exactly as they would have when you were a kid being corrected by a parent, activating that old emotional circuitry.
A Self-Empathy Action Plan
If you hear nothing else from this article, let it be the empathy to love yourself and your reactions rather than blame and make yourself wrong for having them as if you’re flawed.
The design of the human brain is such that when we get triggered, we have reactions. It’s like a chemical reaction—they do just happen when you put two things together.
If you can give yourself some space from being self-critical in the face of an upset:
- Love yourself in the face of it.
- Calm your nervous system in such a way that you can look at the thing that’s going on (mental fitness in action).
When you tend or get clear about the thing that is underneath the reaction, name it and be with it as valid, the resulting experience will be peace of mind and acceptance. In this way, triggering becomes less intense and less frequent, and an empathetic response is more available to you in the challenges that exist and occur around you.
Don’t Give Your Power Away
How often have you been irked by, irritated by, or inflamed by a sensationalist comment in a social media post that stuck with you for hours or days? Most of us recognize this happens. We instantly get outraged and blame the person who wrote the comment, when in fact, what are we reacting to?
It’s just letters on a page that you actually can choose not to react to if you have the mental muscle to discipline yourself to see it for what it is: words on a page, someone’s opinion. If it’s irrelevant and you can’t do anything about it, what does it matter anyway?
What matters more importantly is your own power, and you give it away when you become outraged by something that isn’t important to your life.
When A Saboteur Gets Sneaky (The Trap of “I’ve Done The Work”)
Another point to consider is that if you’ve done a lot of self-development work already, you are not exempt from reactions. In fact, what your brain is wired to do is to continue to perpetuate it’s brain patterns, and your Saboteurs get sneaky, trying to convince you that you aren’t having a reaction when you are doing your level best catch your reactions. This is another pitfall or trap we can fall into.
I’ve had decades of development on myself, and am pretty sophisticated in my capacity to grow, but it doesn’t make me perfect, nor exempt from reactions. My biggest trigger? It’s when I hear people complaining, with a seeming uninterest in dealing with the problem itself. My Judge, the master Satoteur, can often be heard saying, “What a numskill… if you aren’t interested in making it better, why complain in the first place?”
As a skilled coach, one might assume that I’m disciplined enough to avoid getting triggered by my clients’ complaints. In part that’s true. In service of my commitment to helping others grow, I’ve learned how to manage my reactions when I have my coaching hat on… it doesn’t negate the fact that reactions still happen. This is in part why I facilitate the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Program, because I know the difference it makes to gain strength through mental fitness, and love helping others gain this capacity.
The Power of Response: Building Your Mental Muscle
What is Mental Fitness? Mental Fitness is a person’s capacity to respond to life’s challenges with a greater positive mindset. It’s also the key to moving from negative reactions to positive responses in all of life’s challenging or conflictual situations, allowing you to gain control or agency over your reactions that are unique to your mental landscape, and be more empowered when dealing with the challenges you face in daily life.
The next time you feel that familiar rush of a trigger, try this simple shift:
Instead of: “What did they do to me?“
Ask Yourself: “What is this reaction telling me about my internal mental architecture, and how can I respond with kindness to myself right now?“