Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual Growth in 2022: Learn to Recognize When You Are Triggered

It is no fun being triggered, but there is something far worse: Being triggered and not knowing that you are triggered. Being blind to triggers can end friendships and marriages and cause great suffering for both you and the ones you love. This is because if you don’t recognize that some of your upset is your stuff, you won’t see that there is something you can do about it.

If you are like me, you’ve experienced moments when you are certain you are not the triggered one only to realize later that, yep, it was little ol’ me!

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time Sam and I fought over who was triggered.

“I am not triggered, you are!” Then twenty minutes later, “Okay, I am triggered but you are more triggered that me.”

I am so glad those days are over! Mostly!

I suspect that our tendency to get triggered, and not see it, is something we will have to face throughout our earthly journey, even as we grow in Christlikeness. But we are not helpless victims here. There are steps we can take to get better and better at noticing when we are triggered and turning to God for healing when we are. The best part about becoming more aware is that we can cut it off at the pass. We become, over time, more and more sensitive to what being triggered feels like in our bodies, and we can take action to turn it around before we go from feeling irritated to being Mount Vesuvius rumbling and about to blow.

What do I mean by triggered? Something will set us off. We feel any number of negative feelings—fear, anger, sadness, shame, hopelessness, or helplessness. Dr. Karl Lehman, M.D., says that most of the time when we are triggered, our relational circuits are off. You may remember that our relational circuits are the neural wiring in our brain that has to be “on,” or active, for us to be relational, both with God, ourselves, and others. In Outsmarting Yourself he writes that we most commonly lose “access to our relational connection circuits “when “traumatic memories” are activated. Traumatic memories are activated in the right hemisphere of our brain, the part of our brain that does not sequence time. The result is that we feel, what we feel, as if it is happening to us right now.

Imagine what this would be like if you were abused as a child. Intense pain from long ago surfaces, but without a clear connection to the past. From our point of view the anguish seems to arise from our current situation. In reality, it is rooted in the past. If our painful thoughts and feelings did not have a landing place in our life, we might be able to acknowledge, with compassion, that we are in a tough spot and turn to God. It would not get in our craw in such a way that we are stuck in intense feelings. Being triggered distorts reality. We don’t have access to all of our brain. We lack important insights and perspectives.

So what does this look like in real life? I will try to describe a mild example lest I trigger my beloved readers. My friend is habitually late. Because I want to be a gracious person, I pretend that it does not bother me, but inside I’m angry. Especially when it happens repeatedly. Were I not triggered, I might be able to tell him that being on time is important to me. That this is the fifth time they have been late and ask if we can talk about it. We might even come up with a plan to avoid me having to wait 15 to 20 minutes every time we meet for coffee. For example, we might come up with a scheme where he sends me a text when he’s leaving his house, and I keep working until I get the text and then leave for the coffee shop. If I’m not triggered, I’ll see options—including speaking up about my preferences. I’ll see him with compassion, and I’ll be able to explain my view that being on time is important to me. But if I get triggered, I will not see my friend with empathy. Instead, my negative feelings over having to wait will mushroom.

What’s worse is that I won’t have any sense that any of this is my responsibility. That by repeatedly communicating to him that “It’s no big deal,” every time he is late, he has no idea that it bothers me so much. I will see the entire issue as being his fault. In my mind the issue is his tardy arrivals. I will not see that I am not acting like a grown up here and will see him as being 100% percent responsible for my feelings.

In reality, I do have options. First, I can notice that this is upsetting me. I can say to myself, Betsy, this is a big deal to you. I can be curious and ask myself, I wonder what is going on? That is the first step, be curious about strong emotions. Be curious about the tendency to not speak up. Might they have roots in the past?

Could I be getting triggered? If I am, I know my perspective will be distorted. That is step one, noticing that am starting to get triggered.

Then I move to step two. Talking to God about it. We can do this any number of ways. Some just talk out loud to God and hear him respond, usually through thoughts and mental pictures. You may need to quiet your body to hear him, by, for example, yawning and deep breathing. You can use Immanuel Journaling. You can come to Daily Connect where you will be heard by empathetic people and helped to connect to God. Do what works best for you.

In my case, I talk to God out loud. I ask him, is there something in me that is being triggered? I see two things: I want to be perfect. I want to be the sort of person who is always gracious over little offenses, such as being late. But in reality, I feel offended. I am busy, I don’t have much discretionary time and I feel slighted. The Lord helps me accept that I am human, that it is okay to have limits. It also reminds me that there was a lot of bullying in my family of origin. We did not see healthy respect modeled so when I feel disrespected, anger rises up. As I interact with Jesus, I feel his attunement. He saw everything that ever happened to me. Every slight. Every wound. Every hurt. He takes them seriously. He even saw into the hearts and minds of those who harmed me.

We go deeper. I see that in my childhood I developed a belief that I was made to be abused and that I’m not worthy of being treated with respect and kindness. This is key because if the situation that is triggering me did not have a landing place in my heart, I would be able to negotiate rationally and compassionately with the other person. But if there are things in me that are not healed, my guardians might switch into enemy mode and rush to defend me. Oh, our dear guardians, we need them, and God gave them to us to keep us safe. But in their rush to defend, they may go beyond what is healthy and insist that the full blame and responsibility for my feelings rest on the other person. What else can they do? Because to acknowledge that some of this, at least, is coming from my side is exquisitely painful for it touches on exquisite pain of my childhood.

I recently heard a leader say, “reveal to heal.” What she was saying was that God reveals our wounds for the very purpose of healing our hearts.

A friend once said that she no longer put the blame for anything that upsets her on the other person. Instead, she always looked within to see what squishy spot, what wounded spot in her heart was being speared by their behavior, so she can be healed.

To do so, to acknowledge that even though someone else is triggering us we are responsible for our triggers, is to be like Christ who instead of blaming those who had nailed his hands and feet to a wooden cross, simply said, “Father forgive them they don’t know what they’re doing.”

So I want to challenge you that one of the best ways you can grow, a guaranteed way to accelerate your spiritual growth in 2022 is starting to notice when you’re triggered. The next time you are feeling pain, consider asking yourself, Could I be triggered?

Sometimes it’s a mixture. Our dog dies and we grieve a real loss of a loving companion. As we commune with the Lord, we realize that our dog was the first one who made us feel loved us unconditionally. And without him, it feels as if no one really does. In those moments, we can turn to the Lord and engage with him, for he does love us, even more than our dog. Perhaps our dog was his gift to demonstrate his unending love. There is so much to be gained by grieving our sorrows!  

We are fearfully and wonderfully made and have many layers of depth to our heart. Each one of us is sensitive to different things and each time we are triggered it is a golden opportunity to get healing.

I’ve been paying attention to triggers for about 10 years now and I think my family could testify that I’m much less easily triggered today than I used to be, because I’ve let the Lord heal many deep hurts. That doesn’t mean you can’t trigger me, but I am much more aware and much more frequently turn to God for healing. Living in a triggered state can really torpedo your spiritual life. It amplifies the pain, makes it hard to have a clear perspective on life, and also makes it hard to hear God. My prayer for each of you is that you’ll begin to notice and as you do, new life will flow.

If you get stuck, let us know. We now have three prayer ministers who are offering HeartSync sessions for a living. I am so grateful for them as it is making this form of highly skilled ministry more available to our community.

Of course, my dream is that one day all of us will have some level of skill in healing prayer. Where every member of our community is part of a circle of three who minister to each other on a regular basis. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if healing prayer were available every time we got stuck? If we truly shared our joys and sorrows with a safe small group within our community?

Please pray and dream with me!