The Same Things Keep Setting Me Off. I Finally Stopped Asking What's Wrong With Me.
Your reactions aren't random. They're pointing somewhere specific.
Someone left a comment on my people pleasing article from a couple weeks ago that I want to respond to properly, because it deserves more than a reply in the comments section.
They appreciated the 5% safer pattern breaker framework but asked whether, instead of focusing on the reaction and the tool, we might look at how the nervous system itself is trying to wake us up. What if instead of managing the signal we learned to hear what it’s saying?
The answer is yes. That’s the whole point. It’s why I wrote an entire book on it.
The pattern breaker was never the destination. It’s how you build enough capacity to get to the deeper work. You interrupt the pattern first because you can’t hear anything from a system that’s completely flooded. The regulation comes before the listening. But, and that’s a big but, regulation was never meant to be where you stop.
The pattern breaker gives you the pause. What you do inside that pause is everything… And what’s waiting inside that pause is the thing most people spend their whole lives avoiding: the trigger itself, finally speaking clearly enough to be heard.
Triggers Are Maps, Not Flaws
You’re going to get triggered. We’re human beings with a nervous system that remembers every time it wasn’t safe to be ourselves, and until we learn what those triggers are telling us, we keep reacting to them, apologizing for them, or building our lives around avoiding them.
A trigger isn’t a flaw. It’s a map.
When I understood that my triggers were points guiding me back home to myself, I was able to stop judging and shaming myself for every reaction in my life. Which, let me tell you, was a full-time job before that.
Triggers show us exactly where the survival self is protecting us with outdated strategies. Pointing to the needs we’ve been abandoning and revealing the boundaries we haven’t set yet. When you decode a trigger, you stop reacting blindly, spiraling into shame, and making the same reactive choices that have kept you stuck in the same loops. The trigger becomes the way you update your identity in real time.
That’s why managing the signal alone wasn’t supposed to be the full teaching, just the first part of the process. Managing triggers keeps you functional, but learning to read the map is what brings you home.
Your Body Decided Before You Did
Your body is doing something right now that you aren’t consciously aware of. It’s scanning the room, reading the energy of whoever’s near you, evaluating every nuance of the last text you received, and deciding whether you’re safe. This happens constantly, below the level of thought, before you have any idea what your nervous system has already decided.
Dr. Stephen Porges calls this neuroception. Your body assesses threat before your thinking brain has even registered what’s happening. This is why you overreact to something you barely processed and then spend hours asking yourself why. You didn’t choose the reaction. Your body chose it first.
When a cue in your environment, a tone of voice, a look, a silence, a certain kind of text, matches a pattern your nervous system learned to associate with danger, it fires. Your system doesn’t stop to ask whether the danger is present in this moment. It knows one thing: this matches something that hurt before. The cue itself is neutral. A text message is just a text message. It only becomes a trigger when your nervous system has learned to pair it with pain. That’s why the moment that wrecks you wouldn’t register at all for someone else standing in the same room.
The trigger is not evidence that you’re broken, once I really understood this, it changed everything for me. Because a trigger is your body’s memory speaking, and it speaks in the only language it has, which is sensation.
The Sequence Every Trigger Follows
What happens after the cue is fast. The body reacts before the mind has finished forming a thought. Your chest tightens, your breath goes shallow, your stomach drops. Then the mind scrambles to explain what the body already decided. They hate me. I’m going to lose everything. I said something wrong. The story feels like insight, but it’s your nervous system pattern matching the past and handing you a fitting narrative.
Then comes the reaction. The defense, or maybe you attack, completely shutdown, start over-explaining, the apology before anyone has asked for one. My pattern looked different at the clinic than it did at home. At work I went into apology mode and people pleasing however I could, while at home I exploded. Same trigger underneath with a different costume.
Most people only catch themselves at the reaction. They see what they did and spend hours, maybe days, in shame about it (me slowly raising my hand over here, I spent my adult life like this). Why did I do that again? Why can’t I handle this like a normal person? It took me close to a year to start catching myself earlier, at the sensation layer, before the story solidified into something I believed. That’s the window. I’m still not perfect at it, this is a lifelong practice, but when I find that window, everything changes.
The pattern breaker is how you widen that window. The map reading is what you do once you’re standing in it.
What the Trigger Is Pointing To
Once you’ve caught the sensation and separated it from the story, there’s one question that turns the whole thing from a problem into a map.
If this trigger could speak, what’s it trying to protect?
Criticism at work sends you spiraling? You’re asking for clarity and support.
Your partner pulling away wrecks you? You’re craving connection and reassurance.
The bill in the mail floods your system? You want stability and a plan.
The trigger is information about what’s missing, the need you’ve been abandoning (sometimes for decades). They’re the map showing you exactly where you’ve been abandoning yourself, where you’ve been people pleasing, where you’ve been performing for love instead of receiving it freely.
Once you know the need, you take one action that honors it. A request, a boundary, or meeting the need yourself when the other person can’t or won’t. The goal isn’t to fix everything. That’d be lovely, but it’s not realistic. It’s one action that proves to your nervous system that someone is finally listening. And the someone is you.
Why I Stopped Being Afraid of My Triggers
These days I’m grateful when a trigger shows up. That’s not something I could have said two years ago.
When the trigger comes now, I feel gratitude in my chest alongside whatever the trigger brings. It doesn’t happen immediately every time, but it’s increasing, which is pretty cool. When the gratitude shows up, the old sensations are still there, the closed throat, the tight chest, the raised shoulders. But I hold both at once and my brain goes straight to the question, what do I need to learn here? Because this is happening for me. To make me a better mother, a better wife or friend, a more honest human. The trigger stopped being the enemy somewhere along the way. One day I noticed I was no longer bracing for it to come.
That shift didn’t happen because I got better at suppressing my reactions. It happened because I stopped treating the signal as the problem and started treating it as the teacher. The pause the pattern breaker creates was never about controlling myself better. It was about creating enough space to finally hear what my body had been trying to tell me my whole life.
Some days you’ll react before you catch it. You’ll spiral into the story before you even feel the sensation. That’s part of being human and it doesn’t erase anything. What matters is that you keep coming back, one second sooner each time. That’s how trust gets built with the parts of you that have been protecting you the only way they knew how.
Your triggers are trying to bring you home to yourself. Let them.
If you’re learning to read your own map and want support moving through it, I’m offering discovery calls. No pressure, just a conversation to make sure we’re the right fit.
And if you’re at the beginning of this work, where the patterns are visible but the body hasn’t caught up yet, The In Between was built for exactly this.
For Paid Subscribers: Decoding the Trigger
This is the trigger decoding practice from chapter 5 of my book. It picks up where the pattern breaker leaves off. The breaker creates the pause. This is what you do inside of it.
