A perspective shift inspired by How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Currently, I am reading a book called How Emotions Are Made and have been doing some research on rethinking most aspects of my practice. One thing that has really changed my perspective is the whole aspect of emotional triggers or being triggered. I’ve written about it in the past, but today I will be exploring it from a more freeing and totally different perspective.

So, what does it really mean when we get triggered?

We normally imply it as something outside of us has evoked an emotional reaction or a strong emotional reaction inside us. Your heart might race, your body tightens, and then we normally say, “That situation is so triggering or my anxiety has been triggered,” and so on. We’ve been taught to believe that certain people, places, or events trigger us and that our emotional reactions are automatic and caused by things outside of us.

But what if that concept is fundamentally backwards? And what if, by looking at it from a different angle, we’re able to have a deep insight – and instead of fighting with our triggers, we end up developing a new perspective?

Emotions are Constructed

So, as Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in her well-researched book, emotions are not really hardwired reflexes waiting to be triggered. Instead, emotions are constructed by the brain moment by moment — based on predictions.

Your brain draws from past experiences to guess what’s happening and simulate what your body should feel. It’s not reacting to the world – it’s forecasting it.

The trigger was never really out there; it was the meaning it was making inside of you.

Let’s give a common example in the context of an abusive relationship. Say you’ve just left an abusive relationship. Then one morning, when you’re walking down the street, you catch a whiff of a familiar cologne — the one your ex used to wear. In that moment, your chest tightens, and there’s a cold chill moving down your spine, or you start sweating a lot.

So, the truth is, the cologne did not really cause an emotional response, and it did not really trigger you. Instead, your brain recognized the smell and then sent signals to your body to be on high alert — or to prepare — based on what that smell used to mean. So, your system was not really responding to the scent, but rather to a pattern it had associated with the one who was using the scent.

That’s the survival memory your brain stored, kept, and associated with events that surround or remind you of your ex. It could be cologne, a favourite restaurant, colours, or anything that resembles your ex.

The Hidden Cost of Managing Triggers

Most healing methodologies advocate for identifying triggers and then looking for strategies to cope with them — like setting boundaries around them, eliminating items that remind you of your ex for 30 days or so, or even avoiding them altogether.

While those approaches may offer some sort of relief, they may also end up complicating your healing journey, as they make you so hypervigilant of the environment, and you may even relinquish the power of healing to an external source by wanting to control the environment or even choosing to isolate yourself altogether, as you cannot control the colognes or the people you meet on the street.

And the more you identify, the more you overload yourself with a million tools and techniques which end up burdening you in your healing journey or even limiting your freedom.

You may end up stuck in the same state of mind as before the triggers which is not really about change. Or like in some instances, you even get frustrated as you feel you’ve been in the same state as you were a few years back, and you were promised that by doing this or that, you will change – but now you’re feeling worse and drained.

When You’re “Retriggered”

Another thing to consider is the whole aspect of being retriggered, which mostly explains why many people may feel overwhelmed and confused when they thought they’d healed or moved on, only for them to be “retriggered” suddenly. They may say things like:

“Why is this happening? I thought I’d moved on.”
“I feel like there’s some trauma still stuck in my body.”

And so on. But what really happens is not your wounds “reopening”, it’s just your mind scanning the environment and interpreting it from a familiar lens and then forecasting pain and fear. The internal system goes:

“This looks like that time I felt unsafe. Let’s get ready for that again.”

Why This Changes Everything About Your Healing Journey

So, by understanding that you’re not inherently triggered but your mind is rather predicting what will happen using a kind of “false alarm” it has adopted or learned from past experiences, it simply means the work you need to do is not really identifying your triggers, but rather unlearning or rewiring the false alarm.

So that’s where shifting your understanding from being triggered to understanding that emotions are constructed makes you feel that your situation is more changeable and you don’t have to just cope, but thrive. It’s not “trauma” or a “wound” that will be with you forever, but rather a false alarm system that can be recalibrated.

You’re not broken — you think you are.

And you can start unlearning by first going back to this and challenging your original concept of triggers. Then after that, when you experience those moments where you normally get triggered, you don’t see it as your wounds reopening, but rather your false alarm kicking in. And instead of disregarding it, you do a gentle pause so that the alarm does not automatically lead you into the familiar.

By pausing every time you’re triggered, that awareness stops the normal autopilot and you will not fully flow with the narrative your clock has gotten used to.

Over time, the loop dissolves, or your brain unlearns not because you “got rid of the trigger,” or you “avoided all the triggers,” but because your brain stopped predicting danger in the context of those elements which may remind you of past experiences.

Note from the Author

If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns, then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.

Recommended videos

Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.  (recommended reads)