important concept in psychological life - which  demands our respect, compassion and attention.  

To be triggered is, in its most basic form,  to respond with intense fear and anger to a  

situation in the here and now which, to other  people, may seem blameless and unconcerning.  

One moment we are calm, the next we  are catapulted into despair and terror;  

only minutes ago, the future looked hopeful,  now only ruin and disaster seem to lie ahead.

Most of us who suffer from these episodes would  very much like to better hold on to equanimity and  

hope. It may be important to know how to be scared  or incensed when situations actually demand it,  

but - the triggered person typically  feels after an episode - it is also  

deeply counterproductive and plain exhausting  to be visited by powerful emotions that aren’t  

warranted by what lies before us and that  fail to advance our interests in any way.

The way out of being uncontrollably triggered  is to understand how the mechanism operates. The  

mind is triggered when it believes it recognises  in the world around it a situation that it feels  

from memory to be highly damaging and dangerous.  Our triggers are a secret guide to our histories;  

they tell us about things we were once  very afraid of. The triggering element  

is like a piece of a jigsaw that will  precisely fit into an analogous puzzle  

in the past. We are triggered now  by what we were devastated by then.

Even if we don’t remember too much about our  past, we can surmise everything we need to  

know from reverse engineering our triggers.  If we are constantly afraid we are going to  

be excommunicated and mocked, this will -  in some form - be exactly what happened to  

us at some stage long ago. If we’re terrified  that someone is going to overpower us and not  

listen to our ‘no’s’, this is an almost  sure echo of what we once experienced.  

The precise relationship between  trigger and catalytic event may  

not always be literally equivalent, there  can be some displacement along the way,  

but the link will be strong all the same. The  trigger contains and maps onto a traumatic event.

Let’s imagine a person who is triggered, that is,  thrown into powerful despair and self-loathing,  

by images on social media of blatantly  attractive and popular people. No sooner  

have they seen these than they start to  doubt and despise themselves, reflect on  

their inadequacies and remember all the reasons  why they are fated to be a failure and unloved.

The trigger is not entirely ‘nothing’. There is  something a little dispiriting about the beauty  

parade on certain sorts of social media. But the  point at issue is the scale of the reaction that  

is generated. In seeking to account for it,  we have to look backwards. The person has been  

triggered because the contemporary event contains,  in a garbled, disguised and unconscious form,  

the essence of a profoundly traumatic  dynamic in earlier life which lies mostly  

unknown and unexplored - and thereby commands  immense and unending power over the victim.

Let’s suppose that this person had a mother who  favoured their more ebullient younger sibling  

over them and that their looks were part of what  damned them to horrific neglect and emotional  

coldness. It doesn’t, in the circumstances, take  much to be returned back to this place. We are  

animals who are primed to sniff out in the present  the slightest sign of the dangers of the past.

The tragedy of triggering is that it fails to  notice the differences between then and now;  

between the awfulness we suffered long ago and  the relative innocence of the modern moment.  

In so far as bad things do happen nowadays,  triggering also fails to account for the way  

in which we are no longer children, and are  therefore able to respond to the threats that  

do come our way with a lot more creativity,  strength and calm than we possessed as four  

or ten year olds. Were things ever to get as  bad as they once were, we have so many more  

options than we did - and therefore so many  reasons to feel less agitated and vulnerable.

To be triggered is to lose our powers of  discrimination. In the heat of the moment,  

we can longer distinguish between A and B. So  frightening is A that everything between it and  

Q is, at heart, another A. We can’t tell that  someone is not telling us that we are guilty,  

that the situation isn’t evidence of doom, that  we are not being mocked, that our colleague isn’t  

attacking us, that we aren’t being reprimanded  unbearably, that we haven’t been told we’re an  

idiot or a monster. We can’t distinguish between  looking a bit tired and looking fundamentally  

unacceptable, between something they’ve done that  got them sent to prison and something we’ve done  

that won’t ever be noticed. So primed has our  history made us to appalling scenarios, we have  

no ability not to refind them at every turn -  especially when we are a little low or tired.

Though we might assume that we’d want to  escape our triggers, we are also drawn to  

them through a compulsive sense of familiarity.  Calm and confidence aren’t our resting places;  

they don’t feel normal and are therefore worrying  in their own way. We want our awful hunches  

confirmed. It can feel right to put ourselves  in environments where people might be mocking,  

to look out for stories of disgrace or ruin  or to befriend people who are constantly on  

the edge of undermining us. When our mood  feels eerie and sad, we might go to the  

very website that triggers us or call up  the person we know is going to alarm us.

The cure for triggering is love; love understood  as a process of patiently holding someone and,  

like a kindly and soothing parent, helping  them to discriminate between black and white,  

terror and calm, evil and goodness. The cure lies  too in learning to work backwards from our current  

triggers to the dynamics that once created them.  Rather than worrying yet more about the future,  

we should ask ourselves the simple question:  What does my fear of what will happen tell me  

about what did happen? What scenario from my  past is contained in my alarm at the future?

To overcome our triggers is to come to navigate  the present with all the confidence and excited  

curiosity that should have been ours from  the start. And maturity could be defined as:  

knowing what triggers us and why -  and a commitment to dampening our  

first responses in the name of a patient  exploration and understanding of the past.