Why There’s No Such Thing as a “Trigger”
In some ways, the idea of a “trigger” is actually pretty cool because it lets you off the hook. If you’ve just been “triggered,” you’re not really responsible for what happens after that. It’s just that wily old “emotional brain” of yours that can’t be controlled, right? WRONG.
The whole idea of being “triggered” is just an old legend based on brain science that dates back to the last millennium.
See, brains are understood to have a core function: the regulation and coordination of an organism’s internal systems—like the immune system, the endocrine system, the reproductive system, and so on and so forth.
They accomplish this by anticipating the energy needs of the body’s various organs and systems—key word being “anticipate”—and preparing to meet those needs before they ever arise.
In a nutshell, a brain doesn’t react to things, it predicts things. Which means it literally can’t get “triggered by” something, because that would be a reaction—not a prediction.
Our Brains Work Predictively
What the Brain Actually Does
Your brain’s job is to run a model of your body in the world.
What does that even mean, though? Your brain produces a 24/7 model of your reality through predictions based on your past experiences. When (not if) the brain’s model turns out to be wrong, the brain updates its model through something called “prediction error.” This prediction error is really just a fancy way to say “learning,” and is there to help your brain predict more accurately next time.
Now instead of going down a rabbit hole of physics and math—or into the just-as-complicated language of predictive processing and active inference—to explain what I just told you, I’ll simply say this:
Predictions are your brain’s calculations about what your next action should be and about the things you’re going to see (around you) and feel (in your body) as a result of that action.
Not to repeat myself too much, but:
Predictions come from all your past experiences and are the very basis of your reality.
These predictions make up the model your brain carries around and uses all day, every day.
That model allows the brain to conduct the miraculous bodily process
that gets the right amount of energy
for a situation
in advance of the situation,
depending on what the brain thinks the situation is (or will be),
to where it needs to be in the body.
The fancy scientific word for this is allostasis, which just means balancing the body’s energy budget.
What Does All This Have to Do with “Triggers”?
When you feel that surge of energy that tells you you’ve been “triggered,” nothing special or different is actually happening.
Your brain is doing the exact same thing it does at any other moment of your life: conceptualizing the energy you feel in that moment as “being triggered” and/or “experiencing a strong emotion.”
This is how you’ve learned to make sense of the sudden energy in that particular context. That particular understanding prescribes your next action.
If the context includes another person, the emotional experience (that feels like “being triggered” but isn’t) will allow you to vibe with that person, emotionally speaking. Or that emotional experience might allow you to exert influence over the other person (which, believe it or not, is sometimes a perfectly valid purpose of emotion).
So, Here’s the Bad News
You can’t get away with bad behavior anymore with the excuse that you’ve been “triggered.” Now that you know how the brain works, you know better than to fall for the old rational-brain-got-overcome-by-the-emotional-brain story.
You are responsible for your behavior. Full stop.
If, as an adult, you want to act like an angry baby or a ruthless tyrant or a helpless victim, you now have to own that you have chosen these behaviors. The jig is up.
It’s like the sunrise and sunset. Science is completely clear that the sun neither “rises” nor “sets”—it’s the earth’s movement that we perceive as the arrival of, respectively, dawn and dusk.
It seems true, it feels true that the sun disappears and reappears daily. But it’s just not true.
Neither is the myth of an emotional “trigger.”
Leah Benson, LMHC is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Tampa, FL.
