Your power comes from owning what triggers you.
Here’s something most people don’t want to hear: nobody triggers you. You trigger yourself.
Stay with me — because if you want to stop being triggered, understanding this one thing changes your relationships, your communication, and the quality of your life.
I’ve been teaching this to my clients for years, and it’s one of those topics where the moment they really get it, something shifts. Not just in the head. In the body. In how they move through their day and their conversations.
So let’s get into it.
What Happens in Your Brain When You Get Triggered
The first thing worth knowing: when you get triggered, your IQ drops. Literally. In the exact moment you most need to think clearly, articulate yourself, and respond with intention — your brain checks out.
You know the experience. Someone says something, you feel the heat rise, you want to respond brilliantly, and nothing comes out right. Then at about 2am you’re lying there replaying it: I could have said that. Why didn’t I say that?
That gap between what you wanted to say and what actually came out — that’s what a trigger does to you.
A mentor of mine once said: if you can’t stop yourself being triggered, you shouldn’t be part of the conversation. The longer I work with women on this, the more I know it’s true.
Why You Get Triggered So Easily
Here’s the part most people don’t know, and it’s the part that changes everything.
When something happens — someone says something, an event occurs — it doesn’t reach your conscious mind first. It goes straight to your unconscious. And your unconscious runs it through everything: your beliefs, your values, how you were raised, what happened to you at school twenty or thirty years ago. All of it.
Then out comes the response. The trigger.
Which means the trigger was never really about the other person. It was about what your unconscious made of what they said.
That’s why we trigger ourselves. Not them. Us.
What is an emotional trigger? An emotional trigger is a reaction that fires before you consciously choose it. An external event passes straight to your unconscious mind, which filters it through your past experiences and beliefs, and produces a response automatically. The reaction feels like it’s about the other person, but it’s actually about what your own mind made of the moment.
The Space Between Stimulus and Response
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived multiple concentration camps during World War II. He went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, exploring why some people could cope with unimaginable conditions while others couldn’t. What he found: the people who had a reason to live — a purpose, someone to return to, a dream they were holding — survived far better than those who felt they had nothing.
And he gave us the idea I come back to again and again. He said that “between stimulus and response there is a space” — and that in that space lies our freedom to choose how we respond, and in that choice lies our growth.
The stimulus is what someone says or does. The response is how you handle it. Between the two, there is a space. That space is yours. That’s where your power lives.
How to Stop Reacting When You’re Triggered
The moment you feel your blood pressure rise, that’s your signal. Here’s what to do with it:
- Stop. Catch the moment before the reaction runs. The heat you feel is the cue.
- Name it. Ask yourself: am I getting triggered right now? Why is this coming up for me?
- Get curious — genuinely. Not loaded questions born from being annoyed. Real ones. What did they mean by that? How did they arrive at that?
Here’s what I know: you cannot get genuinely curious about another person without dropping into empathy. And empathy and a triggered state cannot coexist.
Getting curious also means your mind might change. You might find that what was said wasn’t what you thought it was. Or you might understand the person better, even if you still disagree.
Either way, you come out with more clarity, more freedom, and more power than if you’d just reacted.
Awareness Is Where It Starts
This is what so much of my work with women is built on. Awareness. You cannot transform what you cannot see — and most of us have been running unconscious patterns so long we don’t even notice them happening.
The moment you understand how triggers work — the moment you see that you create the response, not the other person — you have a completely different way of showing up.
Not perfect. Not untriggered forever. But in charge.
That’s what changes everything.
Learning to see your own patterns — and take back the space between stimulus and response — is the foundation of Woman to Warrior, my 5-stage program for women ready to stop reacting and start leading their own lives. If this is the work you’re ready for, start here.