Pyramid of Triggers

Pyramid of Triggers

Here’s a recent email someone sent:

“I watch your videos. It was a novel idea to me that one does not have to respond to reactivity. The problem is that I hardly ever know what is triggering me. I can kind of get what my thoughts are … But the triggers? I have a long way to go with that. It’s interesting though – that triggers spin me off into behaviors — I guess I always thought that might be a possibility. The challenge is learning those triggers — but more than that how to behave differently around them.”

I’ve given a lot of thought to these questions over the years, looking at

  • what are triggers?
  • what kinds of triggers are there?
  • what is the purpose of triggers? (can you believe this is a purpose?!)
  • what is our task in dealing with triggers…

I go into some of this in my video “Pyramid of Triggers”, here: