Why Your Triggers Are Gold: Nervous System Healing

One Conscious Breath: Issue 06

Our triggers aren't the problem. They never were. They are signals. Always pointing toward what is ready to be remembered, revealed and reclaimed within us. They are the gold that is guiding us back to our core selves, our hearts.

Eye-level view of a serene therapy room with comfortable seating and calming decor

One Conscious Breath ~ Before We Begin

I invite you to take one conscious breath. Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes. Now pause. And then exhale ~ out through your mouth. Slowly. Fully. Elongate the release as far as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your cheeks soften. Wiggle your fingers. Wiggle your toes. Feel your feet firmly on the ground. In this exact moment, for this one conscious breath, feel that you are safe. In your body. Right here. Right now.

Taking one conscious breath and orienting ourselves back into safety within, in the present moment, allows us to feel, really feel, what present moment safety feels like in our bodies. One conscious breath at a time. And from this place of safety, one breath at a time, allows us to engage with whatever comes next from a more resourced place within. The more grounded you are as you read this, the more your nervous system will be anchored in the present now rather than the historic then. And the more open you will be to receive what your body is signaling to you.

So, one more conscious breath.

And when you're ready ~ let's begin.

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I want to offer you a completely different way of seeing triggers.

Not only from my professional lens, but from my own personal one. I had to learn how to be with my own triggers, my own aliveness cleverly disguised as fear. For so long, I avoided and blamed others for making me feel a certain way. I used every tactic I could to keep the focus outward so I wouldn’t have to intimately feel what was happening inside me. Until I finally realized what all these triggers were attempting to tell me, show me, something about myself. My very own wounds pointing me exactly toward what needed healing. They were guiding me, when I summoned the courage to listen, back to my own heart.

And so I began to learn how to follow the signals.

I learned how to reframe every trigger, not only as pointing toward what needs healing, but toward what is longing to be felt. These are not two separate things. Our wounds are longing to be felt just as much as our love and our desire. Both are longing. Triggers point us toward both. They are not mutually exclusive.

When we avoid the wound within, we are ultimately avoiding the love within, too.

Allow that to land.

This is the teaching. And this is the gold.

I’ve spent over twenty years sitting with people in their most undefended moments. Watching, again and again, as the very things they were most desperate to grasp and avoid turned out to be the most precise map they had. Leading them toward their deepest healing, the reclamation of their core selves. And ultimately, a return to their own hearts.

Triggers are, in fact, the pathway of gold leading us back to ourselves.

Here is the first thing I invite you to feel into in your body, not just pass through your mind:

We only get triggered by things we are passionate about.

If you didn’t care ~ genuinely, deeply ~ you wouldn’t be triggered. You just wouldn’t react. You would feel nothing. Not in a numb or avoidant way. In an unbothered way. The way you feel about something that simply has nothing to do with you.

A trigger is not random. What triggers me may not trigger you. And feeling triggered is not evidence of weakness or fragility or a nervous system that has failed. Quite the contrary. It is our body, in its infinite wisdom, orienting us toward something that matters.

Something that is alive, making us feel. It is signaling something that is either deeply important to us ~ a longing, a passion, a love ~ or something needing to be healed. And quite frankly, these truths are almost always present at the same time.

Triggers are not a problem to be solved. Or avoided.

They are a signal to be followed. To be honored.

They are pointing ~ always, directly, without exception ~ toward what is ready to be reclaimed within us. And toward what is longing to be felt. Our wounds. Our love. All of it. Our most alive, authentic self.

Reminding us: that was then. And this is now.

And our triggers are gold offering us the most direct pathway back home.

When we feel triggered, our autonomic nervous system has sensed a cue of threat. The same system we explored in Issue 05. The one that has been scanning for signals of safety and danger since before we had words for any of it. And it activates, in service of our survival, protecting us from something happening in present moment that resembles something that happened in the past.

The activation is real. The racing heart, the tightening in your chest, the flush of heat in your face, the sudden sharpening of your attention, even the drop into disconnection ~ all of these sensations are real.

Most of the time, though, the trigger is pulling us back to a much younger version of ourselves. A version that was smaller, more vulnerable, with far fewer resources and choices than we have today. And to this younger version, the trigger was overwhelming. The very feeling, the emotion, signaled a threat. Because when we are small, we needed a caregiver to help us be with and regulate our emotions. And if this didn’t happen for us, our nervous system did the only thing it could, stopped us from feeling at all. Stopped us from connecting with our own selves. And therefore, pulled us out of connections with others and the world. Brilliant adaptation when we had no other way to feel safe.

But here is the tragedy. What the nervous system also pulled us away from in that protection: our own heart. Our own aliveness. Our own authentic self. The armor can’t differentiate love from fear. It’s protective against emotion itself. It doesn’t just protect us from what we don’t want to feel, it stops us from feeling what we long for, too.

That was then.

We are not that version of ourselves anymore. We have more resources, awareness, capacity and choice than our younger selves ever had. The triggers aren’t a failure. They are the invitation. The very signal leading us back to the present, back to our fully resourced core self, back to our hearts.

Here is the golden paradox: the very thing keeping us stuck is also the pathway to set us free. And nowhere is this more extraordinary than in the relationship between fear and love.

Fear and love activate very similar physiological responses in our bodies.

The same energy. The same activation.

The only difference is the story the mind begins to tell about what this activation means.

Fear says: this is dangerous. Contract. Protect. Run.

Love says: this is alive. Open. Lean in. Follow this.

Same emotional activation. Same energy. Two entirely different experiences, determined not by what is actually happening, but by how our brains interpret this level of activation.

Feel into something you genuinely love. Something alive, something you long toward. Notice what happens in your body. The quickening of your heart. The shortening of your breath. The flush of heat in your face. The sense of aliveness. Something significant is happening right now.

Now ~ fear. Feel into something that activates fear or dread. Something you’ve been avoiding. Something that makes you want to contract or run.

The quickening of your heart. The shortening of your breath. The flush of heat in your face. The sense of aliveness. Something significant is happening right now.

The same.

Exactly the same.

Did you feel it? The body doesn’t know the difference. Only the story does. And the story, the interpretation, is wiring. Old, learned, automatic wiring that decided long ago that strong sensations are inherently unsafe. Both love and fear. Same sensation. And a story will be created to have you grasping in order to keep that feeling alive. Or running away from it.

The trigger that sends you into fear is pointing at something your body once learned was dangerous, and all the while, your whole self is longing to move toward it.

This is where the wound and the love meet. In the same activation. In the same moment.

The fear is protecting us from feeling the wound. And yet, underneath the wound, is the love that was always there ~ waiting, longing, signaling for you to come home to it. By finally meeting the wound and releasing it, we come right back to our heart.

I have experienced this in my own life more times than I care to count. The thing I was most afraid of ~ speaking from my own experience, offering my own truth, taking up space with my own voice, even the spark that ignited in me when my eyes met another, were all things I most longed for. The fear and the desire were not opposites. They were the same activation, being interpreted through old wiring that had learned, in a home where being too visible, feeling too much, felt dangerous, that staying small, and not feeling at all, was safer.

The trigger was not telling me to stop.

The trigger was actually telling me: this matters. This is where something alive and important lives. This is where the wound is ready to be healed. And this is where the love is waiting to be felt.

Following it, not running from it. Turning toward it with curiosity instead of avoidance, began to change everything.

This is the reframe that changes everything once it lands:

The trigger is not the enemy.

The trigger is the signal.

It is the body pointing, with extraordinary precision, without any agenda except your healing and your aliveness, at exactly what needs your attention.

When you avoid the trigger, you avoid the signal.

And when you avoid the wound, you ultimately avoid the love.

They are in the same place. They’ve always been in the same place. The armor built to protect us from feeling the wound kept us disconnected from feeling our love, too.

When we finally turn toward the wound, with compassion, with presence, with the full resources of our present-day self, we don’t only find what needed healing.

We find what was always underneath it.

Our own love. Our own aliveness. Our own heart. Waiting. Patient. Faithful.

T

his is the gold awaiting our return.

A Practice for This Week

The next time you feel triggered, and you will, perhaps today, perhaps within the hour, perhaps by this very letter, pause before you react. Before you move toward (or away from) the person or thing that caused the trigger. Before you shrink, explode, disappear or grasp.

Just pause.

Take one conscious breath. Drop your shoulders. Feel your feet on the floor.

And then ask, opening to your body for the answers:

Is this physical reaction necessary and helpful in this moment in time?

If the answer is no, take one more conscious breath and dive deeper:

What am I actually feeling right now, underneath this reaction?

Is this familiar? Have I felt this before?

And ~

What am I longing toward underneath this?

That last question is the one most of us have never been taught to ask. Not just what needs to be healed. But what is longing to be felt. What emotion is trying to find its way through.

Because almost always, I promise you, both are present. The wound. And underneath it, the love.

When you find that familiarity, when you recognize the younger version of yourself in the activation, turn your awareness there. Bring compassion. Not analysis. Not explanation. Just the felt sense of safety from your present-day self, with all your resources and awareness, that this younger version needed then, yet never quite received. Offer it now. It’s safe to feel. Whatever the emotion. Give it the space needed so it can finally release. Remembering that you have all the resources to feel now what was once too scary to feel then.

This turning toward is the update. It is the opportunity to meet the trigger with care and compassion. To alchemize the wound back into love.

One conscious breath at a time. One moment of turning toward instead of away. One small act of choosing presence over protection. Compassion over condemnation.

This is how our wiring gets updated. This is how we heal. Not by bypassing the pain, but by meeting it. In the trigger itself. In the turning toward it. Because underneath every wound, without exception, is the love that’s always been there. Longing to be remembered.

We cannot feel what we keep avoiding.

And what we have been avoiding, through every trigger, every reaction, every old alarm still ringing, is ultimately, our own love.

Our triggers are not our enemies.

They are the most faithful guides we have, pointing, always, toward what is ready to be healed within us, and toward the love that has been waiting there all along.

That was then.

And this is now.

And your heart has been here, whole, the entire time.

With love and One Conscious Breath,

Jody

P.S. — If you’re new here: I’m Jody Allen, a somatic psychotherapist in San Francisco and Berkeley. These letters are where neuroscience meets the heart, the foundation of a book in progress. If someone forwarded this to you and it resonated, you can subscribe at jodyallenlcsw.substack.com. It’s free. It always will be.