Why You Get Triggered and What Your Reactions Are Trying to Tell You

Why can a single comment, a certain tone of voice, or someone pulling away suddenly create a reaction that feels so much bigger than the moment itself?

Sometimes what is happening in front of us is only part of the story.

In this episode of Know Thy Soul, I use the unlikely story of my four-pound puppy, Bailey, and a bee stinger buried deep in her paw to explore what triggers may actually be showing us. The stinger itself was causing Bailey pain, but she attacked anyone who tried to get close enough to remove it.

And I think we do something very similar.

Sometimes the wound is not only what happened to us. It is the meaning that became lodged inside because of what happened.

I’m not safe.

I’m not good enough.

My feelings don’t matter.

People leave.

It’s dangerous to be seen.

Years later, something in the present touches that old wound, and suddenly we react as though the past is happening all over again.

But our reactions are not necessarily evidence that something is wrong with us. They may be invitations to become curious about what is still hurting underneath.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Why a trigger can feel much bigger than the event happening in the present
• The difference between the original wound and the meaning we made from it
• How people pleasing, perfectionism, control, withdrawal, and other coping strategies can become our own version of the Handless Maiden’s silver hands
• Why the person standing in front of us may have touched a wound they did not create
• Jesus’ teaching about the log in our own eye and what it means to take responsibility for our inner world
• What Perceval and the Fisher King reveal about emotional armor, grief, vulnerability, and the hardened heart
• Why a hardened heart may not be a heart that feels too little, but one that has felt too much
• How the ego can protect us without being allowed to rule us
• Why healing is not simply about becoming less triggered, but becoming less obstructed so we can hear the soul more clearly
• The nervous system’s fight, flight, freeze, and tend-and-befriend responses
• The shadow side of tending to other people when empathy becomes appeasement or responsibility for someone else’s emotional regulation
• How to create space between the first emotional reaction and what we choose to do next
• The question that can help us trace a trigger back to its source: When else have I felt like this?
• How subconscious beliefs formed years ago can continue shaping our lives long after we have forgotten where they came from
• Why healing may require changing the meaning we carry from an experience, not erasing what happened
• What the resurrected Jesus can show us about wounds that remain part of our story without continuing to have the final word
• Why sovereignty is not controlling what happens to us, but learning how to remain with ourselves when pain comes
• And the question at the heart of the Grail story, and perhaps at the heart of healing itself: What ails you?

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Prefer to read?

The full episode transcript is below.

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Hi friends,

Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that help us heal our inner wounds.

We’ve spent the last few weeks diving into two foundational stories: The Handless Maiden and Perceval and the Fisher King. Both stories show us how we become wounded, how those wounds show up in our lives and relationships, how we can unintentionally pass them on to our children if we don’t heal them, and ultimately, how those wounds can begin to heal.

Today, I want to dive deeper into the wounds themselves. Specifically, I want to talk about triggers.

By now, you guys know me and you probably already know that I am the queen of metaphors and I can’t explain anything happening within us without using a story or a metaphor.

And today, we’re going to use my dog.

Over her first summer, our new puppy, Bailey, was walking through the yard when she suddenly screeched and started limping. Due to the sheer number of bees in our grass, we knew immediately that she’d probably been stung. We examined her paw but couldn’t find anything, so we just watched her closely for the next few minutes. But she continued picking at her paw and wouldn’t walk on it normally, so we knew we needed to investigate further.

It took two of us to find it, but buried way up between the pads of her paw was a bee stinger, still very much stuck in her body. But as quickly as we found it, Bailey resisted any attempt to help. She used all the power in her tiny four-pound body to push us away and pull her paw back.

And because the stinger was in her front paw, she also had direct biting access to anyone who tried to touch it. Being a puppy, she couldn’t understand that we were trying to help her. She couldn’t understand that if we could just get to the source of the pain and remove the stinger, the pain would begin to go away. All Bailey knew was that we were going toward the place that hurt.

And that was the last place she wanted us.

She incessantly licked and bit at her paw, trying to fix it herself. But she simply couldn’t reach far enough between the pads to get the stinger out. So she limped. She licked. She guarded the wound.

And she attacked anything that came near it. Think about that for a moment. The stinger was causing the pain. But Bailey attacked anything that got close to the pain. And I think we do exactly the same thing.

Sometimes the fear of what we might feel if we actually go into the wound is greater than the pain we’ve learned to live with. So we resist. We protect it. We learn how to walk differently around it. We learn to call the pain a three when it’s really a nine.

And eventually, we may even forget the stinger is there.

Until something touches it. And suddenly, we react.

And that’s really what a trigger is: an old wound that never had the stinger removed or the care it needed to fully heal.

And when I talk about the stinger, I’m not necessarily talking about what happened to us. I’m talking about what got lodged inside us because of what happened.

The story we told ourselves about what it meant.

I’m not safe. I’m not good enough. My feelings don’t matter. People leave. I have to keep everyone happy. It’s dangerous to be seen.

The experience creates the wound. But sometimes it’s the meaning we made from that experience that stays lodged inside and keeps the wound from fully healing.

Then years later, something in the present touches that old wound.

And we call that a trigger.

When I finally realized she wasn’t going to be able to reach it on her own, I took a different approach. My daughter and I brought her into the bathroom, used a towel under her head to block her access to biting me, held her tightly, and as quickly as I could, I reached between the pads of her paw with a pair of tweezers and pulled out the stinger. For those first few moments, Bailey was not happy with us.

But almost immediately after the stinger came out, she stopped limping. She ran around the yard as if nothing had happened. For the next few days, I still noticed her licking that paw occasionally. Removing the stinger didn’t mean the wound instantly disappeared. Her body still needed time to heal.

But now it could. Because the thing that had been lodged inside her was finally gone.

When we’re physically injured, we have two choices: we look for the cut. The broken bone. The infection. The bee stinger buried between the pads of a tiny paw. Get to the source of the pain and remove the stinger.

The second is to leave the source of the pain where it is and do everything in our power to protect it, numb it, avoid touching it, and keep anyone or anything else from aggravating it.

Physically, it seems like a no-brainer which option to choose.

But emotionally, most of us have been doing the exact opposite our entire lives.

And this is where the metaphor becomes important. Because when it comes to our inner world, most of us were never taught how to find the stinger.

We weren’t taught how to listen to emotional pain. We weren’t taught to ask where it came from, what it was trying to tell us, or why something happening in the present could produce such an enormous reaction inside us.

So what choice did we have? We learned to live around it. So we learn to limp. And after we’ve been limping long enough, we forget we’re doing it.

We start thinking that’s simply the way we walk.

And haven’t we seen this already in The Handless Maiden? After the maiden loses her hands, she doesn’t immediately grow new ones. First, she’s given silver hands. They allow her to function. To move through the world.

To create some semblance of a normal life around what has been lost. But the silver hands aren’t healing. They’re an adaptation.

And I think we all develop our own version of silver hands. We become people pleasers. Perfectionists. Overachievers. Caretakers. Controllers. We learn to stay quiet. To never need anyone. To keep everyone happy. To leave before someone can leave us.

These strategies may seem like they work. That’s why we keep using them. They help us move through the world with wounds we haven’t yet learned how to heal.

But eventually, the question becomes: Do I want to spend the rest of my life learning how to live without my hands? Or am I willing to discover what it would take to grow them back?

And in our effort to protect that pain, we often lash out at the people around us. None of us are making a conscious decision to do any of this. Our body senses danger and reacts. Fight. Flight. Freeze. These are survival responses built into us long before our rational mind has time to explain what’s happening.

And that’s important when we talk about triggers, because sometimes our body reacts before our conscious mind has caught up. Our heart races. Our muscles tighten. Our stomach drops. We want to fight back. Run away. Shut down. Or make the threat disappear.

The rational part of us may know we’re standing in a kitchen arguing with someone we love. But another part of us is responding as though something much bigger is at stake. That’s why I don’t think healing begins by shaming ourselves for the reaction. It begins by becoming curious about it. By asking the questions that heal.

What does some part of me believe is happening right now? What is it trying so desperately to protect? Remember, Bailey couldn’t distinguish between the thing that had caused the wound and the person who was touching it. To her nervous system, pain was pain.

And humans aren’t all that different. Someone says something. They use a particular tone of voice. They criticize us. And suddenly, the emotional response inside us feels enormous compared to what is actually happening in the moment.

Sometimes, of course, the person in front of us really is hurting us. I don’t want to suggest that every painful reaction is simply an old wound or that recognizing our triggers means tolerating cruelty, disrespect, abuse, or behavior that violates our boundaries. But sometimes something else is happening too. The person standing in front of us has touched a wound they didn’t create. And because they’re the person standing there when we feel the pain, we assume they’re responsible for all of it.

We say, consciously or unconsciously: YOU made me feel this way. But did they? Or did they touch the stinger? That’s the question. Because the intensity of our reaction can sometimes tell us that what we’re experiencing isn’t entirely about what’s happening right now.

Something older has been activated. Maybe someone criticizes you and suddenly you’re ten years old again, feeling like nothing you do is ever good enough. Maybe your partner needs space and suddenly you’re a child terrified of being abandoned.

The person in front of us may have done something we need to address. But the trigger is also showing us something about ourselves. It’s showing us where the stinger still lives.

There’s a teaching from Jesus where he asks, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

Notice, he doesn’t say there isn’t a speck in the other person’s eye. There may very well be something happening outside of us that needs to be addressed.

But before I become completely consumed with what’s wrong with you, can I also become curious about what’s happening in me?

What am I bringing to this moment?

What am I seeing through?

What wound, fear, belief, or old story might be shaping the way I’m experiencing what’s happening right now?

Maybe removing the log isn’t about taking responsibility for someone else’s behavior. Maybe it’s about becoming conscious enough of my own wounds that I can finally see the situation clearly. And from that place, perhaps I can have compassion not only for my own suffering, but for the suffering of the person standing in front of me.

The Tao Te Ching points toward something similar. In Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of chapter 67, he writes, “Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.”

And this is where our responsibility begins. Not responsibility for what happened to us. Responsibility for what we do with it now.

Responsibility for removing the log from our own eye, or in the language of the Bailey metaphor, removing the stinger that’s been distorting the way we feel, so that perhaps we can finally have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

There’s a story in Mark that I can’t help but see differently after spending so much time with Perceval.

Jesus enters the synagogue and sees a man with a withered hand. The people around him are watching to see whether he’ll heal the man on the Sabbath so they can accuse him.

Jesus asks whether it is right on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill.

And they say nothing.

Mark tells us that Jesus looks around at them with anger, grieved by their hardness of heart.

And then he turns to the man and says, “Stretch out your hand.”

Think about Perceval standing before the wounded Fisher King.

He sees the suffering.

But at the Grail Castle, he doesn’t ask what ails the king because he’s been taught that a knight shouldn’t ask too many questions. He follows the rule.

He listens with his mind instead of his heart.

Or think about him watching his mother collapse behind him. Going back would require him to feel what is happening. So he rides forward instead.

Or the grieving maiden, holding the body of the knight she loves and openly expressing her grief.

She is doing externally what Perceval seems incapable of doing internally.

Mourning.

Her grief should resonate with his own. His father is dead. His brothers are dead. By then, his mother is dead too. Perceval has an enormous reservoir of grief inside him.

Yet he doesn’t join her in it.

I don’t think that necessarily means he feels nothing. I think it may mean he cannot tolerate what her grief would awaken in him.

And then there’s Blanchefleur.

Perceval finally finds love. He finds a woman he cares for deeply, a woman who cares for him, and for a moment, he allows himself to enter into relationship.

And then he leaves.

Think about how much that love must have awakened in him.

Because love doesn’t only feel good. To truly love someone is to allow ourselves to become vulnerable to loss. And for someone whose father and brothers are dead, whose mother’s entire life was organized around the terror of losing him too, how terrifying must that have been?

Maybe leaving Blanchefleur wasn’t evidence that he didn’t love her enough.

Maybe he left because he did.

Because staying would require him to remain open to everything love awakened in him. Attachment. Vulnerability. Need. The possibility of loss.

All the things his armor had protected him from feeling.

And perhaps that’s why he can ride into battle without hesitation but struggles so deeply with relationship.

A sword doesn’t ask him to open his heart. Blanchefleur does.

Because sometimes we can’t offer compassion to another person’s pain because their pain brings us too close to our own.

Sometimes we avoid the person who’s crying because we’re afraid we’ll start crying too. Sometimes another person’s anger awakens anger we’ve never allowed ourselves to feel. Sometimes their vulnerability brings us dangerously close to our own.

And sometimes we can’t fully receive another person’s love for exactly the same reason.

Their love touches the same protected places.

So we distance ourselves. We intellectualize. We offer advice. We change the subject. We follow the rules. We leave.

We harden.

Not necessarily because we don’t care.

Sometimes we harden because we care so deeply, because we feel so deeply, that we’re afraid of what will happen if we let ourselves feel it.

And that’s another reason tending to our own wounds matters.

Because the more willing I become to sit beside my own grief, my own fear, my own pain, the less afraid I have to be of yours.

And maybe the less afraid I have to be of your love, too.

And isn’t this what we see in The Handless Maiden too?

Her father cuts off his own daughter’s hands because he believes he has to fulfill his bargain with the devil. He follows the bargain, or his mind, instead of his heart.

And then later, when the king finds her handless, he responds to something living and wounded with something cold and lifeless.

Silver hands.

Think about the language we actually use for people who seem unable to feel. We call them cold. Hard. Stone-hearted.

I think Perceval’s heart has hardened too. So has the Maiden’s father. So has her husband.

But think about what it actually means for something to harden.

In the body, calcification can sometimes serve a protective function. The body can deposit calcium around damaged, dead, or foreign material, helping to wall it off from the surrounding tissue.

In other words, the hardening itself can be part of the body’s attempt to protect us.

And I wonder if our hearts sometimes do something similar.

Something hurts us. Something is lost. Something becomes too painful for us to know what to do with.

Our hearts break.

So we build something around the broken place.

We harden.

Not because there’s something wrong with us. Because something in us is trying to protect what hurts.

And at first, that hardness may help us survive. It allows us to keep moving without having to feel something we aren’t yet capable of feeling.

And isn’t that what armor symbolizes too?

Armor isn’t worn because nothing can hurt us. We put armor over the places that can.

But eventually, the protection can become its own kind of prison.

Because the armor that keeps us from feeling the pain can also keep us from being touched by everything else.

Love. Grief. Compassion.

Even the suffering of the person standing right in front of us.

And maybe that’s what we’re seeing in all of these stories.

A heart doesn’t necessarily harden because it doesn’t feel.

Sometimes it hardens because it has felt too much.

Because it has been hurt so deeply that the only way it knows how to survive what’s happening inside is to harden around it. To protect it. To armor it.

To become, metaphorically, a little calcified around the pain.

And perhaps that’s what a hardened heart really is.

Not a heart incapable of feeling, but a heart that has built so much protection around what hurts that it has become difficult for anything to reach it.

And maybe healing isn’t teaching that heart how to care.

Maybe it’s helping the heart feel safe enough to become soft again.

But before we can soften the places that have hardened, we have to learn how to notice what’s happening inside us in the first place. Because I spent most of my life ignoring what was happening inside me. That’s essentially what my birth story was pointing to in episode 8, my complete disconnection from everything happening within me.

A few years after I finally understood how disconnected I had become from what was happening inside me, I dove headfirst into the world of healing.

Over the years, I’ve studied a lot of different healing practices and spiritual traditions, but one of the first was Rapid Transformational Therapy, or RTT. I became certified as a practitioner and learned how to use hypnosis to help people access the subconscious and get to the root of patterns and triggers they couldn’t always understand consciously.

And one of the things that continues to fascinate me is how often everything I’ve studied seems to be pointing toward the same truths, just using different language.

Psychology might call it the subconscious. A fairy tale gives us a wounded king, a forest, or a maiden without hands. Scripture tells us to remove the log from our own eye. Spiritual traditions ask us to become still, turn inward, and know ourselves.

Different languages. Different symbols. Different stories. But perhaps they’ve been drawing the same map all along.

And that work taught me something that has shaped almost everything I’ve studied since: what is happening on the surface is very rarely the whole story.

But there’s something else I noticed as I moved through all of these different trainings and traditions.

I kept thinking, this is good. This is helpful. But this isn’t it.

RTT helped me understand the subconscious. Other practices helped me understand wounds, energy, patterns, beliefs, the nervous system, and the ways we protect ourselves. All of it gave me another piece of the map.

But none of those things were the deepest part of me.

The deepest part of me was underneath all of it.

The soul.

And eventually I began to understand that this is what so much of the work was ultimately leading me toward.

Because over the course of a lifetime, we accumulate so much on top of it. Wounds. Fear. Shame. Other people’s expectations. Beliefs we formed when we were children. Religious dogma we inherited but never questioned. Armor we built to protect ourselves. Stories about who we’re supposed to be, who God is supposed to be, and who we’re allowed to become.

The soul is still there underneath all of it. Our connection to God is still there underneath all of it. But sometimes there’s so much noise between us and that knowing that we can’t hear it clearly anymore.

And I believe healing has two parts.

First, we begin clearing away what we’ve accumulated. We tend to the wounds. We question the beliefs. We remove the stingers. We take off the armor we no longer need.

And then we learn how to listen.

Because the goal isn’t simply to become less triggered.

The goal is to become less obstructed.

To clear away enough of what isn’t us that we can finally hear what is.

And ultimately, I think the goal is for the soul to take back the throne of our inner lives from the ego.

It’s taken me a lifetime to articulate that right there.
And this is part of why I think this work can be so difficult.

Because the ego wants to protect itself. It wants safety. Predictability. Belonging. It wants to know that if we keep doing what we’ve always done, we can avoid the pain we’ve experienced before.

And so much of the world around us reinforces that.

The people who love us may encourage us toward the safest choice. Our families may have very clear ideas about who we’re supposed to be. Culture tells us what success should look like. Religious institutions can tell us what we’re supposed to believe. And sometimes the moment we begin listening to something deeper within ourselves, we discover that it’s leading us somewhere none of those voices understand.

That’s when this gets hard. Because the soul may be asking us to walk toward the very thing the ego has spent years trying to protect us from.

To be seen after we’ve learned that being seen isn’t safe. To love after we’ve been hurt. To speak after we’ve learned to stay quiet.

And the ego says, absolutely not. We’re safe here. We’ve survived here. There’s certainty here. Why would we ever leave?

And that’s why I don’t think the work is about defeating the ego. The ego is doing exactly what it learned to do. We can thank it for protecting us without allowing it to rule us.

The ego can have a seat at the table.

But it was never meant to rule the kingdom.

The soul was.

The ego is meant to faithfully serve the soul, not the other way around.

And maybe that’s what all of these stories have been trying to show us all along.

But understanding any of this required me to first learn how to understand what was happening inside me

The ironic part about my RTT training was that while I felt completely confident being the therapist and learning how to regress other people, I was terrified of being the client.
I had no idea how to understand what was happening inside me. And now that I’ve been doing this work for almost a decade, I can confidently say that I think far more people live in this space than we realize.

Most of us were never taught how to understand what we were feeling, what those feelings might be telling us, or how to trace them backward and ask where we first learned to feel that way.

And whether we had wonderful childhoods, terrible childhoods, or something in between, none of us makes it through childhood completely unscathed. We were small humans trying to make sense of experiences we didn’t yet have the capacity to fully understand.

Those early experiences help shape some of our core beliefs. Am I safe? Do my needs matter? What do I have to do to receive love and stay connected?

And this doesn’t mean you had bad parents or a traumatic childhood. Children are constantly interpreting experiences. I’m not important. My feelings are too much. I have to be good to be loved. People leave.

And sometimes we grow up and build our lives around those conclusions.

And this is the part I think we sometimes miss.

Finding the stinger isn’t quite the same thing as removing it.

We can understand exactly where a wound came from and still carry it with us. Removing the stinger means tending to what happened there. Feeling what we weren’t able to feel at the time. Questioning the meaning we made from it. Giving ourselves what we needed and didn’t receive. And allowing the person we are today to understand something the child we were simply couldn’t.

Sometimes we can do that work on our own. Sometimes we need someone else to help us reach the places we can’t quite reach ourselves, just like Bailey did.

Over the years, I’ve sought help from dozens of people to clear away what I’d accumulated. And I still do.

I go to therapy every week. I still use RTT on myself. I still work with shamanic energy medicine. And when something feels stuck or trapped inside me, I’m still willing to get curious about it and find the help I need to work through it.

Because healing isn’t something we do once and then declare ourselves finished.

You don’t clean your toilet once and say, well, glad I never have to do that again.

The difference now is that I don’t want to spend years limping around it. I’ve learned how to notice when something hurts, get curious about where it’s coming from, and ask myself: What ails me?
The goal is not becoming someone who never gets wounded again, but becoming someone who knows what to do when she does.
That was really the beginning of my journey of growing my hands back: learning how to stop being afraid of what was happening inside me and start getting curious about it.

Because if we don’t become conscious of our wounds, we inevitably bring them into our relationships. We lash out. We shut down. We control. We cling. We run. We build walls. And sometimes, without ever intending to, we wound other people while trying desperately to protect ourselves.

This is how patterns move through families. Generation after generation. Until someone finally stops and says: Wait. This isn’t working anymore. I want to understand why I do this.

I want to do something different. I don’t want to constantly fight or flee when I get triggered.

There’s another response to stress that psychologists have called tend-and-befriend. And I love that language. Because perhaps that’s part of what we’re learning to do with ourselves. Not fight the wound. Not run from it. Not freeze it out.

Tend to it. Befriend it. Turn toward the frightened part of ourselves and ask what it needs. Maybe healing isn’t always about ripping the stinger out as quickly as possible.

Sometimes it’s about sitting beside the part of us that has been guarding it for thirty years and saying: I see why you did this. I see what you were trying to protect. Thank you. But you don’t have to do this alone anymore.

And maybe this is another expression of the feminine we’ve been talking about throughout this podcast.

Not force but relationship. Not domination but attention. Not silencing the wound but listening to it. Because we can’t heal a part of ourselves we’re still at war with.

Maybe that’s what tend-and-befriend really asks of us. I didn’t look at Bailey and say, “Well, she’s hurting, so I guess she gets to bite me.” I stopped her from biting me. But I also didn’t punish her for trying. I understood why she was doing it. And maybe we can learn to offer ourselves that same combination of compassion and responsibility.

I understand why I react this way. And I’m still responsible for what I do with that reaction.

And there’s another side of tend-and-befriend that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Because our ability to sense what is happening in another person can be a beautiful thing. We can read the room. We can feel when someone is uncomfortable. We can soften, nurture, connect, and preserve relationship.

But I think there can be a shadow side to that too.

I know this pattern because I’ve spent much of my life tiptoeing around fragile egos, in both men and women. I learned to anticipate defensiveness before it happened. I softened my words. I made my feelings smaller. I tried to figure out how much truth another person could tolerate before I said it.

And I caught myself doing it again while writing the last few episodes of this podcast.

I found myself wondering how I could say certain things without triggering people. How could I soften this? How could I explain it so carefully that nobody would feel threatened or defensive?

And suddenly I realized: Wait.

I’ve been doing this my entire life.

I’ve been trying to manage other people’s triggers for them.

And maybe that’s another version of becoming handless.

Because somewhere along the way, our sensitivity to another person’s emotional world can become more important than our fidelity to our own.

Instead of asking, *What do I know? What do I feel? What needs to be said?* we begin asking, *How will they react?*

And those are very different questions.

Maybe the shadow side of tend-and-befriend is when tending to the relationship requires abandoning ourselves.

When empathy becomes appeasement. When attunement becomes hypervigilance. When compassion becomes responsibility for someone else’s emotional regulation.

And suddenly, I’m organizing myself around somebody else’s stinger.

That’s not sovereignty and that’s certainly not healing.

I can care about your wounds without making myself responsible for them. I can choose my words with kindness without making myself smaller. I can understand why something I say might trigger you without deciding that my job is to make sure you’re never triggered.

Because just as I’m responsible for what I do with the wounds inside me, other people are responsible for what they do with theirs.

One of the most important things I’ve learned to do is pause. In that tiny space between feeling something and reacting to it, be still.

There’s a line in James that says, “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.”

And maybe that’s exactly what we’re practicing here. Creating enough space between what we feel and what we do to actually listen.

You know those crash-test simulations where they put a dummy inside a car and crash it into something?

We tend to think there’s only one crash: the car hitting whatever is in front of it. But there’s actually a second crash that happens milliseconds later, when the person inside the car hits the seat belt, the airbag, the dashboard, or something else inside the car.

And I think triggers can work a lot like that.

There’s the first crash: something happens. Someone criticizes us. Someone rejects us. Someone says something hurtful. Someone doesn’t respond the way we hoped they would.

We may not have any control over that first crash.

But then there’s the second crash: what happens inside us in response.

The old wound gets activated. Our nervous system reacts. We get angry, defensive, afraid, or ashamed. We fire back. We shut down. We run. We try to control the situation.

And that second crash can happen so quickly that we experience the two as one event.

*You did this, therefore I reacted.*

But they’re not quite the same thing.

And this is where awareness gives us power. We may not be able to stop that first automatic surge of emotion, but we can learn to create more space between what happens to us and what we do next.

At first, that space might be milliseconds.

Then maybe it’s a few seconds.

Eventually, we might be able to feel the trigger happening and recognize it before we act from it.

The goal isn’t to never have a reaction. It’s to become conscious enough that the reaction doesn’t automatically become our response.

That’s how we begin to make our inner world a little safer.

Not by preventing every crash.

By learning what to do in the space between the first impact and the second.

Listen to what’s happening inside us before we speak from it.

Listen to the wound before we react from it.

Don’t immediately send the text. Don’t immediately fire back. Don’t immediately decide what the other person meant.

Just notice what is happening inside you. And ask questions. What am I actually feeling right now? Why did that hurt so much? And one of the most powerful questions I’ve ever learned to ask is: When else have I felt like this?

Not, when else has this exact thing happened? When else have I felt like this?

Maybe you’re forty-seven years old and your partner says something that makes you feel completely unimportant. When else have you felt unimportant?

Maybe someone criticizes something you created and suddenly you want to crawl into a hole and never create anything again.

When else have you felt ashamed of being seen? Follow the feeling. When else?

And before that? And before that? Keep following it backward. Because sometimes, if you follow the feeling far enough, you discover that the intensity of what you’re experiencing today began long before the person standing in front of you ever entered your life. You’ve found the stinger.

This is part of what I learned to do in my work as an RTT therapist.

I remember working with a man who was terrified of speaking during meetings at work. He couldn’t understand it. He was an adult. He knew the people in the room. He knew what he was talking about. And yet, when it was time to speak, something inside him froze.

When we followed that feeling backward, we ended up in elementary school.

He was sitting in class and the teacher called on him to give an answer from a homework assignment he hadn’t done. He didn’t know the answer. He froze. And in that moment, with all of those eyes on him, he felt completely exposed.

But here’s the important part.

The experience itself wasn’t the stinger.

It was the meaning he made from the experience.

Some part of that little boy decided: Don’t ever put yourself out there like that again.

And decades later, his adult body was still trying to protect him from the humiliation of that classroom.

This is why two people can experience something equally horrific and carry completely different meanings from it.

A woman who is raped might come away believing, I’m damaged. I can never trust men again. I can never let anyone close enough to hurt me like that again. And every one of those beliefs makes sense as an attempt to protect her from ever experiencing that pain again.

But I was listening to Oprah recently on Mel Robbins’ podcast, and Oprah said something that stopped me. She said, “I was raped so that I could help other women who were raped.”

She wasn’t saying that what happened to her was okay. She wasn’t saying she deserved it or that rape itself was somehow a gift.

She was saying: this happened to me, and I get to decide what I build from it.

One meaning says, Because this happened, I can never be safe again.

Another says, Because I know this pain, I can use what I’ve lived through to help someone else who is hurting.

Same wound. Completely different meaning.

We don’t get to choose everything that happens to us. And we may not consciously choose the meaning we make in the moment either.

But once we can see the meaning we’ve been carrying, we can ask: Is this the meaning I want to keep building my life around?

Same kind of experience. Completely different meaning.

And maybe we don’t always consciously choose that meaning in the moment. But once we can see it, we do have a choice about whether we continue building our lives around it.

Do I want to keep living as though this wound gets to determine what happens next?

Do I want to keep believing the conclusions I made from it? I’m not safe when people are looking at me. I’m not good enough. My feelings don’t matter. People leave. Don’t put yourself out there.

Because those beliefs can keep operating underneath our lives long after we’ve forgotten where they came from.

The adult man sitting in that meeting wasn’t the little boy who hadn’t done his homework anymore. He knew the answer now. He had something valuable to contribute. But some part of him was still responding as though he were sitting in that classroom.

That’s the stinger.

And once you can see it, that’s the moment you get to ask: Do I want this wound to keep deciding what happens next? Or do I want to take my life back?

Because once we found the stinger, we were able to go back and change the meaning he had attached to that experience.

After our work together, he no longer had that same fear of speaking up in meetings. But what struck me even more was that the change wasn’t limited to work. His family noticed it too. They told him he seemed like a different person.
Because that one belief hadn’t only been showing up in meetings. He had been organizing parts of his life around something a little boy decided in a classroom decades earlier.

And finding it doesn’t necessarily mean the pain immediately disappears. Remember Bailey. Even after I removed the stinger, she continued licking her paw for several days. The wound still had to heal. We’re no different.

Once we understand where something comes from, we still have to allow ourselves to feel what we may have spent years avoiding. The grief. The anger. The fear. The shame.

For me, this often, who am I kidding, always, involves crying. And that’s okay. The Handless Maiden cries. The king cries. Perceval cries. There’s another line that I love from Ted Lasso: “Crying is like an orgasm for the soul.”

Again and again, tears appear in these stories at moments when something that has been held inside is finally allowed to move. Healing doesn’t mean intellectually figuring out why something happened and then declaring ourselves healed.

Sometimes we have to grieve what happened. Sometimes we have to acknowledge what we needed and didn’t receive. Sometimes we have to feel anger we weren’t allowed to feel. And sometimes we have to surrender the hope that the past could ever have been different.

And this is where surrender becomes so important. Because eventually we have to ask ourselves: How much of my life am I willing to spend protecting this wound? How much energy am I willing to devote to making sure nobody ever touches it again? How many relationships will I ask to organize themselves around it?

At some point, we can decide: I don’t want to spend my life protecting this stinger anymore. That doesn’t mean what happened was okay. And it doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t hurt.

It means I am no longer willing to organize my life around the wound. And there is an enormous amount of freedom in that. Because think about how much energy Bailey was using to protect one tiny paw.

And then the stinger came out. She could run again. Suddenly, all of that energy was available for something else.

And isn’t that, in some ways, what the resurrected Jesus shows us?

His wounds don’t disappear. He still bears the scars in his hands and his side. What happened to him is still part of him. But the wounds no longer keep him from living.

And I think the same thing happens to us. The energy we once used to protect our wounds becomes available for living.

Healing doesn’t come with a guarantee that nobody will ever hurt us again.

Growing our hands back doesn’t mean we gain control over the world. It means we learn to trust ourselves enough to know that if we are hurt again, we’ll know what to do. We can feel it. We can listen to it. We can discern what belongs to us and what doesn’t. We can set a boundary. We can leave. We can speak. We can grieve. We can choose.

We don’t need the same armor anymore because we have our hands.

And I think that’s an incredibly important distinction.

Sometimes the stingers we’ve carried have been with us for so long that we don’t experience them as wounds anymore. We experience them as personality. This is just who I am. I’m guarded. I’m jealous. I’m controlling. I’m a people pleaser. I’m afraid of conflict. I don’t trust anyone. I’m overly sensitive. I need everyone to like me.

But are you? Or did you learn to become that way because something happened? That’s one of the questions that changed everything for me.

Because if something is simply who I am, there’s not much I can do about it. But if it’s something I learned in order to survive an experience, then perhaps I can learn something different. Perhaps I can grow. Perhaps I can heal. Perhaps I can take off the armor that I no longer need.
But something else happens with practice. We get better at recognizing the feeling. We get better at noticing the moment we’ve been triggered. We get better at creating that little space between what we feel and what we do. It’s like building a muscle.

Practice builds competency. And over time, something that once might have taken me months to recognize, I can sometimes see in minutes. Oh. There it is. Something just got touched.

What’s happening inside me? What am I feeling? What am I protecting? When else have I felt like this?

And I can’t tell you how much energy that has freed up in my life. Imagine what becomes possible when we don’t have to do that anymore. That’s what healing has given me. Not a life where nothing hurts.

Not a life where nobody can trigger me. And certainly not a life where I somehow keep every painful thing outside of some perfect energetic shield. Something much more useful. The ability to stay with myself when pain comes. To notice what’s happening inside me without immediately handing control of myself over to it.

To ask whether this pain belongs to the present, the past, or perhaps a little bit of both. To listen for what it’s trying to tell me. And then to choose what I want to do. That’s sovereignty.

And maybe that’s one of the most important lessons Bailey’s tiny bee-stung paw can teach us. Healing doesn’t mean we’ll never get stung again. It means we don’t have to spend the rest of our lives limping because of one. The world can still hurt us. People can disappoint us. Relationships can end. We can be rejected. We can be misunderstood. We can lose things and people we love.

The goal was never to create a life where none of that can reach us.

The goal is to become someone who knows how to meet what does.

To know when the pain is asking us to change something outside ourselves.

To know when it’s asking us to look within.

To know when we need a boundary. When we need to grieve. When we need to speak. When we need to walk away. And when we simply need to sit quietly with an old wound and finally ask: What ails you?

And suddenly we’re right back at the Grail Castle. Perceval stands before the wounded Fisher King. He sees the wound. He sees the suffering. He knows something is wrong.

But he doesn’t ask. And because he doesn’t ask, nothing changes. Isn’t that exactly what we do with ourselves? We feel the anger. The jealousy.

The shame. The fear. We see ourselves shutting down or lashing out. We know something inside us hurts. But instead of turning toward the wound, we look outward.

Who did this? Who can I blame? How do I make this feeling stop? How do I make sure nobody ever makes me feel this way again? But eventually Perceval has to learn to ask a different question.

What ails you? And maybe that’s the question we have to learn to ask ourselves. Not: What’s wrong with me? But: What hurts? What happened here?

What are you protecting? When have I felt this before? Because the moment we can turn toward our own wound with curiosity instead of fear, something changes

We stop being Perceval riding away from the wounded kingdom. We turn toward it. And perhaps that’s where healing begins. Because the wound isn’t the enemy. The trigger isn’t the enemy.

Sometimes it’s simply showing us where the stinger still lives. And awareness gives us the hands to finally reach for it.

So the next time something touches a place inside you that hurts, before you react, pause.

Instead of asking, what is wrong with them, turn toward yourself with compassion and ask: What ails you? What is this trying to show me?
Because every time we turn toward ourselves instead of abandoning what we feel, we grow our hands back a little more.
Until next time, my friend,

may you know thy soul.

It already knows the way.