To Be Triggered Is An Inevitable Part of Being Human

The search for meaning in our lives starts with emotional evaluations

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Could you indulge me in a moment of food metaphor? Emotions are the jam in the scones of our lives. Slathered between the bread of thought and social circumstance, our emotions are the sticky deliciousness that holds everything together. Admittedly, they may not be held together all that well, and you may very well get a tad messy during the living, but at no point do emotions disappear or become anything less than the powerful bond that keeps us moving in life. So, to possibly overuse the metaphor, you cannot choose to forego the jam on your life sandwich. While flavors abound, removing it or choosing not to engage at all is simply impossible.

The desire to control, remove, or otherwise ignore so-called “negative” emotions, or, often, the belief that they exist as a threat to our supposed higher rational faculties, indicates that emotions need a better PR budget. Slandered as being unhelpful in such statements as "I was too emotional" or "my emotions got away from me," the emotional system of our life is often sought after to be diminished, controlled or done away with altogether. The notion of "cold rationality" is unhelpful as it in no way pertains to the reality of how our brains work. Still, the fact that such a phrase is associated with clearer thinking should point to how emotions are often considered: burning fires waiting to singe the unwary.

Contrary to the idea that emotions are a threat or somehow antithetical to rationality, it is neurologically more accurate and evolutionarily more honest to see them as the first step in biological assessment. Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” created the metaphorical constructs of System 1 and System 2 to understand the broad assessment strategy that our brain/body engages in. I use the term metaphorical here because Kahneman was not describing two separate systems at odds with one another but one continuous evaluative system that can be defined as having two parts. One does not exist without the other, however.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow (pp. 20-21).

Our emotional system, System 1, is the immediate first light shining upon what we care about, or what I call Values. A common way of considering this is to use the word "triggered" or, as a passive action, “being triggered.” While, unfortunately, the term has taken on many derogatory meanings in this time of identity politics and a hyper-awareness of social power dynamics, the idea of a switch being flipped by circumstance is reasonably accurate. Our emotional system has to be fast or near-instantaneous because it provides the direction for our ongoing actions as they are described or given rationalization through our thoughts or System 2. Emotions declare with, at times, the subtlety of breaking waves upon a beach and, at other times, the blaring of trumpets, that we care about something and that what we are faced with has important meaning to us.

Notice that emotions do not have an appraisal structure beyond "Hey, look here! This is important!" Emotions and, therefore, the phenomenological or personal experiential response we refer to as a "trigger," is not something to use as a judgment by itself. The trigger experience exists on a spectrum as wide as people's capacity to associate meaning with events and things. If you care about something, and desire it to be instantiated in another form than what it is being seen as (as it often is in social issues), or affirmatively, to continue in the way that you want (as in the hug from a loved one), then you will be triggered because that is what emotions do, they react, instantly and constantly.

To be “triggered” is an inevitable part of life, it is the recognition by the brain/body that something has occurred that is associated with meaning/purpose and has a value for us. To be “triggered” is the emotional response (itself a behavior) to an Antecedent, as we are always triggered, or emotionally evaluating, something. This is part of the A-B-C's of a behavioral understanding of humanity.

• A - Antecedent

• B - Behavior

• C - Consequence

Exploring Worldview

What provides the meaning and definition of Values or structures shaping the contours for emotion to flesh out is the person’s worldview. Unfortunately, in the common attempt at attacking the supposed snowflake quality of "triggers," people are conflating worldviews and their associated thoughts and collected meanings from a lifetime of experiences, with the initial emotional reaction itself. Emotions are an initial direction for our follow-up behavior, an initial step for evaluation, rather than the whole. As such, the content that seemingly is automatically present with them is heavily prone to bias in all its many forms.

By not separating the initial emotional response from an overall evaluation, the result is, understandably, either a dismissal of the emotional response if it’s associated with something one disagrees with or doubled down on in the naive worship of “lived experience” being given an evaluative free pass for accuracy if it’s connected with something one agrees with. In both cases, emotions are relegated to a lesser realm in our experience rather than an indication of our shared human drive to create meaning and provide direction for our lives.

We will only stop being triggered when we cease to care about anything, a situation I hope never to see happen. We will only stop providing a structure of meaning for emotion when we cease feeling connected to the world around us. The latter is a result many feel pressured to achieve as the narrative or structured meaning providing direction for their life is lumped together with their initial response and thrown out together. Reminding ourselves that two separate responses are going on, an emotional trigger and the cognitive structure providing meaning, can help reclaim emotions as an essential part of our lives and point us to a place where dialogue can develop.

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