Three Drinks In

When talking to somebody who is emotionally triggered, don't take them seriously. It's like talking to somebody who's three drinks in.

We can't help but be affected when people say inflammatory stuff to us. Our bodies react and we think, "Those are fighting words!" (or some version of that). Then we get into assuming what the other person is thinking, and that can set us off even more. An eye roll can be interpreted as, "the person thinks I'm stupid," when half the time the person is rolling her eyes because she thinks she's stupid herself! So we might also get triggered and respond in kind. This is how people get into fights. But there is another way.

This blog post is about knowing what's going on inside yourself and the other person so you can put emotionally charged moments in perspective. Then you can make a conscious choice about how you respond, instead of giving in to your reactivity or the other person's.

When somebody is emotionally triggered, their body goes into a fight, flight, or freeze response. You are essentially dealing with a drunk person. Their brain functioning is that compromised.

What Being Triggered Actually Does to the Brain

Recently I was at a science fair where a group of researchers had a brain table. I spent forty-five minutes talking to "the brain people". Something they told me changed how I think about emotional triggering.

I had known that when the amygdala — the brain's fear center — gets activated, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. The prefrontal cortex is what gives us compassion, rational thought, the ability to see the big picture. When the amygdala fires hard, that capacity disappears. The nervous system has gone into the emergency mode we call "fight-flight-or-freeze". It's bad enough when your prefrontal cortex is not functioning properly.

But there's another layer. When the reptilian brain — the survival brain at the top of the brainstem — takes over, even more shuts down. The brain people had a diagram of a rodent's brain next to the human brain. A rodent's brain is much smaller in proportion to the body than ours, because we have all these other regions for memory, emotion, language, reflection. When the reptilian system takes the wheel in a fully triggered human being, those other regions essentially go dark. What you're left with, neurologically, is something close to the proportional size of that rodent brain.

A rodent can't speak. A rodent doesn't reflect. A rodent doesn't reason about long-term consequences. When a person is fully triggered, that's roughly what we're working with.

The Layer on Top of the Core

I picture it like this. There's a trigger. Then there's a core experience — a real, deep, hard feeling that runs through the body. Aloneness. Betrayal. Not belonging. Being cast adrift. The core is the truth of what happened to the person internally.

The core is also intolerable. It hurts in a way the system wants to escape. So the brain offers an off-ramp: accusations, explanations, interpretations, stories about what the other person did and what kind of person they are. The mind runs off in that direction because it seems to lead away from the pain. This is what people are doing when they say something aggressive.

How to Respond to Someone Who's Triggered

Don't, really. Not in any meaningful way — not while they're still in it.

First, take care of yourself. Make sure you are far enough away and not taking in their aggression. Once you are safe, what you can do is hold space. Let them know you're with them, that you can hang in there with whatever pain is underneath, that you're not going to abandon them in the middle of it. This matters more than it sounds. Without that signal, it's harder for them to come back down because the construction or aggression seems like their only refuge.

Then wait. Make sure you are still safe. If there has been a rift with a loved one, you may also be triggered and need someone to be there for you. But know that the brain comes back online. The prefrontal cortex re-engages. The body settles. This usually doesn't happen in minutes — it can take hours, sometimes longer — but it will happen.

Once they're back, you can have what I call a meta-conversation: the conversation on top of the conversation. Cooler heads prevail. You can look at the trigger together, name the core feeling, understand what need wasn't met. The psychiatrist William Glasser identified five basic human needs, and one of them is belonging. Often when people come unglued, it's because a belonging need got violated — they felt cast adrift, cut off from someone who was supposed to be with them. Once you can name that core experience, the surface event becomes secondary and can go from unmanageable to manageable. Here is an example from my own life.

How to Get to the Core Underneath the Fight-Flight-or-Freeze

Recently I was driving with someone close to me, and they did something irritating. I asked for help with a task, and instead of helping me, the person asked me to do it. No, I could not do it as I had my hands on the wheel.

Later, when they brought up my annoyed reaction, my first impulse was to explain. To make the case for why what they did was annoying. That's the construction, the overlay on top of the core emotion.

Instead of defending, I stayed with the feeling. What I found wasn't an argument. It was a core experience: I was driving. I was figuring out where to go in the dark while managing a time-sensitive communication. I asked for help and was told to do it myself. The deep, simple, human state underneath was: I felt alone.

When I told them that — not the case I made, just the feeling underneath — something dissolved. The disagreement went poof. We didn't have to process it anymore. There was nothing left to process.

Essentially, I held space for myself the way I suggested you do for others. That's the move. Go private to find what's actually underneath. Then, communicate the core, not the stuff around the core.

Take the Keys Away

I think about all of this now whenever I'm with someone — a partner, a child, a colleague, a client — who's clearly impaired by their own fight-flight-freeze response. We don't have to negotiate with them in that state. We don't have to take their words as truth. We don't have to defend ourselves against constructions they're generating to escape their own pain.

We can take the keys away. We can suggest they sleep it off. We can hold the space and wait. When they come back — when the brain is back online — that's when the real conversation becomes possible.

I hope things get easier now that you have a choice about how and when to respond.