Hello, my loves. Today I want to talk about a phenomenon we often see at the beginning of someone’s personal development journey…hypersensitivity to getting triggered.

Something must be in the water, because I’ve had this conversation three times with different clients, followed by my mentor putting out piece of content about it.

This is also something that I noticed in myself early on in my personal development journey, so I’m excited to speak about it, and help you see how this reflects in your life: your love life, your sex life, your business, your relationship with money, your friendships, all of the things.

Essentially, it boils down to self-trust and learning how to handle getting triggered. But we’ll get into that in a minute…

A Pendulum Swing

When people get into personal development, they start learning about confidence, standards, and setting boundaries.

Usually, this is followed by a full pendulum swing. They go from people-pleasing and having absolutely no boundaries to being so fucking boundaried that they’re like Fort Knox.

Listen: boundaries are great. But what I often see people do is learn about these things in personal development, learn about triggers, learn about setting boundaries…and then they become so fucking fragile that they try to control their external environment by removing every possible thing or person that could cause them to get triggered.

For example, maybe you don’t want to have a friend of the opposite sex because you’re afraid that you’ll cross a line. Or maybe, if you own a business, you don’t want to make sales calls because you don’t want to meet the part of you that is insecure or could get rejected. Or on your social media platforms, you block anyone who disagrees with you about something you posted, because you don’t know how to hold opinions that differ from yours.

In every case, fear of getting triggered comes down to one thing: you don’t trust yourself.

You don’t trust yourself to be able to handle rejection. You don’t trust yourself to hold your boundary. You don’t trust yourself to hold the duality of differing opinions. So instead, you block any chance of getting triggered so you never have to risk it.

The Oprah of Boundaries

We need to stop trying to control our external environment as a way to protect ourselves from getting triggered and seeing new aspects of ourselves.

That’s what it is, isn’t it? “I’m going to remove all triggers from my life so I can never get triggered. That way I don’t have to see how fucking reactive I am, or how I shut down, or how avoidant I am, or how passive-aggressive I am, or how distracted I am, or how unproductive I am…” Name your thing, right?

During COVID, when I was single and living in my own apartment, I wasn’t getting triggered, period. I was chill as fuck. I was thriving.  I was having the time of my life because, one, I love my own company, and two, there was nothing in my external environment that was causing me to get triggered.

I wasn’t engaging with anyone on a day-to-day basis. I wasn’t living with anyone. Nobody was stepping on my toes. I wasn’t getting triggered by anything; I was fucking cruising.

But when we were reintroduced into the world and I started dating again and seeing friends again…bam. I immediately started getting triggered again.

You can’t heal your shit by hiding from it. So as much as learning to set boundaries can be a good thing, there’s also a risk with going boundary-happy to combat getting triggered.

When you end up pulling an Oprah—“You get a boundary, you get a boundary, you get a boundary”—and you decide everyone who’s not “high vibe” or doesn’t have “good energy” needs to have a boundary set on them, that’s not going to help you deal with your shit.

It’s just not fucking reality, babe. Not everyone is going to be hunky-dory all day, every day. If you don’t have the capacity to actually be able to handle people and their emotions without getting triggered—if your energy is affected just because someone else is having a bad day—are you as conscious as you thought, or are you maybe a little bit codependent?

This can also come into play if you struggle to have difficult conversations. I’ve seen people go, “My mom can be challenging, so I’m just going to set a boundary. We’re not going to speak.” 

Like…okay, but if you don’t know how to navigate hard conversations, are you as conscious as you thought you were? Or have you constructed this life where you’re the boy in the bubble, and nothing affects you?

We Can’t Evolve in a Bubble

I love seeing my triggers, because getting triggered reveals shadows. If you ever want to transcend a shadow, you need to get triggered to be able to gain new awareness of that shadow.

You need to be able to get triggered, see that response, and go, “Okay, cool. I seem to be really affected by this. Why is that?”

But instead, so many people they think that something is wrong if they’re getting triggered.

If you’re getting triggered, that’s good. That means there’s something for you to look at. Getting triggered doesn’t mean personal development isn’t working; it means you’ve created enough safety within yourself that things can come to the surface for you to integrate.

Of course, if it’s coming to the surface and you’re dismissing it repeatedly, you’re not going to integrate anything. You’re not going to transcend anything. But if you’re getting triggered, things are coming to the surface, and you’re actually willing to look at them and be with them, that’s a different story.

(BTW, if you’re feeling confused by all these terms—transcend, shadows, triggers, patterns, projections, what the fuck does all that mean?—then you want to get my free on-demand masterclass, Shadow Hunter. It’s all about shadow work, what shadows are, what the terminology means, and the biggest thing that stops people from actually doing shadow work.)

F*ck Fragility

All in all, we need to develop more fucking resiliency to getting triggered. We need to get a grip.

I’ve never seen a more precious set of humans as I have in the personal development industry. I’m not joking. Everyone’s offended by fucking everything.

We have lost the ability to be human adults who are capable of making their own choices; instead, everyone’s so fragile that you want the external world to conform around your fucking triggers. You want everyone to contort themselves so that you can be fully expressed.

I honestly can’t believe we even have to have this conversation, but here we are.

Let’s take social media as an example. What if you could actually take social media as a playground to integrate your shadows? What if, when you got triggered by someone’s post, you took that as something new you need to look at instead of deciding you don’t like the person who made the post?

It’s okay that you’re triggered. But you can’t be the person who’s then projecting all of your shit onto the other person and letting the lesson land on them. You have to take responsibility for your triggers.

Feel Your F*cking Feelings

All of this to say…stop trying to contort and control your external environment—the people, the places, everything around you—so that you don’t have to feel your fucking feelings.

Feel them. Feel them fully. Feel them deeply. Don’t get stuck in them; integrate, move forward, don’t make your triggers someone else’s problem. Take responsibility…and stop being so f*cking fragile. We have to cut that shit out if we want to finally transcend these triggers.

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