How To Be Untriggerable | Infinite Devotion Episode 149

How to Be Untriggerable | Infinite Devotion Episode 149

In this week’s episode Dawn and I dig into a word I've used for years, one that keeps coming back to me from listeners, especially men: untriggerable.

This episode is about what that word actually means to us, why most people go about it the wrong way, and what it's really taken for us to get to the other side of the things that used to set us off.

In This Episode

• Why the word "untriggerable" resonates with so many people, and why nobody wants to feel triggered in the first place
• Why we can't discipline our way into being untriggerable, and why effort and force actually work against us
• The real definition: being untriggerable means encountering the thing that used to upset us and having it not upset us anymore, not forcing ourselves to not react
• Why we have to let ourselves get triggered, fully and repeatedly, instead of trying to shut the reaction down
• The four survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and how each one has shown up differently for each of us
• Why the fawn response is likely the most common one in men, and how it shows up as the "nice guy" pattern
• Why being untriggerable is never about the moment we're in, it's about what happens next time
• How resisting a trigger keeps it alive, and why trying to talk ourselves out of a feeling is the same suppression that created the pattern to begin with
• Gabor Maté's idea that trauma is self-inflicted, meaning the event is one thing and the ongoing suffering we build on top of it is another
• How single-sentence beliefs get written in childhood, before language even exists, and how life keeps handing us "evidence" for them
• Why it can take until your late 30s or 40s for these patterns to run out of road
• The different way triggers show up for men and women: women often protect the physical body, men often protect the heart, and why understanding that difference matters more than fully relating to it
• Why "your triggers are gifts" is true even though it hasn't felt that way to us in the moment
• Why this whole process isn't something we can do perfectionistically, and what it's actually felt like as it's started to change for us

Quotes Worth Sitting With

"You can't discipline yourself out of a reaction."

"Being untriggerable isn't about this time. Think about next time."

"Every attempt to talk yourself out of feeling what you're already feeling is the whole process just keeping itself alive."

"The trauma is all based in the reaction that we have to it, and the meanings that we make out of it."