Insight: The information inside the trigger

What if the criticism you feel, the trigger in your body, or the reaction you have towards another person isn't the problem?

In this insight, we explore the idea that triggers can contain information. Information about patterns, beliefs, and aspects of ourselves that may be ready to be seen.

The question is not whether the mirror appears.
The question is whether you choose to look.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Nellegnes Stadius Podcast. Here we will explore fear, patterns, and what is meant to lead yourself through life. Have you ever felt that one person's comment can ruin your whole day while another one doesn't even affect you? When you receive criticism or something triggers you, does your mind naturally think what is wrong with the other person? Why is this person acting like that? Why do they keep doing that thing that annoys me so much? Why don't they change? But criticism tells you more about yourself than about them. Because your outside world, everything that happens around you is a mirror of you. That's why some people can make you really triggered and some doesn't. And some of it they reflect something that is a disturbance for you, or they reflect something that you yourself is struggling with. You can feel that certain behaviors from people create an emotional distress for you. You may feel sad, you may feel anger. What you are receiving from them is information about you. I remember when I was sitting at a doctor's office and all of the doctors told me you need to lose weight, you need to start moving because otherwise your health will get affected. Because my belief was if I go to a doctor, he's gonna give me some medication. After all of those years looking back, I can see that those doctors were right. That is necessary for a sustainable health. But their words were triggering me extremely much. Because what they were saying was something that I needed to look at myself. They couldn't do that for me. I had to face the fact that I was overweight and see okay I need to take responsibility for this. No one else is gonna do that for me. Because if ten people do the same thing and only one person deeply affects you, the question would become why this one? And then that mirror appears and then you have a choice to either continue getting disturbed about the same person for so long and believing it's something wrong with them or take that as information that something is getting revealed to you that you are probably ready to look at. And that criticism that you feel towards that person can become avoidance because that is safer than needing to look at it yourself. And it's easy to take it really far about judging another person from where they are in their life, or to start diagnosing them in your own head because it's easier to put them in a frame and then create a whole story that probably wasn't even right from the beginning, is actually protecting you from asking yourself what is actually happening inside me. And it's not about that everything is your fault. It can be their living situation, it can be something else behind. But that's not your responsibility to even put energy on. The only energy that should be existing in that moment is to turn that criticism into what is my responsibility here? What can I change instead of taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture? Because you're allowed to put boundaries. You're allowed to react differently than you did last time you met this person. You're allowed to communicate in a different sense so you can understand yourself and they may receive that communication. And you're allowed to choose what is the most healing thing for me to do. You always have a choice to choose whether you want to interfere with something, continue feeding it or see it as information. Because when you put awareness into the equation, your criticism will soften and the pattern that has been following would become visible and the choices that you can take becomes more visible because then the outside world stops being something that happens to you and it becomes information because the outside world will continue to show you different murals and it's not easy, it can be really tough to face that. But either it's to stay where it's always been or is choosing a different path to a different outcome. Because the question is not whether that mirror appears, the question is whether you choose to look in the mirror at the reflection they're holding up against you.