How to Be Untriggerable

Somewhere along the way I started using the word untriggerable. I may have made it up. I may have picked it up from someone else and forgotten where. Either way, I've said it on this podcast and in coaching calls for years, and it keeps coming back to me. Men especially will bring it up months after they first heard it. "I've been working on being untriggerable." Something about the word lands.

I understand why. Nobody likes the feeling. That thing that rises up inside you and is bigger than the moment. You know it's bigger than the moment even while it's happening, and you still can't stop it. Once you've noticed how little control you have over your own reactions, the idea of living beyond them is hard to let go of.

What I'd never done is go deep on what I actually mean by it, how I think you get there, and what it has taken in my own life to get closer. So Dawn and I sat down and did that on episode 149. This is that conversation, written out in full, and taken further in the places where a live conversation moves too fast.

I'll say up front what I said on the episode. I am not there. Neither is Dawn. We are both much closer than we used to be, and that's about the only claim either of us can make. The moment you think you've arrived, that's the old programming talking. Dawn put it well: the only thing you get to hold is that you're moving closer, and you hold even that loosely.

You can listen to the full episode here: Listen to Episode 149 | Watch on YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

You cannot discipline yourself out of a reaction

The first thing most people do with the idea of being untriggerable is try to apply discipline to it. They decide. "I want to be untriggerable, so I'm going to stop letting that thing upset me." In their mind they go out into the desert for forty days and forty nights, harden themselves against everything, and come back into their life expecting the thing that used to set them off to slide right past.

Dawn named the flavor of it exactly. It's the David Goggins approach, the Jocko Willink approach. There are places in life where those methods work beautifully. Getting out of bed at four in the morning. Running when you don't want to run. Doing the hard thing when your mind is negotiating for the easy one.

This is one of the places where they don't work at all, and the reason is simple. A trigger is an unconscious reaction. It fires before you decide anything. So no amount of control you exert is going to keep you from having a reaction you don't control, because the reaction is already finished by the time control becomes available. Dawn called it cognitive dissonance, and it is. "I'm going to control my way into not having reactions I can't control" falls apart the moment you say it out loud.

So what does being untriggerable actually mean? It means being able to experience the thing that used to upset you and have it not upset you anymore. The defensiveness that used to rise up simply doesn't rise, because whatever was underneath it has been felt all the way through and there's nothing left for the moment to grab.

That means dealing with the root, why it happens, instead of managing the fact that it happens. And that is the thing most people don't want to do. They want the simple process. The decision, the discipline, the effort, the steps. I get asked for the steps constantly. There is one step. You have to go into why it happened in the first place, and you have to let yourself be fully in it.

You have to get triggered

The paradox at the center of this is that the road to being untriggerable runs directly through getting triggered. You need to get upset. You need to get defensive. You need to get afraid, shut down, freeze, blow up, whatever your version of it is. You probably need to do it many times. Because the only way to experience what's actually in there is to let it come up, instead of doing what you've done your whole life, which is shutting it down before it finishes.

Dawn's experience makes this concrete in a way that mine doesn't, because her survival mode didn't even allow the trigger. She had a lot of freezes. And you cannot feel a freeze. Numb doesn't register as numb. It registers as nothing. If most of your life has been not feeling, you have no reference point for what feeling is, which means you have no way of knowing that you're not doing it.

She didn't know she wasn't feeling until she started this work and a response finally showed up in her body. And she learned something in that moment that sounds obvious and isn't: what you feel is yours. You just have to be able to tune into it. Then you have to let yourself be uncomfortable with it. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable at the very same time you're allowing the trigger to get big, and those two things pull against each other constantly.

There's a timeline to this that I think helps people. You can't see a trigger while it's happening, not at first. That's especially true of the freeze. You cannot know you're frozen while you're frozen. What you can do is sit down the next day and go, "Oh. I completely shut down yesterday after that thing happened, after he said that." So the first place you get to see it is after it's already blown through.

Do that enough times and something shifts. You start to catch it while it's happening. You're in the middle of the reaction and some part of you is watching it. And eventually, after enough of that, there's enough room between the thing and you that the reaction doesn't need to run at all. That's the whole progression: after, then during, then not at all. Nobody skips to the third one.

The four responses

It's worth naming the four survival responses, because most people know one or two of them by heart and don't recognize the others as the same thing.

Fight is lashing out, lashing back at the person you perceive as having done something to you. When really you're the one feeling whatever you're feeling, and they've just become the location of it.

Flight is getting away from it. Physically leaving, changing the subject, picking up the phone, any exit.

Freeze is the numb-out. Shutting down, turning everything off, going blank. Dawn's specialty for most of her life.

Fawn is nodding and going along with it. People pleasing. Disconnecting from your own experience so completely that you find yourself doing something you don't even want to do, and only realize it later.

Dawn wondered whether there's a little of all four in all of us, and there absolutely is, because which one fires depends on the thing that hit you. She has mostly frozen. But once she started actually allowing herself to be triggered, the fight came out too. It had to. The feminine, when it's afraid, will lash out, because a scared animal in the corner lashes out, and there's a physical reality to being a woman in the world that makes that fear real.

For men, I don't think the fawn response gets nearly enough credit. The entire nice guy pattern is a fawn. That's the whole thing summed up in one word. Here's what it looks like in my own marriage: Dawn doesn't like the way I did something, or the way I'm about to do it, and I change fast. I adjust to whatever I think is going to make her happy. That looks accommodating from the outside. It is a triggered response. It's fear wearing a helpful face. And when I do it, I've left my own experience just as surely as if I'd walked out of the room.

We've both had all four. Different times, different things, different reasons.

It is never about this time

If you want to live an untriggerable life, this is the part to hold onto. Being untriggerable is never about the moment you're currently in. It's about next time. It's about a year from now.

When the thing is already up in you, any attempt to fight it is a battle you've already lost, because you're battling yourself. And it's worse than a lost battle. Resisting the trigger is the exact mechanism that keeps the trigger alive.

Think about what's actually going on. Way back, in childhood, I didn't let myself feel something. That's the origin. I didn't let myself feel it, and so my pattern became not letting myself feel things. That pattern is what's running right now, in this moment, when I try to talk myself out of what I'm already feeling. Every attempt to not be triggered is the original wound doing exactly what it has always done. So the way past it is to do the opposite. Let yourself feel this. All of it.

If I let this trigger be here, fully, then maybe the next time I encounter the thing that activated it, I'll respond differently. That's the only place where "untriggerable" actually gets built. Never in the moment. Always in what the moment gets to teach you because you didn't shut it down.

Dawn's big blowups came out of exactly this. She'd feel something activate, and it felt related to whatever was happening right then. But by the time she'd gotten to the point of letting herself feel those big feelings, she recognized what was happening. She could sometimes hear it in her own mind: I am letting myself get triggered right now. And she did it anyway. It was uncomfortable, because lashing out had never been her pattern. But she had to let herself lash out to get to the point, later and without rushing it, where life could reveal what was actually going on inside her. She had suppressed it so thoroughly that she'd hidden it from herself. So she didn't know what was in there, and not knowing felt like chaos. It felt like giving up. It felt like letting go of control. That's what it was, and it had to happen.

I want to add something here that we didn't get to on the episode, because I think it matters for anyone doing this inside a relationship. When Dawn let herself lash out, I had a job, and the job was to hold it. Not fix it, not explain it to her, not retaliate, not collapse into my own fawn and start apologizing for whatever she'd landed on. Just be the ground it could hit. She couldn't have let hers surface if I was going to punish her for it, and I couldn't have been a man who holds that if I hadn't been doing my own work in parallel. The two are tied together. Her capacity to feel depends partly on my capacity to stay.

And there's a distinction worth being precise about. Letting yourself feel it fully is one thing. Making the other person responsible for it is another. The feeling is yours. It can be enormous in you and you can still know, somewhere, that it's about the four-year-old and not about your wife. That knowing is the difference between expression and blame. In the early rounds you may not have it, and that's part of the mess. But it's what you're growing toward.

They do not go away by wanting them gone

One of the things people hope for is that these reactions will just disappear. That's why the word untriggerable appeals to so many. It's why, after I haven't said the word for a year, somebody on a coaching call or in the men's group will bring it up: "I'm trying to be untriggerable." Dawn's response was two words. Stop trying.

I get it. We want these things to go away. But they will not go away by trying to get rid of them. They will not go away by wanting them gone. Anything you do to not be triggerable is reinforcing the exact conditions that keep you getting triggered.

And they don't go away on their own either. Every time you stuff one down, every time you talk yourself out of it, every time you blame the other person, or the circumstances, or yourself, you've set it up to happen again. They don't fade. They compound. Every finger pointed, every shutdown, every unexamined freeze comes back, and it comes back because it's trying to show you something. It's trying to get you to see that you're carrying something.

You have to let it do its work. Its work has nothing to do with getting you to stop reacting. Its work is to get you to see what you never let yourself see before, what you couldn't see, because it probably happened when you were four.

Dawn never adopted the word

Before we started recording, Dawn told me something about the word untriggerable that I think is right. It defines the thing by what you don't want. It's a description of an absence.

She never took the word on. Her version was simpler and bigger at the same time: she just wants to be herself. All the way. Real. That's been her underlying version of "I want to be untriggerable" for years. Her own experience of what she's after is feeling free, being able to do and be and act however she actually is.

So I asked her if freedom was the word she'd use for the positive side. She wouldn't take that one either. What she noticed along the way is that she was constantly making meanings about what freedom was and what it looked like. Her ego would play both sides against her. Adopt "I want freedom" and immediately the voice starts: you're not there yet. This is what freedom looks like. You're not doing it right. She found herself in a yo-yo where she couldn't do anything right, and that would drop her straight back into a freeze.

What feels purest to her is a question: who am I, as Dawn, as my soul self? That's what she wants to uncover, because that's what's real underneath all the words. The word is always a description of the experience, never the experience itself.

So if untriggerable doesn't land for you, find what does. Tune into the opposite of it, or the thing next to it, and hold that loosely too. Whatever you call it, it's the same undoing, and it's the undoing all of us have to go through if we actually want to live in peace.

The world of language and the wound before it

None of this is a complaint about language. We live in a world of language. We have to use it. Without it there's no podcast and no way to find common ground on any of this. Language lets us touch each other's souls, which is also why it makes certain other things more fun. Dawn and I got distracted at this point in the episode and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But there's something important about language and where these patterns come from. Having no voice when you felt powerless is, very often, what created the suppression in the first place.

Gabor Maté says that all trauma is pre-verbal, and I think this is what he's pointing at. The foundation these patterns are built on was laid by the ways we changed our behavior before we could even talk. We were voiceless. A six-month-old stops crying because mom got upset, and that is a choice made with no words available for it. Not having a voice makes you powerless in a world that runs on language. A great deal of what we carry begins there.

The wound and the trauma are different things

There's another thing Maté says that I wanted to make sure we touched on, because it changed how I understand all of this. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. The two get confused constantly, and pulling them apart matters.

The wound is the event. The one-time thing, or the repeated thing, the actual moment when something painful happened, when you felt powerless or out of control. That's the wound. The trauma is the reaction you had to it, the meanings you made out of it, and then everything you did with those meanings, including the life you built on top of them. The trauma is the ongoing suffering.

The medical version of the word makes this vivid. In medicine, there's the injury, and then there's the trauma: all the bleeding, all the damage, the guts everywhere. The trauma is the aftermath of the event, and it's the aftermath that actually does the harm. For a lot of us, the triggered and reactive life we've been living is the blood and guts. It's the mess that spread through everything after the event.

Which means healing looks like stuffing the guts back inside and cleaning up the blood. I'm going to keep beating this analogy to death because it's accurate. Cleaning up the decisions you made from reactive states. Cleaning up what you did when you lashed out. The damage you caused in your relationships when you pulled away or froze. The ways you hurt yourself by fawning and going along with things you never wanted.

Dawn took it back even further, to the baby. A baby's entire language is crying. It's hungry, it cries. It has a wet diaper, it cries. It has gas, colic, whatever is happening in its body, and the only signal it has is the cry, because the only thing it has is a feeling body. The parents don't have any language the baby understands either. So you have a baby constantly signaling from its feeling body and a parent guessing, and sometimes the baby signals and nothing comes back at all.

And meanings are already being made. In a brain that is, at that point, essentially mush trying to make sense of everything. The whole foundation of your brain was laid in a period when you had no language and nothing but a feeling body. So it's no wonder that one of the available responses is for the feeling body to stop feeling. Or for the feeling to get bigger and bigger, the baby who cries constantly because it's trying to get your attention. I had two kids. I know what that's like from the parent side. It's hard.

You probably don't remember what your experience was like as a baby. I don't. But your body does. And your whole life got built on what your body remembers.

The single sentence and the compounding interest

Those early moments are when we write the sentences. "It's not okay for me to cry." "People get mad at me when I'm not happy, so I have to be happy or they'll be upset." "It's not okay for me to feel this way." "Nobody wants me."

Single sentence belief structures. Written in reaction to what happened, at an age when you had no capacity to process it any other way. And then the compounding interest starts. If the sentence you wrote about yourself is "nobody wants me," then every time someone is busy and doesn't pay attention to you, every time a person has things to do and you're not their priority in that moment, it registers as evidence. Nobody wants me. See? I knew it.

You're feeling it every time. You're just not catching it. And after five years, ten years, twenty, thirty, forty years of piling up evidence for yourself, the sentence has become the architecture of your entire identity.

This is why most of us don't begin this work until our thirties or forties. Dawn said something about her own past that I think a lot of people will recognize. Looking back, the way she used to be almost looks admirable. Capable, functioning, handling everything. It only looks admirable because she wasn't feeling. She was in survival mode for probably ninety-five percent of every day for forty years.

Survival mode is real. And around forty to forty-five years is about as long as a human being can push a life built on a big lie before one of two things happens. Either you break down and deal with it, or life blows up in your face and forces you to. It certainly will if you don't listen.

If I could sum up the one reason this work feels so important to me, the reason I do the podcast and coach people and am writing the book, it's this. I want people to be able to take back ownership of themselves and their lives before their whole life has to blow up. Because it will. Your health will fail. You'll numb yourself out with drinking long enough that it crushes your body. You'll make a mistake that hurts someone. Something will happen to bring you face to face with whatever you haven't dealt with. If I can help even a couple of people take ownership back before the wreckage, that will make my whole life feel like it had a purpose.

Dawn added one more thing here, and it's worth sitting with. People say "you only get one life, so live it." What does living actually look like to you? Numbing yourself out in a job fifty or sixty hours a week and then living on the weekends? That doesn't have to be what living is. Don't buy that lie either.

Men and women get wounded in different places

One thing I don't think gets enough attention is how differently this shows up for men and women. Everyone gets hurt. Everyone writes the sentences. Everyone builds an identity on them. That's universal. But where the walls get built follows a pattern, and the pattern follows polarity.

The way I teach it, men are receptive emotional beings and women are receptive physical beings. A man gives from his body and receives in his heart. A woman receives in her body and gives back from the fullness of what she's received. She's built to be led, built to follow, built to receive. That's very simplified and I've gone much deeper on it elsewhere, but it's enough for what follows.

Most wounded men live exactly backwards from that. They're trying to receive in the body and their feelings are gushing out of them. And the reason is that the wounding tends to land on the receptive center. The walls get built wherever things get in.

For a woman, that means the protection she carries tends to be protection of the physical body. Keeping things from getting to her. Keeping things from penetrating her. I asked Dawn on the episode whether that landed accurately, and it did. In her experience, things happened to her physically and sexually that threatened her physical safety and created a lot of terror. A deep fear of being physically hurt. That fear is real, and it's where the walls got built, and it's why the triggered reactions came later whenever anything started to get close to that place. It's why she had to lash out. The reaction underneath was "get away, you're going to hurt me."

So for women who want to move beyond their triggered reactions, that's an entry point. Notice the physical fears you feel. Notice the places where you push away physical intimacy, or brace against it, or leave your body while it's happening. That's where you can start to see what's going on.

For men, because we receive emotionally, the walls are emotional. When I talk to women who are dating, and even women who are married, the almost universal complaint is emotional unavailability. And that's the masculine's natural defense. It's the thing we have to protect. As much as a woman has to protect her body to feel safe, a man has to protect his heart. Emotion is what hurt us. Emotion is where things got in. So men shut down, numb out, become unreactive, and fill the hole with drinking, drugs, video games, work, whatever's available. Control shows up in both sexes, but it's guarding different doors.

The important thing is to recognize that the experience is different by design. Whether you're married or dating, your inner experience and your partner's are not the same, and you don't have to fully understand theirs. You can't. You can try to understand logically that a difference exists and why it might be hard. But Dawn made the point that even trying to understand it is living from the mind. She's heard so many women ask, "How can he actually receive all of my emotion? How can that be true?" And the answer is to stop trying to reason it into place and accept it. Your inner experience is okay. Theirs is okay. They're different, and the difference is beautiful. That's the whole point of polarity.

What that produces, if you let it, is empathy. Compassion for yourself and for each other.

Your triggers are gifts

Most people in this world have heard the phrase. Your triggers are gifts. And they don't feel like gifts, which is precisely why people want to be untriggerable. They want to live at a point where things don't get to them.

I think that's a beautiful thing to want. I think we'd all love to live that way. And I'm not going to dismiss the possibility that a human being can actually get there, that free from reactivity to the outside world. We have the example of Jesus, or at least the character that's been presented to us. It's something to aspire to.

But it's also something you only get to be if you allow yourself to not be there. Which means you have to stay open to the reality that you might get triggered again, even in a moment when it feels like nothing could touch you.

Dawn and I have both had those moments over the last several years. "It kind of feels like I'm there." And then, nope. Not there. Her way of saying it is that she was where she was, and she wasn't finished, because there's always the possibility of something coming that you couldn't see, couldn't expect, couldn't have planned for.

She described it as a staircase going down. You can't know what's on the next step until you're standing on it. And that's a beautiful thing too, because you cannot unwind all of this at once. You cannot. So don't get hung up on the destination, and don't assume you even know where the destination is. How could you? You've been living as a false version of yourself. Whatever you wanted and imagined life to be from inside that version is probably going to change altogether.

What it actually feels like

One way I've tried to describe what I'm after in my own life is this: being untriggerable is just a matter of feeling okay all the time.

Feeling okay means you're actually able to feel and experience the world, and the world has stopped pulling you out of yourself. It's a quiet state, well short of triumph. And it's the opposite of flatlining. Some people imagine the far side of being triggered as feeling nothing at all, and that's just the freeze response dressed up as enlightenment.

When I get triggered now, when I get upset, when I drop into one of those survival moments, it happens so much less than it used to. I'm grateful for that. Maybe this is as good as it gets for me. Maybe it keeps getting better. I don't know. What I know is that it's a dramatically better experience of life than what I had, because I'm actually alive. I'm actually present in the moment. I'm not being dragged into the past and the future by all the stuff getting stirred up, because most of the stuff has been felt and dealt with. Being able to just be here, and feel okay while I'm here, is the whole thing.

Dawn caught the word okay and turned it over, the way she does. Is okay just fine? "Yeah, I'm fine." No. Really okay. And being able to be in the present moment, really okay, requires pulling out all the black emotional garbage you've been carrying. You cannot know how much is in there. When you're in that head-down survival mode, which varies from person to person, you have no way to measure it. For Dawn it was probably ninety-nine percent of life. She wouldn't say a hundred, because she's still alive and she's where she is today, and where she is today is dramatically different.

Every time she's gone through a big letting go, there's this "oh." A release. And then within a day or two, she finds something more. So she's learned to accept that as the ebb and flow of it. She can't know what's still there. She can also fully let go of everything she's already let go of.

Don't make it a perfectionism project

The last thing, and the big picture of all of it: don't turn being untriggerable into something you try to do perfectly. That's the opposite of what it is. You can't do this right. You feel your way through the moments of life, one at a time.

And then the experience of not getting triggered by something that used to trigger you just gets to be one of those moments. For me, when it happens, I feel proud of myself. I feel grateful. Something that used to put me in a state where I felt completely out of control, and now I'm still present. I'm still here.

I could never have produced that with a step-by-step process. That's not how this works. The only way to experience life without getting triggered is to go through the stuff you don't want to go through, and to realize, somewhere in the middle of it, that you need it. That it's good for you. That the thing you've been trying to get rid of was trying to give you yourself back the whole time.

Listen to the full episode: Listen to Episode 149 | Watch on YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | All episodes

If you're a man and you want to do the inner work described here with other men who are doing it too, that's what Becoming a Dominant Man is for. If you're a woman, Rapture is where I go deepest on the feminine side of this.

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