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Kamini Wood works with high achievers on letting go of stress, overwhelm and anxiety that comes with trying to do everything, and trying to do it all perfectly
Voiceover: [00:00:00] Rise Up Live Joy Your Way from emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness. Coach Kamini Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit. Through these small bites of self visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live, Rise Up Live Joy Your Way.
Kamini Wood: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up Live Joy Your Way, whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening. Thank you for taking some time to be here with me today. I wanna start with a question. When something activates you, do you assume you are being triggered? Or do you consider that something harmful may actually be happening?
We live in a time where I think the word trigger has, uh, it pops up. What, what feels like everywhere. Now, [00:01:00] granted, I recognize the field that I'm in. I'm gonna see it based on the algorithms. But I do feel like the word trigger is being used a lot. You know, we're triggered by feedback. We're triggered by politics, we're triggered by the news.
We're triggered by disagreement, we're triggered by tone. And sometimes that language is accurate, but sometimes it can be slightly imprecise. And when we're imprecise, we lose a sense of discernment. So today I wanna see if we can just kind of break these things down, not because every emotional reaction is trauma and not every emotional reaction is.
Overreaction. Sometimes you really truly are dysregulated and sometimes you are also being harmed, and all of those things are not the same things. So if you do not learn to distinguish between each of those things, what ends up happening, I think oftentimes is that we tend to over pathologize ourselves or we can actually underestimate the harm that we might be going through and we kind of just.
You know, almost poo and say it's fine. So neither is really leadership and neither is is truly [00:02:00] hearing is truly healing. So I wanna just see if we can separate, you know, the difference between activation from violation, ego discomfort from nervous system threat, and then the growth edges from what could be considered red flags.
Um, so first let's just define trigger. Uh, a trigger is a stimulus that activates a stored emotional memory. It is often disproportionate to the actual present moment. So it pulls you into past emotional intensity from a past experience. So you might notice when you've been triggered that your heart rate increases, maybe your thoughts start to speed up.
Um, your body tenses or braces, uh, you might even notice that you wanna defend, um, or maybe you wanna retreat, withdraw, or maybe you go into fix it mode. The present moment becomes fused with whatever that previous experience was. You know, as an example, somebody gives you neutral feedback, but then you feel this surge of shame, [00:03:00] not because the feedback was abusive in any regards, but because your nervous system remembers maybe a previous time when you were criticized, and that was followed by a sense of rejection.
So that's an example of a trigger. That present moment is not the one that is inherently harmful, but there's a history. That history becomes activated. So it's important to recognize that triggers are not weaknesses. They are just what I would refer to as unresolved imprints on our nervous system. So just ask yourself, when you feel triggered, what does it resemble from your past?
I mean, that question alone allows for some awareness to occur. Now I wanna just jump into defining harm. Harm is not activation. Harm is ongoing. Destabilization harm would include repeated boundary violations, manipulation, gaslighting, humiliation, control, [00:04:00] retaliation, chronic invalidation. Harm does not require you to have a trauma history.
It creates trauma over time. So when, when harm is present, your nervous system is not misfiring, it's actually responding accurately. Your anxiety that you feel in those moments is really important information. Your hyper vigilance is data and whatever exhaustion or tiredness you feel is actually protective.
So the key difference is that triggers are more like echoes, whereas harm is happening now. And I think that it's important to make that distinction. Now here's where I think some confusion does happen, because both triggers and harm can feel very, very intense and both create, uh, physiological activation.
So when we think about both triggers and harm, they can also both lead to defensiveness or potentially withdrawal. It's that fight flight. Difference. So I wanna introduce, you know, a way to maybe tell the difference. And so here are three [00:05:00] lenses that we could look at. Lens number one pattern, you know, asking the question, is this isolated or is this chronic?
Does it happen over and over again? A trigger often appears in, um, sometimes safe dynamics, whereas harm appears repeatedly, uh, lens to accountability. When you express impact, does the other person. Reflect on what you're sharing, or do they deflect? Because again, in safe dynamics repair would be possible, but in harmful dynamics that accountability is avoided or it's reversed.
And then lens number three, is there a power imbalance? Does this person have emotional, financial, social, um, any type of institutional power over you? Because power can intensify harm. It's just important to pay attention to that. So if we were to. Think about this practically. If you think of a recent moment where you might have felt activated, was this a single uncomfortable interaction or was it part of a larger [00:06:00] pattern?
Was the person open to reflection or did they dismiss your experience as you voiced it to them? Those questions can offer some clarity now. When we might use overuse, the word trigger, I wanna just kind of call a spade a spade here. Sometimes we label something a trigger when it's actually just discomfort.
You know, disagreement with somebody is not harm and feedback from somebody is not always abusive, right? Boundaries from others are not always a rejection. You know, somebody says, calmly, I really need you to be on time. And you feel a sense of shame and defensiveness. That may be a trigger. Um. You know, growth requires us to stay present long enough to reflect, um, you know, we could say we're triggered by that statement, but then we could use it as an opportunity to recognize okay, that just, you know, made me feel uncomfortable.
'cause not every uncomfortable emotion means that you're unsafe and, and there is that emotional maturity that can help. Um, balance that out and to, to allow for some emotional [00:07:00] tolerance to happen as well. So just really reflecting to yourself, you know, asking things of where do I need to build capacity for discomfort?
You know, that offers a little more room for growth because sometimes we might catch ourselves saying, I'm so triggered and. It's really that those are moments that we're feeling discomfort rather than actually needing to attend to it as though it's harm. Now let's talk about harm the other end. So, uh, sometimes we call things a trigger when it's actually harmful.
And I do see this in a lot of, uh, high achieving, high functioning adults. Um, it's, it's really the fawning pattern. You know, when people are raised in maybe control heavy environments or they just wanna avoid being a burden or they don't wanna create waves, they just. They don't wanna create conflict, you know, those are the individuals who are gonna catch themselves minimizing, rationalizing, saying things like, okay, I'm, I'm just too sensitive.
I'm overreacting. They didn't really mean it. Um, it's, it's my trauma talking. Right? And, and meanwhile what's actually happening is a [00:08:00] pattern, you know, they're, they're routinely saying like, okay, they didn't mean it and not catching on that. You're saying they didn't mean it multiple times over and over and over again.
And over time, as the pattern continues, you actually start to feel smaller. You start to second guess your own reality. You're rehearsing conversations, you're anticipating backlash. You're constantly adjusting what you say, how you say it. Uh, those aren't triggers. That's actually erosion if we're gonna be totally honest.
So if you're constantly leaving interactions where you're feeling slightly confused or you're feeling actually more anxious after the conversation, or, um, you know, you're, you're noticing that you're gaslighting yourself, those are indications that your nervous system might actually be accurate here.
And this might, might be a harmful situation. So I think a question, uh, people often ask is, am I being triggered? And that, that question in my opinion assumes that the, there's like this internal problem. [00:09:00] So a different question maybe to, to start asking is, okay, what's actually happening here, right? Is this my own history?
Uh, my history and my reaction to that, but it's otherwise a safe situation or is this my body responding to something that is actually unsafe? Uh, that moves us a little bit from this self-blame place to a sense of discernment. And again, discernment is not defensiveness. Discernment is being regulated and, and being able to evaluate what's in front of you.
So, you know, the question then becomes, okay, this is great information, but what do we do with this? Well, we build capacity in two different directions. The first is we increase our trigger awareness. We just notice patterns maybe from our childhood or, I mean, we create patterns throughout our whole life.
So just noticing those patterns, noticing when we might become tone, you know, sensitive to different tones when we might be, um, sensitive to different authority, um, noticing our shame [00:10:00] responses and then. Figuring out ways to regulate the nervous system. If we're really in a safe, you know, a safe environment, we reflect, we repair when it's appropriate.
And then the second part of this is to increase our ability to, uh, recognize harmful situations. So just paying attention to patterns, you know, watching for things like deflection, watching and, and listening for things like retaliation watching and, and paying attention to when there is potentially a chronic power imbalance, you know?
Learning to trust consistency and, you know, paying attention to those things. It's just knowing that healing is, it's not about being UNT triggerable. I mean, we're human beings. Things are going to trigger us. Healing is knowing when to, when to pay attention and when, when we need to take ownership of self-regulation and when we might need to actually self-protect.
So here are some questions I should wanna leave you with. Where in my life might I be avoiding my own growth by labeling discomfort as harm? [00:11:00] Then where in my life may I be tolerating harm and just labeling it as a trigger, you know, what does safety feel like in my body? Because not every activation is gonna be trauma, and not every activation is about, um, fragility.
You know, sometimes, sometimes you are growing, sometimes you are healing, and then sometimes you really are in a harmful situation. Your work is not to suppress your reactions. Your work is to create ways to stay curious with it and to learn to understand it. And truly that's where my coaching practice really focuses on, is creating space to understand yourself in a deeper way so that you can move forward.
And if you'd like to talk about how coaching could support you doing that, feel free to reach out to me anytime at coachwithkamini.com. Until next time, stay well.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Rise Up Live Joy Your Way. For more information, Book a chat with Kamini at [00:12:00] www.chatwithKamini.com, or visit her website at www.kaminiwood.com. You can also find Kamini on Facebook or Instagram username, it's authentic me. Thank you for listening!