Last week, my husband stepped on a chipmunk while trying to avoid another one scurrying across his path. It died instantly.
To say this affected him is an understatement. He called me from work. I stepped on a chipmunk. I killed it.
Oh my God, was all I could say. Whoa.
Other than that, which I said without a thought, I didn't know what to say. I noticed how I wanted to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault.
Then I remembered the other way, the one I learned through Focusing: patient and spacious curiosity.
What’s it like? I wondered.
How square and heavy his step had been. How confidently he'd taken it to avoid the chipmunk he'd just seen. How forcefully he'd then, inadvertently, come down on the one he hadn’t seen. 😢
I could feel it. And I understood, as best as someone who hadn't actually inadvertently stepped on a chipmunk could.
I hemmed and hawed about writing this.
And then I hemmed and hawed about that trigger warning.
I put it in. And then I sat with the slight discomfort of having done so — because I'm not actually a fan of them. I get why we started adding them. But I also think they have inadvertently — there's that word again — made us see the triggers themselves as the issue. As the villain. As the thing to be eliminated.
And yet. There is a dead chipmunk in this story. So I warned you, and I meant it, and I’m still not a fan of trigger warnings.
Which is, I suppose, what this newsletter is about.
I'm pretty confident in people's ability to stop reading, stop watching, when they've had enough. I say this as a woman who loves The Pitt, even though my eyes are probably covered for at least a quarter of any given episode. I don't need a warning. I know The Pitt will go there.
Good luck eliminating actual triggers from your life.
A trip to the grocery store on any given Tuesday has potential.
You could take that beautiful orange from the pyramid with all the care in the world, and the whole thing could still topple.
Someone near you might drop a bottle of apple cider vinegar and even though you don’t get cut by the glass, you still smell sour for the rest of the day, including through that meeting.
You could be pushing your cart, la di da, and pass a mom yelling at her kid in a way that brings back memories you don't want to revisit.
The man in front of you in the checkout line might keep calling the cashier honey, even though you're pretty sure she doesn't know his name, and you never once see her meet his eyes.
Triggers are everywhere. The question is never really whether we'll encounter them. The question is what happens next.
Here's what we miss when we put all the blame for our dysregulation, our upset, our stress, our whatever-we-end-up-calling-it, on triggers:
A healthy nervous system is not one that is always in the green zone — the ventral vagal state, the zen zone, the all-is-hunky-dory zone. If it were, we'd be dead.
A healthy nervous system is fluid. When you wake in the middle of the night and smell smoke and see fire, I hope your nervous system will not think positive and spout affirmations, but rather register unsafe and get you the hell out.
A healthy nervous system will save your life.
A healthy nervous system will also not keep you up every night for years afterward, making sure the house isn't on fire again.
It goes in and out: Regulated, dysregulated; safe, not safe. As needed. That's not a bug. That's its number one feature.
Triggers are not the problem.
A nervous system that can't find its way back to regulated — back to a place where your body can register safety — that's the problem.
And the solution isn't a trigger-free life. It's building the capacity to notice, and to return. To have your default — the state you most often inhabit, and the state you know your way back to when you lose it — be safety. Or, as my clients learn: safe enough.*
The evening of the day my husband stepped on the chipmunk, we sat together in the sauna. Into the silence, he said: It's still with me. It was so freaky. The kind of thing that would only happen in a bad dream.
He knows better than to mention dreams around me if he doesn't want me to go there. He knows that. He went there anyway.
What if this had happened in a dream? I asked. What might the dream be trying to say?
Which opened, briefly but meaningfully, onto the threshold he had just crossed. A long and complicated life stage, ending. Grief involved — and underneath and around the grief, celebration. Tenderness. Healing.
Talk about love.
What about you?
Is there a trigger from this past week — something that shook you or caught you off guard — that, when you sit with it in a curious and friendly way, might bring you something you need? A layer of self-knowledge, a moment of tenderness, an unexpected opening?
I'd love to hear it. Hit reply.
xo Heidi
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"Safe enough" is not a consolation prize — not even close. Especially when things do not in the least feel okay, being able to register safe enough is enormous.
For example: "I'm in bed. I’m okay." You can notice that, in that moment, you are safe enough and it’s okay to fall asleep now. Even if — especially if — your day had many triggers and any given headline feels like a trigger.
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P.S. Speaking of things that are trying to tell you something — anger might be the most misunderstood messenger of all.
In Anger as Your Ally — a masterclass on what to do with anger — you'll learn what anger looks and feels like (activated, suppressed, and everything in between), the disguises it can wear, and how to listen to what it's trying to tell you so that you and anger can finally start playing on the same team.. You'll also hear a very personal story about the night anger saved a relationship I had nearly given up on.
If this newsletter stirred something in you, there's a good chance this masterclass will too!