What Your Triggers Are Really Trying to Tell You

Three o'clock in the morning in Costa Rica. Howler monkeys — animals you can hear from miles away — are right outside the door, close enough that it feels like they're in the room. And for at least one of the Hills, lying there in the dark, something fired. A little jolt. A little Fear (Hill & Hill, 2026).

That's a trigger.

And before you decide that word is too big for you — that triggers are for other people, the ones who explode — stay with us for a minute. Yours probably isn't a monkey. It's a tone. A sigh. The way your spouse glances at their phone mid-sentence. Something small brushes against you, and your body answers with something bigger than the moment seems to deserve.

You have them. We all do. And they're not what you think they are.

A trigger is just pain with a memory

Here's the plainest definition we know: a trigger is a current emotional response based on a past experience (Hill & Hill, 2026). Maybe the experience was yesterday. Maybe it was thirty years ago. Either way, it's reaching into this moment and lighting something up — a flash of Hurt, a wave of Fear, a sudden heaviness of Sad — that isn't really about right now. It's about then.

It's worth slowing down here, because most of us picture trauma as something enormous and rare. It isn't. Trauma is simply a current emotional response based on a past event (van der Kolk, 2014). Your body keeps a record. It files away the moments that hurt, and it stands guard so they don't happen again. So when something brushes up against that old file — a word, a tone, a look — your body responds now with the pain of then.

Phyllis tells a story about this. She and Glenn were sitting outside one morning, tea in hand, having what she remembers as a beautiful conversation. Then something he said landed wrong. She got up, walked inside to refill her cup, and noticed her body felt — off. So she slowed down and tuned in. What is this? Underneath it was Hurt. Not because Glenn had been cruel — most people wouldn't have noticed the comment at all. But her body had an encyclopedia of memories — forty-four years of marriage, the first thirty of them painful — and it responded the way it had learned to (Hill & Hill, 2026).

That's not weakness. That's not her being too sensitive. That's brain chemistry doing exactly what it was built to do.

And again — that's just the human condition.

Nobody chooses to feel hurt

This is the part that sets so many of us free.

You were probably taught, somewhere along the way, to choose your emotions. Don't be sad. Don't be afraid. Choose joy. And underneath that teaching is a quiet accusation: if you're hurting, you're doing it wrong.

But you've never once chosen to feel Hurt. You just felt it. The brain doesn't distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain — to your brain, "I felt hurt by what you said" is as literal as a stubbed toe (Eisenberger et al., 2003). If Glenn stepped on Phyllis's foot, she wouldn't decide to feel pain. She'd just feel it. Emotional pain works the exact same way. Not by choice. Not by volunteering. Not by signing up (Hill & Hill, 2026).

We'd never look at a six-month-old crying and say, "Get over it. Choose joy." And yet we say it to ourselves and the people we love all the time. Just stop it. You should be past this. That's not human.

We are all just older babies. There's no birthday where that changes.

The choice you actually have

So if you don't get to choose the trigger, what do you get to choose?

The next move.

When Phyllis stood in that kitchen, she had a decision to make. She could let it go — which sounds mature, but really meant walking away from her own body, pretending the Hurt had no validity, putting it back in the jar and screwing the lid on tight. Or she could turn around, walk back outside, and say the brave, simple thing: I feel some Hurt about what you said.

She turned around.

And here's why it worked. Glenn didn't defend himself. He didn't explain what he really meant. He didn't say, "That was years ago — you should be over it." He got curious. He made space. He let her pain come out (Hill & Hill, 2026).

Because here's what most of us get exactly backwards. When someone we love gets triggered and the emotion gets big, our instinct is to tamp it down. Calm down. Breathe. It's okay. We hand them a tissue to stop the tears. We try, with the best intentions in the world, to put the lid back on the jar. Good intention. Bad application. Emotion that gets stuffed down doesn't disappear — it goes internal, into the body, into the cells, and it costs us (Gross & Levenson, 1997). The research is sobering: holding the feeling in doesn't make it smaller. It just hides it.

So the Connection Codes move is the opposite of what you were taught. Don't diminish the emotion. Heighten it. Let it all the way out.

Presence processes. Defensiveness reactivates.

"Wow. Tell me more."

When Glenn is with Phyllis in a triggered moment now — even when he is the source of the old pain — he doesn't shrink it. He follows her energy. He says things like, Wow. What else happened? and Ugh — how many times did that happen? He's not trying to fix it or talk her out of it. He's privileging her experience. He's letting the infection drain out of the wound instead of sealing it back in (Hill & Hill, 2026).

Does he enjoy hearing it? No. It comes with his own Guilt and Sad and Shame. But he's learned something most of us never get told: you cannot logistic someone out of their pain. You can say you need to forgive, you need to move on, you need to let it go a thousand times, and it will never once work. Glenn sat with a couple recently where the husband said exactly that — over and over — and Glenn finally turned to the wife and asked, gently, Has that ever helped you? She laughed an awkward laugh. No.

Of course not. It never does.

Because emotional pain isn't like physical pain. Physical pain peaks and then steadily fades. Emotional pain can sit, unprocessed, for decades — and someone can weep over a wound from thirty-seven years ago as though it happened thirty-seven seconds ago (van der Kolk, 2014). It doesn't go away because someone tells it to. It goes away when it's finally processed — let out, in a safe place, with someone who stays.

The sacred thing hiding inside the hard moment

Here's the reframe we want to leave you with.

The next time someone you love gets triggered — when the emotion gets big and a little scary, when it would be so much easier to shut it down — try seeing it as what it actually is: a sacred moment. That person is trusting you with the contents of their body. They felt safe enough to let you see the part they usually keep hidden. Most of us spend our whole lives performing the version of ourselves the world expects — the right volume, the right face, the right composure. So when the real thing comes out, don't put it back in the jar.

Get curious. Make space. You don't have to understand it. You don't even have to agree with it. I hear you doesn't mean I get it. It just means I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere.

Phyllis once got triggered while speaking to a room of total strangers in Switzerland — a wave of Sad about her mother's passing rose up mid-sentence. She didn't announce it or apologize for it. She let the tears come and kept going. And one by one, strangers in the audience began to cry with her. Afterward, they came up and hugged her. I don't even know you, she thought, but I feel so much more connected to you, because you joined me in that sadness (Hill & Hill, 2026).

That's the secret hiding inside every trigger. It isn't a malfunction. It's an invitation — pain that's ready to come out, and a doorway into the kind of connection you can't get any other way. The two questions running underneath every marriage are simple ones: Will you be there for me? Am I good enough for you? (Johnson, 2008). And there is no better place to answer yes than the moment your person is triggered and you choose to stay.

So here's our question for you: the next time your spouse gets big — or the next time you feel that old pain stir in your body — what would it look like to leave the lid off the jar?

Let the river flow.

If something stirred while you were reading this, you're not broken — you're human, and your body is asking for your attention. A good first step is the free Core Emotion Wheel.

Get the free Core Emotion Wheel

And if there's old pain in there that's been stuck a long time, you don't have to sort it out alone.

Book a session with Dr. Glenn Hill

References

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134

Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.106.1.95

Hill, G., & Hill, P. (2026). Triggers [Audio podcast episode]. Connection Codes. https://www.youtube.com/embed/3erEup7akl8?si=mf3M7wnrRX0Trk4A

Johnson, S. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown Spark.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.