It seems like triggers are everywhere these days. Last week at my local coffee shop, I heard someone say they were triggered because they were out of the kind of tea they liked to drink. Maybe someone in your life says “I’m triggered” in the middle of an argument, and you have to stop the conversation even though you think they’re using it as a weapon. Or maybe you feel what you consider to be a true trigger when someone confronts you and your mind goes blank, and you feel numb. When is trigger the right word for what happened? Today you’re getting the real definition of a trigger, what to do if a real trigger comes up in conversation, and how to (finally) resolve communication issues when someone says they’re triggered.
14-minute read
Introduction
I’ve talked about triggers many times over the last eight years. I’ve taught you how not to get triggered by your family, how to effectively deal with them in your relationships in general, and I did an entire episode on understanding your emotional triggers. And, of course, I’ve given you tons of tips and strategies for dealing with your triggers in multiple other episodes. So, you might be asking, “How come you’re still talking about triggers, Abby?!”
The answer is because I read an article in the New York Times recently (yes, it came out in June and yes, I just got around to finally reading it, hold your judgment) called Are You Triggered or Just Upset and, well, it rankled me a bit, so here I am writing about triggers again. No, I don’t have a full out beef with the NY Times or the article’s wonderful author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, who I’ve chatted with (she interviewed me for an article she wrote on limerence that came out in July, and I really liked her parenting book, How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes), but I don’t like some of the things that got said in this article and think they could ultimately be harmful, so… here I am.
My first issue is that the fix identified in said article for people who overuse the word trigger is to swap it for something more specific like, “that frustrated me” or “that reminded me of something difficult.” Fine advice, if you’re only mildly annoyed. But if you’re truly triggered, meaning you’re emotionally flooded, you don’t have access to the part of your brain that can come up with a reasonable, specific, well-chosen sentence. If you’re honestly triggered (as we’ll define today), that fabulous, clear thinking isn’t available to you in that moment. So, if you try to use this suggestion, you won’t be able to, and then you’ll blame yourself later, inspiring (I’m sure) a marvelous shame, self-recrimination spiral. You need an answer for what to do with a real trigger.
And the same goes if the person you’re talking to is truly triggered and you get upset and tell them they should just say, “this is difficult for me” instead of “I’m triggered.” You’re going to be frustrated that they don’t change their language in future conversations with you, but it’s not that they don’t change it; it’s that they can’t change it if they’re truly flooded and their brain is offline. You’re setting up yourself and the other person for some resentment and huge miscommunications.
And since I’m taking the time to do a whole episode about this, there’s a second issue I have with this article (oh yes, I’m on a roll). One of the psychologists interviewed talked about how saying “I’m triggered” mid-argument can function like an emergency brake. It ends what might have otherwise been a real, healthy conversation. And then, the article gives you nothing. So, if you (or the other person) is truly triggered in a conversation and voices that, what are you supposed to do next? How do you come back to a triggering conversation without the same thing happening? I’m going to answer that today too.
What’s a Trigger, Really?
When you experience a real trigger, your body reacts first. And what’s happening is that it’s reacting to something it perceives as dangerous before your brain has even had a conscious thought about it. A trigger isn’t just a strong feeling about something you don’t like because a real trigger isn’t an emotional response; it’s a neurobiological response. Each and every day, while you’re going about your usual activities, your autonomic nervous system is running a constant background scan of everyone and everything around you, and it’s always deciding whether something or someone is safe or dangerous.
There’s a great framework for this called neuroception. You might not have heard that word, but you’ve definitely experienced what it is. For example, if a relative stranger at your job makes an offhand comment about your haircut, you’ll likely shrug it off. But then your mother makes an identical comment, and you’re suddenly defensive and furious. Same words, wildly different reaction, because your nervous system isn’t reacting to the words your mom actually said; it’s reacting to the pattern it thinks it knows. It’s reacting to every other time feedback from your mom was actually criticism or passive-aggressive or upsetting in some way.
Is This a Real Trigger, or Are You Just Uncomfortable?
I agree that the word trigger is definitely overused. In my experience, a lot of the time someone says, “I’m triggered,” they’re really only feeling some kind of discomfort. I did an episode last season on why you feel insecure in a healthy relationship that relates here. In that episode, I talked about how to tell the difference between a genuine threat response and your nervous system misreading a safe person as a dangerous one, so let me repeat a little of that here because it applies.
Your nervous system is never only reading what’s happening right now. What it’s doing is consistently adding/reading what it learned to expect a long time ago. If your past taught you that closeness came with unpredictability or withdrawal, your body will flag a perfectly safe person as a threat, not because they’ve done anything, but because safety itself feels unfamiliar.
So how do you tell a real red flag from an old wound getting activated? Check in with the Trust Triad (I’ve discussed this a ton on the show), which is comprised of three things:
- Integrity: are they honest and transparent?
- Competence: do they follow through with what they said they would do? And
- Goodwill: do they have your back and act with your best interests in mind?
If one of those is missing, your alarm is picking up something real. If all three are solidly there and you’re still anxious, that’s usually not about them; that’s your nervous system treating a safe person like the unsafe ones from your past.
And sometimes both are true at once. Your nervous system can be oversensitive, and the person in front of you might not be acting in a fully trustworthy way either.
In the end, a real trigger feels like your body took over, while discomfort feels like you don’t like what you’re hearing. Those aren’t the same, of course, and treating them like they are is how we get into trouble. It starts a path of excuses and avoiding harder conversations, which can never lead to an emotionally close relationship with anyone.
Here’s the crucial part of all this: most of the time, the person having a real trigger doesn’t know it’s happening! In my experience, it’s almost never the triggered person who says, wait, I think I’m triggered. It’s the other person who notices first, because you can usually see a real trigger from the outside before the person experiencing it even knows it’s happening. Sometimes you’ll see hyperarousal symptoms like yelling, snapping, or escalating. Sometimes you’ll see hypoarousal symptoms like a blank look, them going quiet, going cold, or checking out entirely. Either way, the person in it usually can’t see it happening, because the same response that’s flooding them is the one erasing their ability to notice!
I did a whole episode on emotional flooding in relationships and what to do when your partner shuts down, so you can go check that out.
And because I love you, the free download for today is a quick quiz to help you figure out if this is a real trigger or simply discomfort.
When “I’m Triggered” Isn’t Real, But It Still Shuts Down the Conversation
If what you or the other person is feeling is a real trigger, stopping the conversation is the right call. Everyone’s body has left the building, and there’s no version of the next five minutes where you’re capable of a real conversation. That’s not a choice; that’s biology doing what biology does. How to actually come back to that conversation once you’re regulated, we’ll get to in a few minutes, so hang onto that.
But here’s the problem: too much of the time, “I’m triggered” mid-argument isn’t a real trigger. It’s discomfort, and it’s getting used to end the conversation anyway.
Naming a trigger is supposed to help, but often it doesn’t, because the label alone does nothing. For example, I’m sure you’ve been watching the news and heard the anchor say something like, “This is a warning that the image you’re about to see might upset you.” They’re forewarning you that they’re about to show you something pretty icky. Helpful right? Uhm… no. They’ve done research on this and found that the warning didn’t reduce how upset people got once they saw the actual material (and it didn’t stop anyone from looking at it either.) What it did do, reliably, every time, was make people more anxious in the waiting period before anything even happened!
Here’s why that matters for your argument with your dad, best friend, sister, or coworker. If naming the trigger doesn’t soften what comes next, and the main thing it does is spike anxiety and get treated like a stop sign, then saying “I’m triggered” mid-conversation isn’t functioning as a heads-up; it’s functioning as an exit only.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the trigger was real or the person was just uncomfortable. Saying, “I’m triggered” shouldn’t be a permanent get-out-of-accountability card where you never come back to finish the conversation. If that’s the case, you’re telling me I can blow you off, say mean things, forget every anniversary, and never once apologize for any of it, as long as I remembered to say “I’m triggered”? That sounds like some BS to me.
I’ve been in this situation. I was hired not long ago to work with two founders of a design company. They’d been friends since college and had difficulty separating business and personal. Cofounder A used “I’m triggered” to end every single hard conversation with his business partner, Cofounder B. He’d miss a deadline, triggered. If he was called out for snapping at the team, triggered. Forgot to follow through on something? Because you triggered him. Six months in, his cofounder had stopped bringing anything to him at all, not because the problems went away, but because there was no longer a way to talk about them. Hence, bringing me on.
I’m triggered can’t be an excuse. Ever. It’s an explanation, and then action needs to be taken.
When Naming It Opens the Conversation Instead
And that action needs to be coming back to where the trigger happened and doing something different. The difference between a real pause and a permanent exit is whether you come back and work forward in a new way. A pause says, I’m flooded, I need some time, and I’m going to finish this with you. An exit says the word and never returns to the thing that started it.
But coming back isn’t enough on its own; how you show up when you get there matters just as much, and the research is clear on that part specifically. When people feel like their emotions get dismissed or waved off by someone close to them, that lands as psychological distress, and if you’re feeling that distress from feeling dismissed, it’s not just your own satisfaction in the relationship that gets hurt; it spills over, and the other person also feels dissatisfied. In other words, dismissal doesn’t stay contained to the person who got dismissed; it leaks into the whole dynamic of whatever relationship you’re in. Conversely, research shows that when people are navigating conflict, and someone shows up with genuine acknowledgment, interest, and understanding, the other person is far more likely to shift out of a negative state and into something calmer. Validation didn’t just feel nice; it moved people from worse to better in real time.
So, using the word “triggered” without following through does damage. Responding with genuine acknowledgment, “tell me more about that,” “I hear you, keep going,” does wonderful things, as it helps regulate the other person’s nervous system, not just your own.
The Rules That Keep “I’m Triggered” Honest
If you’re going to say it, say what you need and when you’re coming back. “I’m triggered, I need twenty minutes, and then I want to finish this with you,” is a completely different sentence than “I’m triggered” followed by silence. Asking for time is indicative of self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-regulation (you know those are three of my favorite things). If you’ve been saying, “I’m triggered” and doing nothing else, I don’t want you to beat yourself up. I want you to reflect and shift what you’re doing so you can create some resolutions in your relationships.
And if someone says it to you, don’t argue, but also don’t let it derail the whole conversation. You can say something like, “Okay, take the time you need, and I want to come back to this.” When you do it this way, and it’s a real trigger (so this person is emotionally flooded), you’re showing presence and care. And if it’s not a real trigger, you’re creating an opening for reconvening.
For the record, time by itself doesn’t calm your nervous system, so “I need twenty minutes” only works if you use those twenty minutes to regulate your nervous system and come back to a healthy baseline. And when everyone is ready to come back together, that is not the time to relitigate who was right, but to walk through what happened, this time with both of you regulated enough to do it. If you simply jump right back to where you were, in the exact same way, the triggering will come right back.
Instead, you want to come back and recalibrate together. And that’s where the Five N’s come in, the tool I’ve taught you before.
So, when you come back together, you’ll start with these five steps (which are all from the research):
- Name it. Each of you gets specific about what you felt, not just “I got upset.” Be as specific as you can. I feel/felt hurt, embarrassed, dismissed, scared, abandoned, rejected, resentful, frustrated, sad, whatever it was.
- Neutralize it. Before you try to talk about any of it, do something physical to make sure you’re both at baseline and grounded in the moment together. A slow exhale longer than your inhale, feet flat on the floor, something cold in your hand, anything that ensures that neither of you is in hyper- or hypo-arousal.
- Normalize it. This is the self-compassion step. Whatever you felt made sense. Neither of you has to justify it or prove it was warranted. So, say out loud something like, “It’s normal to have a reaction when you’re worried that…” or “I can see now why I got upset because of how my dad treated me in these situations,” or “It’s understandable that given my history I had x reaction.” You’re saying this more for yourself than the other person.
- Narrate it together. This is the classic cognitive behavioral therapy step where we think differently about the situation so we can feel differently about it. This is where you ask each other real questions as you look for a new point of view for the conversation: what got in the way here? What do you think set this off? Was it the conversation itself, or was it something in how I responded? What else could be true about x? What else could I think about how this played out? What’s the most generous interpretation of what happened/what was said?
- Navigate it. Finally, from this more regulated place, decide together what you want to do next, finish the original conversation, let it go, come back to it tomorrow, whatever you land on together. There’s no single right answer; the point is you’re choosing it together instead of one of you disappearing and the other one guessing.
This works with your mother, your best friend, your coworker, your kid, not just a partner. The mechanism is the same everywhere two people are trying to stay in a hard conversation instead of ending one.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- Real Trigger or Discomfort? A Quick Quiz to Find Out What’s Actually Happening
- The Five N’s: A Guide for Coming Back Together After a Trigger
- The Trust Triad Worksheet
- Spotting It from the Outside: How to Notice a Real Trigger in Someone Else, Before They Do
- The Coming Back Log: A Place to Track Real Trigger Conversations Over Time
- Journaling Prompts to Understand Your Triggers
Resources
Got Family Stress? How to Not Get Triggered by Family
Emotional Triggers: Understanding Your Brain and How to Keep It in Check
How to Effectively Deal with Triggers in Your Relationships
Why You Feel Insecure in a Healthy Relationship
How to Be Honest and Build Trust in a Relationship
What to Do If Your Partner is Conflict Avoidant Plus Dealing with Your Own Conflict Avoidance
How to Build Emotional Intimacy
What to Do When Your Partner Shuts Down in Conflict
References
- Moyer, M. W. (2026, June 11). Are you “triggered” or just upset? The New York Times.
- Wenner Moyer, M. (2026, July 9). This kind of obsessive attraction isn’t love. But it has a name. The New York Times.
- Wenner Moyer, M. (2021). How to raise kids who aren’t assholes: Science-based strategies for better parenting—from tots to teens. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
- Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19-24.
- Bridgland, V. M. E., Jones, P. J., & Bellet, B. W. (2024). A meta-analysis of the efficacy of trigger warnings, content warnings, and content notes. Clinical Psychological Science, 12(4), 751-771.
- Brandão, T. (2024). Perceived emotional invalidation, psychological distress and relationship satisfaction in couples: An actor-partner interdependence mediation analysis. Psychological Reports, 129(4), 2964-2985.
- León, G. A., Dien, O., Khaled, M., & Saxbe, D. E. (2026). Partner validation during couple conflict predicts reduced negative affect and better psychosocial adjustment to parenthood. Journal of Family Psychology, 40(6), 943-956.
