Responding Vs. Reacting

Responding to experience requires us to make intentional choices about how to feel, think, and act. Reacting to an experience is an unconscious process that happens based on previous experience, pain, triggers, and perception.  Most people are caught in a cycle of unconscious reactions. That is the norm in our society, however we can change this by becoming self-aware and learning how to respond instead.

To respond we have to become aware of ourselves. We have to understand what's triggering us, why we're being triggered, and then ultimately heal the trigger. Triggers are like buttons that people can push, both knowingly and unknowingly. If we're honest about it, people go around intentionally pushing other people's buttons all the time. I think of it like an adrenaline rush. People seem to get a kick out of the wild reactions of other people and will make a point of trying to get that reaction. The truth is, they can't do that if you don't have any triggers. Learning to respond means you get rid of the buttons that other people normally have access to. 

Getting rid of those buttons is what self-awareness is all about. What we're doing is understanding what the pain we held onto was and then recognizing the habit we have as a result of the pain.  You had an experience at some point in your life that caused you pain. You held onto that pain as most people do. From there, you built a self-protection mechanism around that pain to make sure you didn't get hurt again. That means that every time something happens that pokes at the old pain, you get defensive. The defense is the trigger. You're defending yourself from the old pain, whether that's what is happening in the present moment or not. Anything that you think is remotely close to what happened previously will trigger the defensive reaction. Over time, you use that trigger more and more often. Maybe the trigger gets worse and worse with time as well because of the level of pain behind it.

To be able to respond instead of react to a trigger, we need to:

1.  Understand that we have this trigger. 

2. Recognize what types of experience make the trigger more likely to cause us to react. 

3. Be aware of when we find ourselves in one of those experiences.  

4. Be willing to ignore the trigger and find a better response.

I'll be completely honest with you, this is a process you will do after the fact for quite a while. You will sit down on your couch by yourself to reflect on the day and realize that you were triggered by a familiar type of experience or a pattern. Your job is not to beat yourself up or shame yourself into trying to change it. Your job is to simply recognize that there is a pattern there that needs to change. Determine what a better response might have been. If you could go back and do it again, what would you change? 

It is so important to play out in your mind while you're alone on your couch, what you would do differently. How would it look if you didn't react to the trigger? What would the response be? The reason that is so important is because you won't have the bandwidth to figure it out on the fly. You're going to have enough of a challenge just keeping yourself under control. You need to have a more or less "canned response" to a trigger you're trying to heal when you're first starting to do this. Once you do it enough, you won't have any problems trying to control yourself and you'll be able to respond more genuinely and easily on the fly. But at first, give yourself the grace to have a pre-determined non-triggered response at the ready to make things easier for yourself.

If you don't have a practice of self-reflection you don't give yourself the option to make these types of plans for yourself. You don't offer yourself the ability to change it. You shoot yourself in the foot because you're unwilling to give yourself the tools you need to fix it.

The difference between a response and a reaction is your willingness to pay attention to yourself. Be willing to put the time into changing it and it will change. Ignore it, avoid it, take yourself off your own list, make excuses, or complain that it's hard and the trigger will not change. It cannot change because you won't allow it to. Responding to your life means making the choice to change. That's a hard choice. It's scary when we can't identify who we will become. The trick is not ask yourself that question. Instead ask who you need to be to live the life you want and then be willing to take the steps to get there.

Love to all.

Della