Personality, Trauma, & Victim Blaming | Podcast 566

And basically I give people the encouragement. I say, listen, if you have a triggering moment in your life where you get triggered, something upsets you, I have these. I had one today, I had one just a few minutes ago. I I'm starting to re see these as like bad events in my life and I'm starting to recontextualize them to myself.

as an opportunity to see something about myself I didn't see before. Like there's obviously some material that got surfaced through this triggered moment. And now I've got something I can look at and say, all right, well, this is maybe material, shadow material I didn't notice before. I can maybe do something about this. I can address it. I can maybe uh you know work work on it, I can understand it.

I can get a get a h hold on it. I can just see it, honestly. And and often things that are in our shadow, we can't that's why we call it the shadow. You can't see them. Mm-hmm. But this could be challenging for for some folks when they think about getting triggered. I mean, that sounds nice, Joel. Oh, go get triggered and then look at things in your shadow.

But that isn't always fun. Like it's not fun for me. When I was like just a few minutes ago, we were setting up for this and trying to get some stuff organized, and I'm I'm a little uncertain. We're not in our normal studio and I'm trying to do the settings and I'm like all the equipment came from the live event and I wasn't certain about the s the settings on it and I was like

getting grumpy and I'm like, Why does why is this so hard? Why don't I know this? And I'm like I'm feeling like some angst And I'm getting ready to kind of like emote strongly. And I know that would set us in a bad tone for this podcast. I'm like, I can't emote, but I feel I feel like I'm I'm upset right now. I'm getting triggered by this moment. And I said, well, I have an opportunity to manage this.

work with it and not make it a problem for the scenario we're in. I'm not gonna let my emotions bleed over into this. That was really hard to do actually. I I didn't feel like that. I felt like emoting strongly be like, Antonia, why do I have to and like, you know, making it kind of your problem along with me. Right.

But I knew that would put you in a bad state. You wouldn't be able to record. It would have been a really tough thing. Yes. So I got a hold of it. I didn't do it. Thank you. But again, I think that's hard for a lot of people. Like just that idea of of sitting with something that upset you. Because I'm on the hunt to fix it.

Externally. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna have to go, Well, I'll make sure that these settings are never off for our equipment. I'll keep track of it all. Like immediately I go into like problem solving mode. Mm-hmm. So I'll never feel this trigger ever again. I'll never have this bad experience ever again. And this is like a low level one. It's not even hard. Like it's nothing for my past or anything.

I don't know, like a like capacity to do a keto on myself. I'm not like good at that. And so when I ex you know, when I get really like sort of emotionally triggered and my emotional regulation is off. I'm pretty blamey. I'm pretty I'm pretty loud and explosive and blamey.

I'm in an energy of emotion right now. I can't I can't even think. I'm not leaving to never come back. I'll be right back. I just need a moment to get some space from this conversation. Mm-hmm. And I went, Oh, because my previous relationship with my first wife, she would literally hang up if there was an argument she didn't like, she would literally hang up on me or she would walk out of the room, slam the door, and I was it.

We're not gonna have resolution. This marriage is gonna end too. It's gonna be nothing but fights until the end. It's now just a matter of time. Like all this narrative and meaning all s came to me in the midst of these dis disagreements. And we even had to develop some code language where you just say, I'm not hanging up the phone. I'm not slamming the door. I just need a moment. Oh, okay. I know she'll be right back to resolve this.

And I definitely bring in baggage from previous relationships. It doesn't take much. I mean, like if I'm seeking a feeling of closeness or intimacy and I get rejected because I mean, between the two of us, like you might I don't know, you might just be involved in something. You're like closing loops or at the end of a project or maybe

focusing on details, which is always nerve wracking. And so if I come in seeking emotional closeness and you're in the middle of something, you know, like a, you know, a process. That has nothing to do with emotional closeness. Uh, that can easily trigger thoughts of worthlessness in me, or like, oh, I guess we aren't as close as I thought, or like nobody values me. Like, that's definitely baggage I bring in from the past.

But I think what you're mentioning right now is a a really valuable um it's a really valuable platform for this conversation around triggers and the shadow.

Because uh it it immediately strikes me as um the there's different kinds of trick. And uh and the reason why we're focusing on this conversation in part, because we have done, we have done previous podcasts on the concepts of triggers before and how valuable they are. They're incredibly valuable for anybody who's interested in personal development work or personal growth.

And um to go back to the the definition that I always apply to personal development, um to me personal development just means accelerated maturity. Yeah. It's just uh it's a way for us to figure out the the lessons life didn't teach us for whatever reason.

because in that way maybe our life was a little cushier or because the opposite happened. It was actually really traumatic. And so we didn't learn a valuable lesson because we were so, you know, like in our stuff or whatever. Uh, the point being that we don't On all the many channels of life. we don't develop at the same level in every single channel.

So, you know, we're sort of stratified. It's like looking at um a soundboard and some of the knobs are up and some of the knobs are down. Yeah. And personal development is an opportunity to to do an assessment or an audit of ourselves and try to figure out which channels

are sort of dialed down. Like they're what are the what are the areas of my life in which I need to mature? And the reason why development is so great is because um as opposed to allowing life just naturally to slap the shit out of us in that particular arena. at the exact amount of slapping that we need, because maturing and development usually means that.

We're given something that's like slightly outside of our current comfort zone or slightly outside of our range. Yeah. And then we meet it, right? We do the hard, heavy lift of like meeting it and then learning all the right lessons. But if it's not enough, then we don't learn the lesson because we figure, well, we already knew it to begin with, right? It's not a reach.

If it's too far, we're demoralized. We feel like we failed. We can't take the right lessons unless we like really, you know, really focus and I don't know, like maybe do a vipassana retreat or something and spend 10 days like meditating on it. But it's hard it's hard to get the balance exactly right. And when we allow life to provide the circumstances for us, it doesn't always give us the ideal situation. But in personal development, we can set up our life or set up our circumstances.

to make it so that we do get that like sort of Goldilocks amount of challenge in whatever arena. We can reach out for something a little outside of our comfort zone and keep doing that until we you know, learn the right lesson in that channel and then accelerate our maturity in the sense of not just leaving it up to happenstance or life. It accelerates it because we can control it and then we can watch yourself make progress.

So the reason why I say all of that is triggers are this like really great way for us to accelerate our maturity. They give us these wonderful opportunities. to observe parts of ourselves that might need a little bit of acceleration, right? It might need a little bit of attention or attunement. Now, recently in a podcast series that we did around careers in the shadow, we were particularly talking about the six function. We mentioned, I think multiple times over those three episodes.

that triggers give us a great um opportunity to observe how we're already using our six function, which is quote unquote shadow material. And it also gives us an opportunity to observe when our boundaries have been crossed. And we got a um a comment from somebody who mentioned that they have INFP preferences that we have to be careful about how we talk about that because it can sound like victim blaming basically. If we say, you know, you got triggered, so

This is an opportunity for you. Like or the when you get triggered, go inside and figure out what shadow content is in there or figure out what boundary was crossed. That you might be talking to somebody who is just experiencing something in life that was like like legitimately triggered them to take an action that was aggressive or assertive. Like they they actually are innocent and that they

you know, that they're just in a terrible situation. Yeah. And um what's interesting is when I read that comment, I was like, You didn't like you're you're not saying anything opposite of what we were saying. But I think the reason why it could appear as if it was a calibration is because we use the phrase trigger so casually in our modern language. We use it so assumptively.

that um that I don't think we stop to define what we mean by the word trigger. Yeah. And I don't think that we actually stop to define what we mean by the word shadow either. Yeah. So I Uh, we thought that this podcast could give us a good opportunity to talk about what what when we use the word trigger, what are we actually saying?

And is using triggers as an opportunity to dive into shadow content is that victim blaming, taking responsibility on the self when really you could have actually truly been victimized. Yeah. Um, and what exactly is the shadow and why are triggers so valuable for looking at them?

Maybe I'm just bad at regulating my emotions when uh the stakes are high, or not the stakes are high, but like there's pressure on me or something. I don't know. I'm kind of embarrassed about it. Like why should why should it even be emotion like what you're set up equibajel? Why is that even emotional at all? Right? Like that's so a little I'm a little like uh self judging around like I probably shouldn't be

With the equipment, the trigger there. So we talk about the hat model. When we're doing personal growth, usually it falls within the realm of three key areas, either healing, achievement, or transcendence. Right.

One is achieving and the other one is transcendence, letting something go to go towards something new. So you transcend one level of your life into another level of your life. Yep. And that requires us to give up something often in order to go for something new.

And I bet you triggers fall into these three categories. They do. And the two triggers I talked about, I just realized are two different categories. The first one is really an achievement trigger. I'm frustrated that certain things aren't set up technically and I've got to go and do like redo work that's already been done. Somebody else forgot to put something in a box and I'm frustrated. It's like I just can achieve. It's just and that's my instinct. Go try to fix it.

So it's achievement. I go and I'm I like something surfaces, I get frustrated emotionally, and I'm like going to work to fix it. Now there might be trauma behind that too. That's my story.

So when we talk about that, that's a healing trigger for me. In other words, it early in in the early on, it hurt way more than it does now. Sometimes now You can still walk out of a room or say, I've got to get off the phone right now. And I still a little panic rises up, a little trigger moment comes. But I have enough history with you and me to know, okay, wait a minute.

I've healed the trauma that caused it or I've been healing the trauma that caused it. And I've seen you time and time again come back in the room or get back on the phone to resolve it. I know that this isn't you actually hanging up the phone or slamming the door, even though I still have that. It's like an almost an automatic response sometimes. Yeah.

If if you walk out of the room and I feel the trigger of quote unquote hanging up the phone. And the advice is, well, Joel, examine yourself and see why you feel that way. And maybe there's something you could do about it. Mm-hmm. This person is arguing that suggesting that to me is vic is blaming me as a victim. In other words, it's not my responsibility. It's the person that victimized me, my ex-wife.

That there's that's where the work should be done. I shouldn't I shouldn't need to examine something or fill fix something in myself.

And you feel triggered and emotional about that and trauma arises in you, you might want to look at that. That's maybe something from your shadow emerging that you could address, you could heal, you could talk to a therapist around, you could work on that. Right. The suggestion is that if somebody made that suggestion to me, they're blaming me as a victim.

And a situation without their permission, so to speak. uh brings up that or like or sort of r the the same feelings bec they get revisited by them. Mm-hmm. That we have to be careful not to say, Oh, the work is all done inside of you, or to say that that, you know, if they're that that's um that the that's their shadow material. Yeah. Uh, because the person may have

you know, they have may have legitimately been victimized or exploited. Yeah. And so to say that that's just their shadow material means that you're putting the onus on them to do all the work or to figure it all out on their side. or that even the fact that they have a reaction in and of itself is somehow bad or wrong. Yeah. To say that that shadow material insinuates to them that they're somehow doing something wrong.

And this is why I want to spend some time defining trigger and defining shadow. Let's do it. Because I think that this would be really helpful to answering that.

Or whether you're talking about it in a psychological realm. It's a um, it's a situation, it's a stimulus that has now created a a reaction or response. So uh in a psychological um you know sort of context. the uh the definition in a psychological context is um a stimulation that causes a reaction, uh often an adverse emotional re response, a reaction.

Well, not all people with the label homeless are the same type of person. Like one person might be homeless, we talked about the episode, because of abuse drug abuse issues. Another person might be homeless because they just lost their job last week and they were living paycheck to paycheck. Another person might be homeless by choice because they decided to be homeless.

It's just a cr you know, a piece of criticism might make you feel bad about yourself. Right. Yeah. And so it's not like and you don't have to have a big story around trauma. It's just that's just that's the human response to that.

And the trigger is what causes the system to go and produce the results that you're looking for. So we use systems thinking all the time and a trigger is basically whatever it was that, um, you know, like Like created the feedback loop that helps you uh get the chain reaction of responses that you're looking for. Or environmental changes trigger adaptive behaviors. So that's another word for trigger. And this is these are all in psychology, by the way.

Developmental psychology uh talks about significant life changes can trigger like the next what you could call like Ericksonian d you know, level of your life. Like what is the next thing that I'm supposed to be doing in my life and how could major life changes be the trigger for that. So you know you're talking about transcendence in the hat model.

Transcendence would be a major life event triggers the next phase developmentally. And so now you're leaving an earlier iteration of yourself and moving to the next iteration of yourself. And that would very much be a transcendence trigger.

I mean, most of the developmental psychology like Ericsson and that sort of thing, most of them end by the age of twenty five. Carl Jung, to go back to Jungian psychology, was one of the very few um people researching midlife as its own developmental level. So And there's a bunch of stuff that comes along with that too. So developmental psychology uses the word trigger to indicate, like we were talking about before, a transcendence component.

And then there's like social psychology, like what triggers behavior in mass? Like a meme could maybe trigger a bunch of people going online to go look at the meme or whatever. So there's also triggering behavior um, you know, as a collective. So even

Or it could be something that you just like had a really bad run in with. And and so now you don't want to experience that again. And so that's a lowercase T trauma. And so traumas that are psychologically like um, or excuse me. triggers that are um are clicked or sort of pushed based on trauma. have some predictable patterns to them.

And uh and and again, they can be physical, you know, like breathing heavy, right? Uh they can be emotional, like going to, you know, like anger, shame, fear, you know, the basic responses. Uh, or they can be behavioral, like um trying to flee or uh trying to push something away or um you know, maybe

I don't know, acting out, uh, being defensive, et cetera. And so those are some of the behavioral triggers. So the word trigger, I think the reason why I mention all of this again is that we use the word so casually. That the assumption is always that what is being talked about is a capital T trauma response.

you know, like your basic behavioral trigger. Yeah. They could be talking about something that isn't trauma related, but still acting as if it is. Yeah. So a person who is poor at emotional regulation. not necessarily because they were traumatized through some sort of like victimization or exploitation or something terrible that happened to them, but maybe they were a person who just like never was expected

to show up in a more adult way. Like, I mean, to me, you could call that a form of, you know, I don't know, sometimes people call that abuse because the parent didn't like train the child to be fit for life, or they spoiled them. But I don't know if, you know, like mild spoiling is necessarily a trauma-related response.

But it is definitely s a a person who will have trouble with emotional regulation out and out, you know, out and about. And so the person might assume that that is somebody who's dealing with something trauma related when it's really just emotional regulation. Yeah. So, um, or somebody who's dealing with maybe you know, like your basic uh

uh developmental psychology, which is you're ready to mature, you're ready to move on to the next level. And in part, that's what we oftentimes are talking about. We're talking about triggers um in your life. that point to a need to go to the next level. So oftentimes ours is a developmental, you know, sort of um c uh component to it. Yeah, more achievement oriented.

counseling or therapy or help. We believe in clinical therapy and we think that certain people that could be very valuable for you. And in fact, I think a therapist can help you determine whether this is material needs to be healed from or whether it needs to be achieved through.

Not everybody has a great therapist. And so, um, so sometimes we have to do the work in-house too. So understanding how these tools work, and and I know you're basically trying to make it so that it's like we're not saying that If you have a trauma related response to something and you get triggered.

It's all your fault and bring it all in-house. Um in fact, one could argue that very little of this is our fault. In fact, one could argue that like most nothing is our fault except for the ru uh what we do after you know after the experience. Um, so let's go back to the main topic which is triggers can help us unearth shadow material. And um and then the question is if a if somebody takes that position, uh are they necessarily victim blaming? So um so to define the shadow

The shadow is basically anything about yourself that you were unaware of, which is another way of saying unprocessed material. Yeah. Right? The shadow is filled with unprocessed material. What is unprocessed material? So, um, in in the world of Jungian complexes, which complexes is all about like getting to unprocessed material, when something is throttling your ability to choose, you know, choose your behavior. Unprocessed material is like experiences that have le uh been left unprocessed.

What is that? Well, that's a memory. It's a memory that you're not visiting. You're not revisiting. You're not trying to figure out what this meant for you. Uh, when you go back to the memory, maybe you're reframing it and seeing it from a different angle or putting a positive spin on it or trying to figure out why it served you or whatever. But you aren't necessarily like sitting with the experience and trying to figure out.

Like how it forged you, how it shaped you. And for a lot of people, sometimes just not reliving a traumatic experience, but just going through what actually happened without having a bunch of I don't know, story and narrative placed on top of it can all by itself be highly cathartic. So unprocessed material are experiences that we have not revisited and understood the meaning of, like the full implication of.

Unprocessed material are also emotions that are stuck inside of us, very much in that sort of, you know, feelings buried alive never dies sort of way. Unprocessed material are our emotions. that are waiting for us to give them attention and do a full processing on them. Right. And we can do that. We can process our emotions through, you know, a wide variety of techniques. Their thoughts that are on process.

So um how we actually think about something, how we've been programmed to think, whether or not our beliefs are serving us, whether or not they're like limiting, or whether or not they are, you know, like just ideas m about the world that Maybe you're creating some cognitive dissonance within us. And then finally, it's the patterns and the meanings and the wishes that remain on processed.

Um, and you could you can kind of uh if you're into you know cognitive functions, you can kind of chart, oh, unprocessed material falls in the realm of like introverted sensing or experiences or memories. Introverted feelings are emotions or feelings about something and how they defined us, what's stuck inside of us that is causing us to behave in certain ways with intentions and motivations that we might be blind to.

what are our thoughts or introverted thinking, right? Like the the cognitive dissonance we might be experiencing and how we're talking to ourselves and eliminat beliefs or, you know, just any any position we take, any opinion we take that hasn't fully been thought through. And then our meanings, our patterns, our wishes, this would be our introverted intuition, our ability to reframe something or to see it from a different angle in order to fully understand it.

So one could say that our shadow is filled with unprocessed material from our introverted functions. That um that then some you know can send over a signal to our extroverted functions to have us act out in certain ways, right? Behave in certain ways. uh and and then you know sometimes gather even more material that remains unprocessed. So the shadow is effectively just like anything about yourself that you are unaware of that is waiting for you to see it and process.

So when w when we say things like a trigger is an opportunity to look at the shadow, I think this can be um sort of misdefined because I think a lot of times people say the shadow is our darkest part. Because the shadow is a dark part, right? It's dark by definition. Yeah. So when we say the darkest part, the assumption is the evilest part or the worst part or the meanest part.

But it's actually dark in the sense of um of unseen, not dark in the sense of evil, not dark in the sense of doing like like with bad intent.

It's not shadow material anymore. My ego's getting triggered in that moment. Right. So I think we need to talk about too that our triggers can be connected to our ego or our shadow. Things I'm very aware of. I know trigger me and they trigger me right there and things I'm not aware of that I, oh whoa, I why did I act that way? Holy crap.

uh because of the work I do. I'm a harmonizing subtype. I do a lot of coaching. Um we do a lot of energetic work in like personality life path. And so I have become far more empathic as an adult than I ever was when I was young. Yeah. But I've always been kind of empathic. And by empathic, I mean like br like slurping in other people's emotions into myself. I've always been kind of that way for anybody that I was in a strong relationship with. So like my family, like my immediate family.

Dad, if I could, you know, send money somehow or whatever, because it would be I would be so distraught around the images of children who were starving. Yeah, for sure. Um, so

So explosions were very common. So um there in these moments, we would be in a fight. We would be in some sort of like impassioned argument heated. Um, we'd be talking about whatever it was we were talking about.

I am the exact opposite. And I think it's because introverted thinking or accuracy is the opposite of extroverted feeling or harmony. So the more emotional I am, the less I mean, like I just I almost become so stupid I or not stupid, but I become I become like completely inarticulate. So we'd be in the middle of a a of a battle.

I rem uh I I learned this phenomena and um from our our arguments and I went out and asked a bunch of other people if this was the case for them and I think this is basically true. Um, the emotion would be baked into the scene or the room that we're in, or maybe we were in the car arguing or whatever, but it would be baked into the room. So um I think for extroverted feeling or harmony.

I think location is tied to emotion. Like the emotion lives in the location that the emotion is being expressed. Yeah. So if I leave a room, like if I'm fighting in a room and I just exit the room, all I have to do is like go five or ten feet outside of the room. The emotion is left in the room of the battle, like where it was baked, like almost like it's like uh like that's the oven. And so the heat gets stays in the oven. And if I can just leave.

I can feel the emotion draining out of me very quickly oftentimes. I can go for like a two to five minute walk or whatever. And on the other side of it, I get my brain back. I get to think. But I would be so filled with an emotion, I was almost like non lingual. I couldn't even tell you. I couldn't even express or say

I I'm I I can't think. Like that's what I was experiencing, but I couldn't say it. I can't think. I need to leave in order to be able to think. I couldn't even use those words because I was so full of emotion. So what I would do is I would leave the room so that I could go get my brain back. And you would think that

Oh, this is just like my first marriage where uh if she leaves the room, we'll never we'll we'll never talk about this again. We'll never have any reconciliation, we'll never come to any meeting of minds. Yeah. We're just gonna be fighting about this and leaving it un you know, unpro uh like uh unresolved for eternity. So you'd follow me. And unfortunately it was almost like the oven with the heat.

it didn't stay in the room now. Now it was following me. And so the proximity of you and me in that battle meant that I couldn't think. I just like I like d I couldn't get far enough away so that I could get my brain back. And it turned into these like

epic problem. It was such an epic problem for us. For so long it was an epic problem. Eventually we realized, oh, that's that's the dance that's going on. Like in the moments when we weren't fighting, I was like later on I was just like, what is even happening there?

So we had a conversation and I was like, and so I explained to you what I thought was going on. Yeah. And you explained, oh, I think what's happening. And then like now we're getting into shadow content. Because it was through those conversations. It was through the trip. We were both triggered like crazy. It was post-processing those triggers that had you going, I think I'm projecting onto you something that was happening from my first marriage.

That was totally shadow content. That was unprocessed material from your first marriage that you had not contended with at all. And so in the early days, you were bringing like like the trigger was very valuable to go back and go, this is what happened to me. This is what remains unprocessed. Uh, I still have a fear of it. Like you're getting emotional about something that isn't happening, but you're bringing it into a moment.

In part to process it. And I think that this is what like Harville Hendrix talks about with Imago relationships. It's like we were recreating scenarios from our past. in order to process what happened not in this moment, but what happened then previously. So we're almost like creating a scenario so that we can finish unfinished business. Does that make sense? Yeah. And so we play our shadow all the time on each other in relationships because we're trying to complete unfinished business. Yeah. So

So I guess to make long story short, too late. The point of all of that is uh eventually you and I used a code word and I I figured out how to say this before I'm so full of an emotion that I can't speak, but I just say I'm not hanging up the phone. Right. That's our code. Our code of hanging up the phone means.

Um, we'll never get resolution on this conversation. So I learned before I was so full I couldn't even say that. I learned to look at you and say, I'm not hanging up the phone. Yeah. And you know that that means I'm just about too dumb to continue talking.

So you give me tons of space, I leave the room, I get my brain back. It usually gives us a couple minutes to just sort of, you know, calm down from whatever heated conversation we're having. And then we get right back into it and we can find resolution. Yeah. So that was the scenario.

Have I actually looked at my shadow material? Have I actually healed from that? Have I actually worked on anything? If the fix is external Right. Like you had to change your behavior to make it okay for me. But what if you were unwilling or incapable of changing your behavior? Am I screwed? Am I out of luck? Can I not work on my shadow or heal from that? I I mean, I'm begging the question. I I believe I can.

And in some ways I'm I'm genuinely asking this to myself, like did I did I have a a shortcut a cut or a bypass just then by having the external fix?'Cause I think I think a person that says you're we're victim blaming and we say to look at the shadow would say, Yeah, the external fict is what we're actually after. That's actually what we're wanting because to have the person have to bring up that trauma or that experience again.

It feels like re victimization or blaming them as the victim, et cetera, et cetera. It is the external world. And we would take it maybe to a physical thing, like Let's say you know, you slap me across the face and one of my parents slapped me across the face when I was a kid and that brings up a trigger for me, everybody would agree it's not okay to slap somebody.

Right. It's like you gotta stop that external behavior. You're not allowed to slap somebody. Well, but it's good for them. It's it's triggering them to look at their shadow because they're you know, their parent or guardian slaps them when they're a kid. It's helping them, right? It's like no, you stop that. That's not okay. Yeah.

But for some reason we say it's okay with words and what we say to each other. We don't necessarily stop those external behaviors, except in this situation which where we did. We we had you change your external behavior. And I changed some of my external behavior as well.

But the work was out here in the external world. It wasn't I mean, I have done healing, I have done inner work, but one could look at this and go, Well, you didn't actually address the inner space, Joel. I mean, maybe you didn't actually see what you need to see there. Maybe it was just covered over by an external fix.

um material that we were just simply unaware of. Like you didn't know that you were bringing in your first relationship into our into our marriage. when you were afraid that I was gonna quote unquote hang up the phone. But then you became aware of it. Once you became aware of it, now it entered egoland, right? Like you're aware that this is a thing.

But what stays in the shadow shadow, and this is why I was like, I'll I'm like 99% agree with you, is the unprocessed material around it. Yeah. So the reason why it was frustrating to you wasn't simply that it reminded you of your first marriage and you don't want to think about your first marriage because that's not the relationship you're in now. The reason why it was so triggering to you is because you hadn't fully processed the impact that that original series of events had on you.

This marriage is also gonna fail. It's just gonna be a slow destruction till the end. We're gonna keep fighting more and more until it all breaks apart. Right. This is how it starts. Like all that's unconscious. Like the introverted intuition or the like running the simulation of where this is gonna head. I'm not actively thinking about that, but all that material is underneath the substrate of what I'm hap what's happening in the moment. That's right. And I'm going

like in my unconscious, I'm laying out the the blocks. I know exactly what's gonna happen. Exactly what's gonna happen. Because I can just see it. Because that's what happened last time. And I'm patterning what's gonna happen this time. And I'm just

That's right. So I'm responding in kind, but I'm not aware of any of that running underneath the surface until I keep having it just and it probably had to be shown to me maybe 30 times, 20 times before I could see all all of it. And I probably haven't seen all of it yet. Right. Like I'm sure there's still material I haven't seen of it.

So once we realized it was, so then the question becomes, is it sh still shadow material? And I would argue until me leaving has zero impact on you. Like the day you and I are quote unquote fighting. And I leave the room and you just wait for me to return. then we will know that it's no longer shadow material because there's no unprocessed material. And I would actually argue that we're kind of there. Like, like basically that's what feels like happens. You and I get heated.

I leave the room, you patiently wait for me to return. I return in about three minutes. We resume the conversation. Like that's basically how it works now. So at this point, I would say it's no longer shadow material for you.

to learn the lesson we need to learn because it's just a little out of our comfort zone, but ta not too heavy a lift for us not get the right lessons. We can either do that or we can create the context ourselves. to help learn those lessons and watch ourselves make progress over time. We can kind of take that in our own hands. Re-victimization is uh when it's too heavy of a lift for the person. Like that they're not that trigger, right? The thing that

is the catalyst that brought up whatever emotional distress or physical distress or behavioral responses that leads them back to remembering trauma. And oftentimes this is like trauma with a capital T. Yeah. But sometimes it's lowercase. in that situation, whatever was the the the stimulus was uh was too heavy a lift for the person in the moment to be able to to to make it meaningful in any other way other than just re-traumatizing them. So like re-victimizing.

Yes. Right. And it's like that person, that was just too heavy a lift for that person. Sure. That was just beyond their capacity to like use the material in any sort of like, you know, personal development way.

Maybe that's where the distinction is. Maybe that's where we could say, that's not victim blaming. That is actually asking the person to use the resources they now have to address the new, the the same challenge in a new light. Is that kind of the distinction we're creating?

It was later on when we were reflecting on why did that fight go so badly? Why did it explode? Why was why was the emotional response like sort of exponential? for the you know, like whatever the original fight was, which quite frankly I never I don't even remember what we were fighting about in any of those scenarios or situations. So they clearly weren't, you know, they clearly weren't like game changers or anything. Yeah. We were just fighting. We were just a couple having a fight.

But the um the emotion was disproportionate to the situation. So uh in the later on when we were reflecting back, like why do those turn so ugly? Why do those turn so bad? uh the um it was in the quiet time that it was like, oh, I have some I have some reflection I need to do and you have some reflection that you need to do. Like we both have we both have unprocessed material here.

that we need to figure out. Yeah. And um and by doing it in the quiet times, it meant that later on when we were in the same scenario in a fight. we could improve the quality of those fights, so to speak. We could get better at them until, like you said, twenty or thirty times later, eventually we got to a point where we just know the drill. Right. I'm I'm emotionally filled.

I can't speak anymore or thank. I say, I'm not hanging up the phone. I walk out of the room. You give me a couple of minutes. I come back and then we resume. Like that's where we're at now. But we would have never been able to do that had we not done processing work in the quiet times. From the from the fight that triggered the uh awareness that we needed to do processing work in the shadow.

That's where maybe it's inappropriate to say, look at your shadow and see it because I I don't I don't have the resource to do it in that moment. Yes. So the person that's saying we're victim blaming in a situation where they don't have the resource to deal with the thing that's coming up for them. or the maturity to deal with it.

I think that is appropriate to say, yeah, maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't see that as a as a valid trigger. I I guess I'm trying to come down to a a place to know If I'm triggered in life, the person listening right now, I'm trying to land this to say, how do I know if this is something that I should see as something, okay, there's actual material here that I can now readdress in the new state I'm in.

Or I'm still in a state that this was created in and I need either professional help or I should push it away for now'cause it's just too trauma traumatizing.

And that's a very valid strategy for a lot of people. Are you saying that's I'm I'm not you're not saying that's wholesale, but are you saying that's a little bit risky because maybe you're not giving yourself the opportunity to now go get the therapy for the triggers that are coming up? Or you sugg like'cause I know that's a strategy. People just they eliminate things in the external world so they don't have to feel anything. Right. And I'm there there's there's validity to that.

but only up to a certain point. Right. And so where is that line? It's subjective for each person, but how do I as a person, if I'm listening right now, determine that for myself?

And then later on you would no longer need the block. You wouldn't need to block it because it would no longer be triggering you. Sure. So it's either that you go process the material so that the the trigger no longer exists. Or you do whatever work you need to do to become the kind of person that can process that material and the block stays in place for longer because you've got a longer road ahead of you. Does that make sense? Yes. It's like, and only you can determine that. Yes.

And if you keep if a person believes that anytime you go inside to try to figure out what it means for you, that blame is always associated with it, that's actually um, that's all by itself something that needs to be processed. Yeah. Like why is introspection always associated with blame? Why is taking responsibility always associated like taking responsibility for the healing the same as saying you're taking responsibility for the original

That's one of the reasons why taking responsibility and going, what do I need to do to get to the other side of this? Yeah. Is about the most empowered action a person can take. And it's not victim blaming at all. Taking responsibility for something is not the same thing as blaming yourself for it. Those two things are not synonymous.

And it's also not saying that you're not going to do anything about it in the outside world, meaning that you can take responsibility for your the you know, the things that are have happened, not

Not taking responsibility for what happened to you, but taking responsibility for the processing work you need to do now in order to get to the other side of it is not the same as saying and then everybody else gets to do whatever they want to. For a lot of people, the processing work on trauma is going and like

you know, confronting their abuser. Sure. That's that's very common. Like you don't have to do that. But for a lot of people, that's part of the process. So it's saying like and and creating really strong boundaries and going, I'm never gonna allow that to happen again.

What you're saying is I shouldn't take responsibility for the person that ran into me. Like that's not my fault. Right. I was a victim to the situation that happened. Somebody slammed into me and broke my arm and The doctor didn't do a good job. They set my bone incorrectly and it healed improperly. And I shouldn't take responsibility for the doctor's actions either. So the person that broke my arm, that ran into me, broke my arm. That's not my fault.

The doctor that set my arm incorrectly is not my fault. Right. But I'm in pain. Right. And it's been two decades. It's twenty years later. And I'm in pain.

By taking responsibility and driving myself to the doctor to ask them to fix this, I'm blaming I'm victim blaming myself. That's basically what you're saying. It'd be as that's as ridiculous as to say taking taking responsibility to heal our emotional or mental state. Right.

It would be just as ridiculous to say I'm victim blaming by going and getting this fixed now. Well, no, you shouldn't it's the doctor's fault and the person that ran into you's fault. Like you're taking this on yourself. You shouldn't do that. That's inappropriate to take that upon yourself to take responsibility. You should just I I'm not sure what they would say if it's an emotional or mental realm, like just keep it feeling awful and not like address it or

maybe the person saying they're sorry would fix I don't know what they I don't know how a person that would feel that way, like in the arm situation, yeah, how they would feel mentally or emotionally,'cause I just can't see it in myself. I don't know, right? I just don't know how I would do that.

So there's the whole it runs the gamut. Yeah. That said, in the case of the arm, you can just tell everybody that you have a susceptible arm and everybody has to like give you wide birth and walk way around you. Sure. But what do you do if you have to get in a subway and it's and there's a bunch of people there? Right. Like you can't control all circumstances or situations. Or I guess you can just, you know, prevent yourself from l living the kinds of experiences that would require a crowd.

Or you can do what you're talking about. So you can either try to control the environment to honor your susceptible arm, right? Your vulnerable arm. Or you can go do the hard work of getting it reset. And um, you know, allowing the body to heal itself right and and now you don't have to avoid everything.

Now, if a person is um is still dealing with a bunch of other trauma related to that, they might not or maybe they're just not in a position, like you said, they're not resourced. Maybe they don't have the money to go get. the arm reset. Maybe they don't have the money for the physical therapy. Maybe they're just not in a position to. Yeah. And in the meantime, because they're not resourced to do it.

And only they know their actual circumstances, it's appropriate in the meantime to request people be kind to you during this time period of healing or this time period of vulnerability. That's appropriate. but the smarter play or the smartest play.

is to go get resources so you can go get that ph physical therapy. So you become the kind of person that can afford the physical therapy. Does it make sense? Yeah. It's like you got to do what you got to do to get yourself to the other side. So you can request that the world walk way around you, which it may or may not do. And if it doesn't, you can get really upset at the world for not walking Ray around you, but you're still in pain because it didn't.

Yeah. Or you can do whatever it takes to get to the other side of it, maybe taking years to first get insurance to get the kind of job that gets you insurance that allows you to, you know, have this kind of elective procedure or whatever it is.

Whatever you have to do to get to the other side. So now on the other side of it, you don't have to worry about it. You never have you don't even have to think about it. You don't have to make any requests. You're just done. And now you can just live whatever full life you want to. You can make any choice as a human being. You can make the choice to request everybody walk right around you. You can make the choice to not become the kind of person who can afford it.

You can make the choice to become the kind of person that affords it and then get to the other side. You you're allowed to do whatever you want to, but one is definitely the more empowered place. One is the place of personal development. One is the place of accelerated maturity, and the other one is not.

So when we say things like triggers are an opportunity for you to look at shadow content. In fact, every trigger is an opportunity for you to look at sh shadow content. We're not saying you deserved the trauma. You deserve the thing that made you get triggered, that in every circumstance or situation, you will be ready for the information or the content. that, you know, like like that you gotta stop everything, stop the presses and go do that work. We're not saying any of that.

We're not saying it was your fault. We're not saying that you should blame yourself. We're not saying that you should allow it to happen again. We're not saying that everybody else is, you know, like uh um like everybody else is pure and you're at fault. But we are saying that every time you have a trigger, there is unprocessed material in there that you are unaware of. And in the case of us fighting,

You were aware of the dance, but that doesn't mean you were aware of every square inch of the unprocessed material, right? Like whatever is unprocessed stays unprocessed until it's not. And then the moment that it's not unprocessed, now the trigger doesn't exist. That's how you know. That's how you know that you no longer have unprocessed material in your shadow because the trigger doesn't exist anymore. So in some ways, they are one-to-one. They are like a one-to-one correlation.

Shadow material, though, is not you being at your worst. It's not the bad part of you. It's not the dark part of you. It's not this evil part of you. It's the part of you that you're unaware of. And we tend to have behaviors live in the shadow that are less than ideal because we don't want to see those parts. Right. We just want to come and push them away. We don't want to see that we're the kind of person that'll fight dirty. Yeah.

We don't want to see that they're the kind of person who can like be evilly undermining. That's why those parts tend to live in the shadow. But the moment you go, Oh no, yeah, no, that was totally me. I did that, I was underhanded. I was kind of an awful person. It's not shadow material anymore. Now it goes in the ego, right? Especially if you processed it through.

And so, um, so the shadow doesn't mean triggers don't mean that um triggers that lead to shadow content don't mean that uh um that you deserved whatever happened to you and now it's going in, it's bringing up the worst parts of you. All it means is that um that there is a catalyst. Of un that is now giving you an opportunity to observe aspects of yourself that you were less. familiar with. And the aspects of ourselves that we're less familiar with have unprocessed material.

Now we're all filled to go back to Jungian complexes, we're all filled with unprocessed material. Tons and tons and tons of it, right? Like I will never be able to process all the material around ourselves in a single lifetime. It's just not possible. But if um if the unprocessed material is throttling our ability to act with freedom.

Uh if it's in uh in our cour in the course that I teach called Personality Dynamics, we talk about the goal is a healthy psyche. And a healthy psyche has choice, right? I want to take this action because it's good for me, but for some reason, I'm not. So if you want to take an action that's good for you and you're not taking it as what we call throttled, right? You're you're throttling action.

What about you is throttling action? If you're unsure, if you're unclear, if you don't know why, it's almost always unprocessed unprocessed material. So the only time we have to really go in there and observe this pro unprocessed material and process it is if it's associated with throttled behavior. It's not a healthy psyche, right? Like we have some work to do. We have some cleanup work to do. And triggers point to that.

Triggers point to the unprocessed material that is throttling our behavior. We're not taking an action we want to take. We're taking an action we don't want to take. Right. We're having a fight and escalating it and losing our minds with our partner, which is not the thing we wanted to do. We just wanted to get to resolution, but now all of a sudden it's explosive. Like these are the moments that these triggers can go back and point to this, um, to the shadow material.

And uh this shouldn't be seen as blame. They should be seen as opportunity. Yeah. And opportunity does not mean that you have to go from zero to sixty, right, in five in five seconds. You don't have to go from awareness to now healed. That's not even possible. In this in the case of the arm, how long does it take?

to r to fix a broken arm, months, right? Maybe sometimes years, depending upon how it happened. Yeah. So being aware of it and doing the work to get to the other side can even psychologically and emotionally take literally years. But you're on your way. You're doing it. You're getting to the other side where it no longer needs to be protected.

I really recommend going over our our website, personalityhacker.com and looking at one of the sixteen owners manuals for the personality types. We've got one for all of the sixteen Myers Briggs types. It's a great place to start a journey because it talks about

Things like trauma looping, which is kind of getting stuck in this place in a personality. Every personality does this differently. They get into this loop and the behavior's hard to stop. Sometimes people can get triggered there. There's some neurosis that live and

what's called our 10-year-old or technically called our tertiary process for each of us. And so we address some of these ideas. We don't go too deep into the shadow in the owner's manuals yet. I think we're gonna be adding some more content there over time. Right now it's mostly the first Four cognitive functions in your personality. And that's pretty, you know, if you're new to type, you're like, whoa, four cognitive functions, what is that?

If you've been around type for a while, you probably know what I'm talking about. But we use a car model to make it easy to understand. And I think those owner's manuals are fantastic. So if you're a a person that wants to get on this journey, it's one of the first places to start.

If you're ready to jump deeper into some of the things we've been talking about, like actually looking and on the hunt for triggers, allowing yourself to see what material if you want to be brave enough and see what emerges. and go through a process of seeing your shadow displayed to you. We have a shadow work program. We call it personality life path mentorship. It does more than just shadow work, but it's it tunes into the shadow. We see the unconscious material

We understand our relationship to that and then we help everybody create a systems map of their life and an action plan to operate that systems map. We do it over eight weeks with a live event, three days a live event that easier in person or streaming. People report it's life changing. I mean, it we just got through with our profile training and people were coming out of PLP, our Life Path Mentorship, the shadow work content, and they were raving inside the profiler training.

ecosystem. There's a bunch of people inside PT now that want to take PLP, Antonia. Uh I don't know if you knew that at the live event they were they were talking a lot about it. So Those two places are a good place to start if you're resonating with some of the some of the things we're talking about here on this episode. Yeah. And then I'd love to hear what's coming up for you as we talk about this too. Like what's surfacing for you? How are you thinking about this?

We talked about triggers, trauma. We talked about, you know, your shadow. Have you struggled with this? Do you still struggle with this? Do you see it as healing, achievement, transcendence? Some of those those triggers maybe you deal with if you're listening.

Come over while you're getting that owner's manual and signing up for PLP. Also make a comment under this episode. Leave, you know, leave a question, a comment, or share your story. I think it's really important we understand where you're coming from, maybe a story of your life.

Where maybe you're triggered, you overcame it, or where you haven't been able to overcome it. Yeah. You're still working on it. Or maybe there's something else coming up for you. We want to know, come over, make your voice heard.

Yeah. Right. Like it's a it's a conversation of our times because we are really invested in mental health in this time period. And what what creates a healthy psyche? And um and I guess we just spent who knows how long, 90 minutes, two hours talking about.

sort of empty for a while and then I make my next pitiful plea for a rating and review and then we'll get a couple more. So I think it's time for me to make another pitiful request. For a rating and review because um because we do these day in, day out. Like every week we've done them for