There's research on trigger warnings, research that will equally say trigger warnings work and don't work. It's depending on what research you look at. One of the ideas behind trigger warnings not working is because now oh my god. Trigger warning. Something's gonna happen. It creates this, like, kind of, like, negative anticipation. Personally, my belief is Mastin of the time, at least in my experience, I've never experienced life giving me a trigger warning before. Shit
just happens. And so it's not like I mean, I feel like there can be too much cobbling sometimes because the goal of life is not to be is to not be triggered. That's not our goal. Right? We want to understand our triggers and then better navigate them with maturity, with, like, better wiring in your prefrontal cortex. But, ultimately, if somebody is expecting the world to have all these trigger warnings, you're actually outsourcing your boundaries to everybody else but yourself. Right?
And so it's way better to stop trying to manage other people's behavior and to be able to put yourself in situations where you wanna be in, where people are just behaving the way that you would rather prefer, for the most part. Sometimes that's not possible if someone's a child and there's economic constraints or whatever. But at the end of the
day, the goal is not to not be triggered. The goal is to understand when I'm triggered, what do I do with it, what are the thoughts, feelings, physical sensations that I'm feeling, And to build this interoception Kipp, because interoception, this is, like, what's happening on the inside, is, like, probably one of the most missing skills in personal development and therapy and all the things. Right? It's like, I remember I was at my
chiropractor. I started with a new chiropractor recently who's brilliant at what he does. And, like, I have such a I have such a focus on paying attention to what's happening in my body because it's what I teach, but also because I've, like, worked on healing so many things and I work on alignment and be able to be functional. And so, like, he'll ask me, like, after an adjustment, what's happening? And I'll go into such detail about what's
happening. Or, like, I was with my osteopathic, physician the other day working on some tension in my foot. He goes, where's the foot pain? I go, it's in the lumbar close between the 4th, 5th, and 3rd metatarsals on the lateral side of both my feet. It's almost the exact same strain pattern, and it goes all the way up, right into, I think probably my calcaneus hand, like like, area. There's some, like, tension pattern that's going there, and then it goes medial up the but the medial gastroc.
Like, I I can I can, like, literally give you all the specific details? And the reason why I do that is because when I would go and say my foot hurts, it wouldn't be the most effective way to get treatment. So if I can be specific about where the foot pain is, then I can, like, for example, get better care. So when you understand what's happening in your body and you build interoception, you're like, oh, that's interesting. I feel this, like, dorsal experience of
sadness, like, right in my diaphragm. Anyone feel that, by the way, when you get sad or, like, depressed or grief, you gotta feel your diaphragm. That's where the myelinated part of the vagus nerve is no longer myelinated. And so that's where the dorsal branch begins. So, of course, you're probably gonna feel something there. Right? So it's like and, oh, it's not just sadness. There's, like, there's, like, tension in there and, like, it kinda hunch over.
So there's like this awareness of how you do what you do, and most of us don't go through life without this interoceptive Kipp set. And when you build more interoception, when your clients build more interoception, and you fight, okay, or you disagree, it's a whole different conversation. Like, let's take for example, anyone ever heard of nonviolent communication Mastin example? It's kinda like one of the standards. Okay? So nonviolent communication is, I I won't get too much into it, but
I language. Right? So it's about my experience. Right? I have met, and I love the idea of taking accountability for, like, this is my experience. And I have seen and met people who, like, love nonviolent communication, but they lack interoception and what's happening on the inside. And they come off, like, more passive aggressive sometimes or Kipp of still blame me or, like, I feel like you're an asshole and stuff like
that. They don't really practice the actual principles of, like, active listing or NBC. But when you have awareness of, like, let's just say that you're not and let's just say that that person actually did something. Okay? Wrong or whatever. Right? You would still wanna be able to have your own internal awareness because when you fight well, when you communicate well, you're able to communicate what's happening in your body.
You're able to communicate what's happening in your experience. Right? So if something someone did something to me and I'm like, well, you abandoned me, you betrayed me, and then you, like, prioritize somebody else over me or whatever. Right? That's a story. That's a story. Right? But if I could say, when you did this specific behavior, I felt a sadness in my stomach that really felt like, deep abandonment. And
then, like, there was a bunch of other things. I didn't speak up. There were a bunch of things that just kinda triggered that same feeling, and I felt more and more and more alone, more and more isolated, and that's what happened to me.
Right? And that's why I didn't respond on a text message. Now we're not justifying it, but also it Kipp removes quote blame because ideally in relationships, certainly with your clients, your our goal should be to help them navigate their nervous system and in a relationship to help both people navigate their nervous systems. If you don't even know what's happening in your nervous system, how can you possibly think to be a good coach or partner or anything for anybody?
Right? Because if you just have all this reaction stuff happening in your system that you're not aware of, and then you're blaming people on the outside for how you're feeling without that self awareness, you're not gonna be a convincing communicator. You're not gonna learn more about yourself and you get stuck in trauma loops. Right? And so and also when you self report, like, I no way could argue with that. Right? You could feel angry and make up a bunch of things about what someone
did or didn't do, same thing with your clients. You could argue that for days. Who's ever argued details in a relationship? Well, no. That's not what happened. This is what happened. Oh, no. No. No. I didn't say that. I said this and all all that shit. Right? Well, first of all, when you're dysregulated, like, again, your your your your your good thinking is gone and your working memory is
shit. So debating what someone did or didn't do if you're both disregulated, unless you have, like, a camera, you know, I can watch, okay, is probably pointless because we wanna improve the next interaction. But what we wanna recognize is is that this regulation makes you not as smart, not as intelligent, and it means you're in a reaction that you've learned from the past. And so what we wanna recognize is if you can self report, this is what's happening inside of me when this happens. Now
it's very possible the other person doesn't feel as defensive. And they learn more about you and you learn more about yourself. And in good relating, if somebody knows that this is the thing that triggers you, you would both work together to make sure that less of that happens and vice versa. Right? And the same thing for clients. Right? Because here's the thing. One of the reasons why this is so powerful for clients, I can't tell you how many clients I
work with that are high functioning that burn out. Anyone ever burned out before? Right? Burnout, part of the reason why people burn out is because they lack interoceptive skills. They have dissociated from their body signals and their emotions until you you ever heard this idea that, like, the universe, you know, sends a whisper and then eventually a storm and all set of stuff. Right? And then eventually
there's bit no. Your body does that. Your body's like whisper and and all of a sudden, like, your somaticizing up, you have an injury or something like that. That's how it finally gets your fucking attention. Right? So a lot of this work that we're doing is trying your body and your emotions and all of the reactions, wanting your higher parts of your nervous system to be able to pay attention to them in a way that your parents couldn't, in a way that your
caregivers couldn't. And hear me now. Okay? The lack of attention to something is neglect. The lack of attention to something is neglect even if you don't mean to. So if you're not paying attention to your emotions, if you're not paying attention to your body, it's not to blame you, but
you're neglecting them. Right? And, usually, this is new for people because, you know, they don't have caregivers or a family system or even coaching containers or or or therapeutic containers where, like, it's okay to emote and express. Right? Like or if it is, it's only like a a small section of what they're able to emote or express. And so our whole goal is to make the unconscious conscious, to make what's implicit explicit.
Right? And to update our nervous system so our neuroception can be a match to what is versus a mismatch. Right? Right? Because and there's different ways to be mismatched with your neuroception. You could be in the middle of a threat and not activate fight or flight. That's a mismatch. Right? Because you're like, whatever. Doesn't matter. And that can happen a lot when there's, like, people are normalized
in war zones and stuff like that. Like, the first time a bomb goes off or you hear a gun, you have this, like, certain response to fight or flee, and then eventually, it's just kinda like whatever. Right? So that that'll be a mismatch. Another mismatch would be that everything's safe, but you wanna run our fleet. Right? That's also a neuroceptive mismatch. Okay? And that's not a negative thing. It's normal when we've been through trauma or adverse experiences because we carry the past with us.
Part of starting to rewire the nervous system though is understanding wait a minute. What's happening in my system right now? When did that start? What are the component parts of this? Because I don't want to live my life based on the limitations of what's happened to me. I I want to live my life based on what
I want to create. Well, I really can't do that in full if I don't know how I get in my own way somatically, emotionally, in my thinking, in my relating, in my environments, and most importantly, unconsciously. Right? Because you, quote, get in your own way because parts of you like that behavior is not safe. We have to be on look out for threat. We can't people can't be trusted. All those different types of things. And so, a big piece of that is learning how
to discover your triggers. And what I will tell you is, like, it is unbelievable to me what people will try to do to not do this work. Anything. They will they will they literally, like, all this not psychedelics, breath work, juice cleanses, trips to an ashram for a year to meditate. Like, all this stuff, which great. All that stuff is great, but we wanna break the trigger cycle. There's a triggering
stimulus, something happens. There's a trigger and there's a response to it, and we want to improve that cycle, and coaches generally will tell you're in a story. Right? And many times, you'll be diagnosed with something that may or may not be accurate, but, like, they're not taking the environment into, consideration. Right? Like, do you have PTSD or do you live in an
abusive home? I don't know. Maybe, like, that might make sense. So we wanna understand how is the environment impacting somebody's, nervous system and how they're being triggered. Does that make sense? Right? Because there's so much that goes into why someone feels the way they do, and we wanna contextualize it, normalize it, and we want to be better and better at either activating or deactivating the things that we want so that we can go in the direction that
we want to go in. So turning towards being curious about deconstructing, breaking down, and understanding your triggers is a extremely valuable skill set that's not sexy. It's not fun. It feels like shit for a period of time, but, ultimately, it's gonna help you do better and better and better.