Triggers | 21 Days of Prayer: Day 12

hat other people or events are responsible for their triggers and subsequent feelings. Many have a tendency to say: “So-and-so made me angry.” “So-and-so ruined my day.” “I’d be okay if So-and-so hadn’t done such-and-such to me.” This attitude of nonresponsibility for our feelings and our actions is rampant. This too starts with early “influence learning.”

The belief that “they make me angry.” This leads to an almost automatic critical response toward anyone or anything we misperceive as being responsible for our feelings. We become experts at other-examination rather than self-examination. We must take responsibility for our current reaction to what happened in the past. Otherwise, we will forever feel like a victim.

What causes my triggers—the actual event or my reaction to the event? The answer is both. While we cannot undo what has happened, we can do something about our reaction. We can acquire skills to help us complete our relationship to the pain, disappointment, frustration, and heartache caused by what has happened. It is bad enough that horrible things happened to us. It becomes diabolical when we ourselves sustain and recreate the pain through our own memories. The problem is heightened by the fact that we were not taught the correct skills to complete the pain caused by the memories of long-ago events.

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