Keeping your calm when triggered

Stress and overwhelm may be running particularly high these days, but even under ‘normal’ circumstances, everybody sometimes gets triggered while parenting. Your child talks back with sass, or does something unkind to their sibling. The house is a mess – again – or you’re overwhelmed by the length of your to-do list. All of a sudden, your higher brain goes offline, and your reptile brain takes over… acting reptilian.

Despite our best intentions and visions of the parents we want to be, we all sometimes lose it. And yet, it is worth putting effort into identifying what triggers you, and developing ways to manage them. When your higher self stays in charge, you’ll find more tools for actually solving the problem, and you are likely to learn better ways of self-care as well.

WHAT’S GOING ON?

Triggers are essentially anything that sends us into fight / flight / freeze mode. You can tell you’ve been triggered when you have a seemingly automatic, negative, often out-of-proportion response. Triggers can be rooted in our childhoods (eg. we were censured for taking up space, so it feels dangerous when our child is a ‘show off’), or they can simply be a cumulation of daily stressors that leave us depleted and overwhelmed (eg. you're exhausted, have a mountain of work to catch up on, and your child won’t go to sleep). In either case, your higher brain suddenly goes offline, and your reptile brain will do anything to stamp out the threat and regain a sense of control. And unfortunately, it does reptile-like things, like yell, rage, or be harsh to whomever it sees as the enemy… even your beloved kids.

While this happens to everybody, and it may feel empowering to let your feelings out, there are several reasons to try to "self-regulate" when you are triggered. Self-regulation is being self-aware and mindful in order to realize when you're being triggered, and choose a different response.

Note that self-regulation is different from trying to control or suppress your very strong emotions (which is not healthy psychologically). As psychologist Stuart Shanker put it: “Self-control is about inhibiting strong impulses; self-regulation [is about] reducing the frequency and intensity of strong impulses by managing stress-load and recovery. In fact, self-regulation makes self-control ... in many cases, unnecessary.”

Self-regulation is the desirable path because:

By modeling self-regulation you teach your kids to do the same. Greater self-regulation is linked with greater overall well-being at all ages, and helps young people be more successful in school and social relationships.
Self-regulation signals to you both that you are not in an emergency (whereas losing your temper reinforces your feelings of being in danger). And after self-regulating, you won't need to deal with any added feelings of guilt or disappointment for having over-reacted or been unkind.
Your tantrum doesn’t solve the problem – in fact, an intense reaction from you is likely to send your kids into fight / flight / freeze as well, and they aren’t able to absorb, learn, or make productive choices around the issue. Usually they just want to shut you out.