All triggers are self-inflicted.
Someone else's triggers are not your responsibility.
Let me tell you a secret.
You can’t really trigger anyone.
No, seriously.
You can’t.
That might seem counterintuitive for a project dedicated to teaching people how to trigger their enemies for fun and amusement, but hear me out.
The only time that someone is really triggered is when they ALLOW themselves to be triggered.
You can set them up. You can say the most biting thing that will make them weap sweet glorious tears behind their smiling mask. You can call out the hypocrisy they care most about hiding from the world.
But none of that will trigger them unless they ALLOW it to trigger them.
It’s a little like saying “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
The fact is that words do hurt…but only when we allow them to hurt.
Most human beings go through life believing the falsehood that our experience creates our emotions. Things happen to us and we experience emotions as a result of those things. People wrong us and hurt us and we get sad, depressed, or angry.
However, the truth is the opposite. Our experience does not create our emotions.
Our emotions create our experience.
Just because someone says something to you that you don’t like doesn’t mean that you are required to experience negative emotions as a result of that thing. You can make the choice to do any number of things when someone says something you don’t want to hear.
You can make the choice to ignore them and focus your energy elsewhere.
You can make the choice perceive them as a crazy person who is unhinged from reality and therefore has no credibility.
You can make the choice to acknowledge the truth of what they’re saying, but also say “so what?”
Just because something bothers someone else doesn’t mean you have to allow it to bother you.
And, if we’re honest about it, the people trying to trigger you are never really bothered by the things they claiming to be bothered by.
They’re just feigning outrage to weaponize it against you.
If they don’t really care, then why should it matter to you?
That’s why all triggers are self-inflicted wounds.
If the person being triggered simply made the choice not to be triggered, and allowed themselves to discover a different way to perceive the situation, there’s nothing the person trying to trigger them can do about it.
But luckily for us, most people don’t realize how much power they have in the situation.
Most human beings believe they are at the whim of whatever comes out of the mouths of strangers.
The belief that it’s true is what makes it true.
They’ll only stop being triggered when they learn to look at things differently.
You shouldn’t spend a moment of your time and energy worrying about what you’ve done to them. You haven’t done anything.
All that happened is they listened to something you said…considered it…and then triggered themselves.
The trigger was a result of their own thought process. You have no control over that. And, what’s more, if it hadn’t been you who provoked them to trigger themselves, it would have been someone else.
The problem is not the words. The problem is their own thought process. And they are the only ones who can fix their own thought process.
Releasing a sense of responsibility for other people’s emotions is one of the most liberating things you can do.
You’re not responsible for someone else’s unmanaged baggage, toxic attitude, or low self-worth.
They are responsible for those things.
And they will only stop being triggered when they start taking responsibility for those things.
In the meantime, have fun. Experiment. Study their behaviors. Enjoy the process of understanding the complexities of human emotions.
The more powerless people you trigger, the more you will realize how much power you truly have.