There are many things that are non-negotiable as part of being alive. Sustenance on food is one of them. I need food to continue being alive. Barring genetic exceptions, animals have a mechanism of feeling hunger embedded in their DNA. I'm going to feel hungry when the nerve endings in my stomach send a particular sign. That's a non-negotiable trigger.
One trigger that we seem to take as a non-negotiable one is anger. It's easy to think that we can't be exempt from the experience of anger. Although we can generally have days where we cruise through life, I think you'll agree with me when I say anybody can be pushed enough to "lose it" and be angry.
But is it? For the amount of time we spend being angry, we spend such little time studying and understanding anger itself. What does it mean to be "triggered" in general? And how does it relate to anger?
Resilience
On my website there is a quiz that evaluates your resilience across multiple dimensions in life. What the resilience is supposed to measure is two things:
1. How elastic is your mind when it comes to returning towards your baseline state after a disturbance?
2. How stable is your mind when it comes to swaying from your baseline state after a disturbance?
Thinking about this in four dimensions:
Elastic / Unstable: You get VERY upset or excited easily, but it takes just a few minutes to calm down.
Lax / Stable: You don't get upset or excited that easily unless there's a big event, but when you do it takes a long time to come back.
Lax / Unstable: You get into an altered state easily AND it takes a long time to recover.
Elastic / Stable: You don't get into altered states that often and even if you do, you come back very quickly.
What does this have to do with anger? Entering the "altered state" is basically being triggered, and entering into the negative altered state is "being angry".
This implies that there is a threshold we cross to get to this altered state land. How is that threshold determined? Because it seems to vary, based on the fact that we measure stability.
My mom gets very upset when my dad's office is untidy, while my dad's okay with it. My dad gets very upset when he doesn't get enough sleep, but my mom's okay with it. How is the line drawn?
What Anger Touches
This is a bottom line that really needs to be experienced and understood. Anger touches your sense of self, or the ego. When something happens to something you don't care about, there is no reason to be angry because it has nothing to do with you.
But what happens when something happens to something close to you? Closer to you? Closest to you?
When I get angry waiting for an email that was supposed to arrive, WHY am I angry? There are plenty of emails that are delayed, and why does that particular email anger me? Possibly the email contains my health benefits or my job interview results.
But even in that case, WHY do I have to be angry? What is the reason that makes the anger non-negotiable? Well, because the delay of the email impacts me. Certain choices of my life depend on that email, and I'm being forced to wait in suspension.
This may not be immediately understandable to you right now, but ultimately there is a deep, deep unconscious ego speaking along the lines of "how dare you do this to me?"
My sense of self has unconscious rules about what it can do, what others are allowed to do to it, and such. When the world behaves differently from these unconscious rules, anger is invoked. That is the triggered state. The sense of self is protected and preserved by the safeguarding unconscious rules — so when the rules are violated it is acting in fight-or-flight survival mode.
Triggers are not about the external event. They are about the ego's unconscious rules being violated. The same event that enrages one person leaves another completely calm — because their unconscious rules are different.
Freedom From Anger
What makes anger arise are two pre-conditions. One, the existence of the self, and two, the existence of the unconscious rules. These unconscious rules in common everyday terms is the belief that I am right.
I work with many clients with family disputes. Family, while a comforting environment for many, is also like a prime breeding ground for anger because it is filled with people with shared identities with slightly varying unconscious rules.
Taking the example from above, my mom has a different rule about tidiness and she gets upset because to her, being tidy is the RIGHT thing to do. My dad gets upset about lack of sleep because in his unconscious, one HAS to be well-rested to feel good and his unconscious is so sure that it's RIGHT about that.
Because we spend such little time studying and understanding anger, we don't fully feel into the truly devastating and harmful effects it has on us. Many people understand how much they have been poisoning themselves with anger AFTER they have found the freedom from anger.
My hope is that you will start your study of yourself sooner than later. When you understand that there is no self, and there is no right or wrong, anger has no ground to sustain itself and its grip on you will naturally disappear. Find freedom from anger.