When the Trigger Isn't the Trigger

My husband woke me early this morning after a bad dream and gave me a big hug.

I was still half asleep, so I didn't ask too much about it. Later, when I'd properly woken up, I found him out on the deck doing yoga.

I asked if he'd had a bad dream and whether he wanted to talk about it.

He told me he'd wanted some time to meditate and reflect before speaking about it. Over the past few nights, he'd been having dreams — particularly the feeling he remembered of others being disapproving or critical of him.

He would wake feeling disorientated, with a wrenching feeling in his chest and a deep sense of inadequacy.

I'm not enough.

I'm not worthy.

I've done something wrong.

As we talked, something else began to make sense.

Over the previous few days, he'd noticed the same feelings appearing during completely ordinary moments between us.

One happened while we were in the tender (dinghy attached to our yacht).

The outboard motor is loud and he sits right beside it while steering. I asked him something and he couldn't hear me, so he asked me to repeat myself.

I did.

He still couldn't hear.

By the third attempt, I was frustrated and raised my voice more sharply than necessary.

I remember the look he gave me — surprised, taken aback and annoyed.

Another time, he was sitting beside the air-conditioning unit, which is also incredibly loud. Again, he couldn't hear me. Again, I had to repeat myself several times.

Nobody had done anything wrong. It was simply noisy.

But by the time I repeated myself, I probably wasn't my usual chirpy, smiling self.

He told me that in that moment, something happened inside him almost instantaneously.

He felt small.

Inadequate.

Worthless.

As we talked that morning, the pieces started coming together.

I hugged him and apologised. I explained that I'd never intended to make him feel that way. We also talked practically about how we could communicate differently in noisy situations.

We now have some rather hilarious improvised sign language for high winds and loud engines. 😂

But once that part was resolved and we felt connected again, we became curious about the deeper layer.

He said something incredibly insightful:

"I could tell at the time that the intensity of my emotional reaction was exaggerated compared with what was actually happening. That told me there was something else underneath it."

And there it was.

The trigger wasn't really the trigger.

When the present is experienced through the past.

My frustrated tone was real.

But the meaning his system gave it was something much bigger.

A moment of irritation became:

I'm disappointing someone.

I've done something wrong.

I'm inadequate.

I'm not enough.

His body wasn't responding only to what was happening between us in that moment. The present was being experienced through a filter shaped by earlier experiences of criticism and disapproval.

This is one of the reasons I say that life is experienced from the inside out.

Two people can experience exactly the same event and live completely different internal realities because we don't experience events in isolation. We experience them through our beliefs, memories, expectations, nervous-system patterns and relationship with ourselves.

This doesn't mean the external world isn't real.

It means our experience of it is deeply influenced by what we carry within us.

And sometimes the intensity of our reaction gives us a clue.

When the emotional intensity outweighs the situation, perhaps we can become curious rather than certain.

Instead of immediately concluding, This person has made me feel this way, we might ask:

What else is here?

Symptoms are intelligent

My husband's emotional reaction wasn't a failure of regulation.

It was information.

The wrenching feeling in his chest.

The dreams.

The sudden feelings of inadequacy.

The disproportionate intensity of his reaction.

They were all signals.

Something inside him was asking to be seen.

Had we simply tried to make the uncomfortable feelings disappear, we might have missed what they were trying to communicate.

This is why I believe symptoms are intelligent.

Sometimes the body knows there is incoherence before the conscious mind understands what it is.

Awareness precedes change.

What made this experience particularly beautiful was that my husband could witness his own reaction.

He wasn't completely consumed by it.

Part of him could observe:

This reaction is bigger than what just happened.

That awareness created space.

And inside that space, curiosity became possible.

This is the foundation of Inner Coherence.

We cannot consciously change a pattern we cannot yet see.

Compassion before correction.

As we explored further, another layer emerged.

For much of his earlier life, my husband had looked externally for validation.

Over the past few years, he has done an extraordinary amount of inner work and no longer depends upon that external validation in the way he once did.

But we realised there was another step.

Learning to offer himself what he had once sought from others.

He can still be incredibly self-critical. He finds it difficult to praise himself. He can accomplish something wonderful and almost immediately follow it with:

"But I could have done this better..."

or

"This is where I stuffed up."

When we talked about practising self-love and appreciation, he said:

"I've never done it. I don't really know how."

That sentence changed the quality of the conversation.

There was nothing to correct.

There was something to understand.

If a child has never learned to swim, we don't throw them into deep water and criticise them for struggling.

We teach.

We practise.

We encourage.

Why should learning a new relationship with ourselves be any different?

So before trying to change anything, we offered compassion to the younger version of him who hadn't had much opportunity to practise loving self-appraisal.

Not blame.

Not judgement.

Understanding.

From there, change felt possible.

Practice before pressure.

We talked about strengthening a different pathway through practice.

Not grand declarations of self-love that didn't feel believable.

Small things.

What is one thing about yourself you genuinely appreciate?

What can you forgive yourself for?

Where could you offer yourself a little more compassion?

What might your older, wiser self say to the younger version of you who didn't yet know how to give himself the love he needed?

What might happen if you practised this just a little every day?

We weren't trying to transform decades of conditioning in one conversation.

We were simply practising another way.

Afterwards, he paused and said:

"I feel lighter."

Of course he did. 😂❤️

He could physically feel the difference in his chest.

His body had softened.

Progress, not perfection

We didn't "fill his cup."

We didn't solve self-worth.

We didn't eradicate an old pattern.

That wasn't the goal.

We noticed.

We understood.

We practised something different.

That's enough.

Inner Coherence isn't about reaching a state where we are never triggered again.

It's about noticing destabilisation sooner, understanding ourselves more compassionately, returning to centre more readily, and becoming less governed by the old reaction over time.

Sometimes profound change begins with something incredibly small.

We uncover who we've always been

Perhaps my favourite part came later that day.

We successfully moored stern-to in Vasiliki.

For anyone unfamiliar with boating, manoeuvring a large catamaran stern-to in an unfamiliar marina with wind around you is one of those situations that can bring every internal pattern straight to the surface. 😂

It requires focus, communication and quick decisions.

Afterwards, I noticed something different about my husband.

He was buoyant.

He praised our teamwork.

He acknowledged his own capability.

And something was conspicuously absent.

There was no:

"But I should have..."

No:

"I could have done that better."

No immediate catalogue of mistakes.

I pointed it out.

He smiled.

Later, when we spoke about it again, I realised there was something else I had noticed.

His focus during the mooring had felt different.

It wasn't intensity.

It was calm clarity.

He was still highly focused. Alert. Responsive.

But he wasn't gripping the experience.

He wasn't operating from an internal pressure to get everything right.

He was simply present.

This is an important distinction.

We often mistake intensity for effectiveness.

We think caring means gripping tighter, trying harder, thinking faster, putting more pressure on ourselves.

But coherence doesn't make us passive.

We can still act decisively.

We can still concentrate deeply.

We can still respond quickly when the moment requires it.

But the internal state from which the action arises is different.

Coherence doesn't remove challenge. It changes the state from which we meet it.

We uncover; we don't manufacture.

That afternoon, we didn't manufacture a more confident man.

We didn't force a different way of being.

We didn't install worthiness.

We didn't teach him to become somebody different.

For a moment, some of the self-criticism simply wasn't running the show.

And underneath it was already a man capable of appreciating himself.

A man who could enjoy what he'd accomplished without immediately searching for what he'd done wrong.

A man who could be focused without being tense.

A man who could experience competence without needing perfection.

Perhaps that's what healing so often is.

Not becoming somebody new.

But gently removing the layers that prevent us from experiencing who we already are.

Everything belongs

It would have been easy that morning to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable feelings.

To reassure him quickly.

To make him laugh.

To move on with the day.

But feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness and discomfort belonged too.

It all belongs.

They weren't interruptions to our day.

They became the doorway.

We didn't need to wallow in them, nor did we need to push them away.

We listened.

And because we listened, they led us somewhere.

This is also why the goal isn't happiness.

Our aim wasn't to make him happy again as quickly as possible.

The aim was coherence.

Truth.

Understanding.

And from there, peace arose naturally.

We heal in relationship

There is another part of this story that matters.

This didn't happen only inside my husband's meditation practice.

It happened between us.

I needed to be able to hear that my behaviour had affected him without collapsing into guilt or becoming defensive.

He needed to be able to share his experience without making me responsible for healing it.

We apologised.

We listened.

We laughed.

We changed something practical.

And then we became curious together.

Healing is deeply personal.

But so much of what hurts us was formed in relationship — and sometimes relationship becomes the place where we discover something different is possible.

Stewardship begins within

The ripple became even more visible later that afternoon.

As my husband returned to coherence, I could see the difference in the way he moved through the world.

There was the twinkle in his eye again.

During the stressful mooring, he didn't snap at the girls.

He was focused and responsive.

Afterwards, rather than becoming absorbed in whatever mistakes we might have made, he breathed deeply and took in the experience around him.

And something happened to the rest of us too.

I relaxed.

The girls were relaxed.

The whole atmosphere aboard the boat felt lighter.

Nobody sat down that morning intending to create a more peaceful family.

One person simply noticed something happening inside himself and became curious about it.

But our internal state doesn't end at the boundary of our skin.

It influences how we speak.

How we listen.

How quickly we react.

How we parent.

How we partner.

How we lead.

How safe other people feel around us.

The quality of the whole emerges from the coherence of its parts.

And sometimes stewardship of the whole begins with something as quiet as noticing:

"My reaction feels bigger than this moment."

Then having the courage to look underneath.

Perhaps that is what the art of living in coherence really looks like.

Not never being triggered.

Not never feeling pain.

Not reaching some permanent state of serenity.

But learning to listen when something inside us speaks.

To meet what we find with compassion.

To practise another way.

And then to return, little by little, to who we have always been.

Love,

Kim x