"How Did I Get Here?” Maybe the most important question you ask yourself
When it comes to self-awareness, identifying what you’re feeling can be just the start. Understanding how you got there can take you on a path to growth.
The word “triggered” gets thrown around a lot. Especially if you’re in a therapist’s office, or on TikTok. More than just a buzzword though, triggers are situations, people, even things (let’s just call them nouns) that can put you into an immediate unwanted emotional state. Like the flip of a switch, triggers can be quick to impact and activate but they can also be incredibly difficult to spot in the moment.
When it comes to relationships, our partners and their behavior/tone/words and so much more can often become triggering to us if they remind us of an unwanted experience or emotion, bringing up a familiar yet uncomfortable feeling. Sometimes this feeling is super quick, and something we have a knee-jerk response to. Other times however, a trigger is related to a feeling of vulnerability or emotional exposure that builds upon itself over a short period of time, like a couple of days or even weeks.
If you’re working on becoming more self-aware and conscious of your emotions, you know identifying what it is you’re feeling and communicating those feelings to your partner is incredibly important in your self-growth journey. It can also be a tricky conversation to navigate because not everyone speaks feelings. In fact, many times in a relationship you’ve got a feeler, and a thinker, working at odds to get to the same place: understanding. Regardless of the way you and your partner process, being able to discover your own emotional responses and processes and getting to know where they come from is vital to reaching depths in your personal growth.
Self-awareness is like an onion with many layers. There’s always another layer to peel back and unpack for yourself if you’re curious and conscious of it. If you’ve been in the practice of identifying your emotional responses and figuring out the ways in which you operate - or are triggered - emotionally, asking yourself, “how did I get here,” can be the key to unlocking your next, deeper self-revelation.
“How did I get here?” can work in a lot of ways; microscopically looking at your most current emotional reaction to something or taking a more meta, overall approach to how you operate in general. When you’re ready to peel back a little more of the layer, start from where you are and work backwards, asking yourself what else could’ve influenced your emotional state. “What happened?”, and then, “what happened prior to that?” Taking a look systemically at the other things/events/emotional reactions you may or may not have had to other pressing, simultaneous issues can often influence where we end up.
