You get triggered easily because your body is doing what actors do on purpose: attaching old moments to new ones. The more you have attached, the less it takes to set you off.
By Judith Shekoni, actress and creator of The Shift · Updated 20 September 2026I learned this from acting. When we work on a script, we put triggers in on purpose. We take something from our own past and put it where the character experiences something similar. It's called substitution.
Then when the other character says the line, it triggers our original response, and it matches the character's.
That is exactly what your body is doing all day.
Someone brushes past you, and it tags on to the time someone knocked you over, or the time your dad hit you.
When we want high stakes, we stack them. We want the adrenaline.
Your body stacks them too. Your body holds unprocessed feelings, and these rise to the surface when something similar happens again. So your feelings are bigger than the event.
If this happens often, your system doesn't have time to recover and gets stuck in that heightened state. You are then much more easily triggered by anything: your child being slow, the car in front stopping, the people in front of you in the queue, someone banging your table. You live off adrenaline.
If it rains on holiday, I could think it's going to be a crap holiday, because I am still attached to the last time rain ruined a holiday, when I was a child with my family.
That state is what the new rain puts me in. And that state ruins this holiday.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If it still has a charge, you’ll get triggered. So we teach you how to get out, fast, before you're stuck in Survival Mode. What is Detriggering?
On the deeper level, we work on the system so you don't get triggered by the things you used to. How to heal your triggers. How a trigger turns into Survival Mode
The Detriggering Workshop is a free live hour online with Judith Shekoni.
The Shift is personal development and education, not therapy or medical treatment.
Why your feelings are bigger than the event, how to Detrigger in the moment, and how to stop fighting the ghosts of your past. Nine pages, from Judith.
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