Healing and Repair After a Triggering Comment
A loved one gets upset and makes a comment in a heated moment and now you are tormented by it. You find yourself replaying the comment over and over in your head and feeling the sting each time. You might even be re-evaluating past experiences in the light of this comment. Perhaps the person has apologized and given you reassurance that it means nothing. Still, it hurts and stays with you. How can you get past it?
Three things are helpful to consider here.
One, the comment likely triggers your own insecurities or unhealed wounds. It is related to something in yourself that remains unintegrated. The comment keeps coming up in your mind as a way of directing your attention towards healing for yourself. Just sitting quietly and resting your attention on the sense of pain and discomfort without being swept away into your narrative about it will help you to connect with what the comment touches in you.
If this feels too vulnerable at first, ask an empathic other to accompany you without offering judgment or advice while you express your experience relative to the comment. You can start by sharing body sensations, observing and describing where the pain sits inside you and what it looks or feels like. The person accompanying you could reflect your words back to you like a mirror to help you further deepen your attention inside.
Once you can name this part of your experience, immediately invite a sense of kindness and acceptance. Remember that suffering is part of being human and that there's nothing wrong with you because you feel this way. All of your experiences are valid. If being kind and accepting towards yourself feels like too much of a stretch, imagine a friend, loved one or a pet offering you care and kindness in this moment. After naming body sensations and calling in kindness and acceptance, use the feelings and needs list to identify those aspects of experience. This part might sound something like this: "I see that a part of me feels frustrated that this still comes up for me, because of needs for relief and healing. I also know that it's okay for this to be here and I can meet it with warmth."
If you notice that your mind still reels with blame and/or self-judgment, allow yourself more time and space to be with and accompany your inner experience, or seek out empathy for yourself on the topic before moving to the next step.
The second thing that's helpful to consider is your loved one's experience. The more you can connect with what's really happening in their heart, the more you can detach from the comment, understanding that it's not personal, that it's really not about you. Underneath their comment are their own valid feelings and needs. After having experienced sufficient self-empathy or received empathy from another, you will find more willingness and curiosity in yourself to connect to the other person's inner experience in this way.
Sometimes, though, even with empathic guesses about the other person, you have difficulty accessing compassion. In this case, it's helpful to bring fully to heart and mind the life-long context of your loved one's pain from which the comment arose. This often means understanding how wounding occurred in childhood or in another significant period of life for the other person. It's tricky here. If you aren't mindful, you might slip into analysis of your loved one which usually leads to judgment. If you lose yourself in judgment, start again with self-empathy. It’s often the case that one starts to offer empathy for the other person and gets lost in judgment. Simply naming a judgment for what it is and returning to compassion for yourself will help come back to your heart.
Lastly, reactivity also sticks around when a clear agreement or plan for future interactions hasn't been established. A promise from your loved one not to say something like that again is often not enough, especially if this is not the first time they have said something like that.
A specific, do-able, authentic agreement about doing something differently next time, the kind that will enable you both to shift out of reactivity, arises from three things:
Both parties accept that you will probably get triggered again about the same thing in the same way.
Honoring each other's feelings and needs in that particular situation. This means your loved one really gets the impact of their words on you and you really connect with their feelings and needs behind the reactive comment.
Both of you find a genuine desire to behave differently in a future similar situation, and this translates into a specific, doable action (such as taking three conscious breaths together, calling a pause in the interaction, expressing feelings, needs, and requests, etc.)
Coming up with a new agreement requires patience and creativity. Too often I have seen people settle with an agreement that glosses over the needs of one person or makes a vague agreement that's really more like a wish to not ever get reactive again. I encourage you to set aside time and space to brainstorm possible new courses of action together, considering both parties’ needs, before you settle on a specific, doable and authentic agreement, and then to set a timeframe to check on whether the agreement met both your needs or if it could do with some adjustment.
If the other person is unwilling or unavailable to reach an agreement with you, you could brainstorm new courses of action for yourself, ideally based on the needs that are alive for both of you around the situation. Remember that interactions that stem from reactivity rarely contribute to connection or to life, so any new course of action that stems from a centered, compassionate place in you will benefit both parties.
Finding trust and emotional safety after a painful reactive comment requires focused attention and a willingness to turn towards what's painful in both persons to find a new way through. Without this attention and direct action, reactive comments fester in the relationship's toxic dumping ground, over time becoming ever more difficult to clean up. The reverse is also true; the sooner you turn towards a reactive comment for repair, the faster and easier the clean-up and healing.
Practice
Take a moment now to bring to your awareness a comment from someone close to you that triggered you. What underlying need wants your attention? Allow yourself to hang out with the pain and discomfort, breathing into it for three full inhales and exhales, observing where it lives and what it looks or feels like. Notice if there is something there which you would like to process and transform. If you are in the middle of a busy day, make a note to yourself to come back to this and then complete the steps described above, starting with self-empathy (or receiving empathy), then connecting with the other person's inner experience from your heart and, finally, making time and space for new agreements.
If your sense is that the relationship you are thinking of already has a sizable “toxic dumping ground” of unrepaired reactive comments, you may want to look into the healing and repairing process in more depth here.
