Pod # 2 Triggers are time travellers with dirty boots.

You ever had your whole world go sideways over a sentence? Not someone screaming at you? Not a slap. Just, a tone. Some perceived slight. A text that took too long? Some helpful advice from a friend that touched something that felt like a branding iron against your soul.
It’s second nature now. Hard to even spot. We live in automatic.  

Whatever it was, it has you in a chokehold — and boom! You are triggered.

A trigger is a time traveller. It’s an old part of you showing up in dirty boots, stomping mud across the clean floors of your life. And you’ve got a battlefield full of them — planted by moments you didn’t know how to survive clean. Conversations you never got to finish. Tears you never got to cry. Shame you learned to swallow like battery acid. It’s something that didn’t heal the first time. Something you lived through – survived – but couldn’t make sense of.

And your body. It remembers. All of it.

So here you are, years later, being loud, getting drunk, finding a way to go numb. Rejecting someone who hit the exact same nerve you learned to guard with your life. Not because you’re crazy. Or have a temper. Or are a drama queen. Not because you are damaged, but because your system is doing exactly what it was trained to do: survive.

Survival doesn’t care if it ruins dinner. Or makes you cry in the office where you have curated your unbreakable facade. It also doesn’t care if it keeps replaying the mind movie of that one night you stopped being a kid. Your triggers are the ghosts in the machine — and they don’t just haunt — they hijack.

You think you’re annoyed that your partner didn’t listen. You think you’re just irritated by a text. You think you’re just snapping because you’re tired.

Behind that is the breadcrumb. Underneath that is the black box from the crash you never got to walk away from. The rules of old wars you thought you left behind.

Triggers aren’t proof that you are broken.
They’re muddy, weather-beaten markers, pointing straight to the places you abandoned just to survive.They are the wounded younger version of you, screaming from the blueprint of the past — the bruises that never got kissed better.

And if you’re willing to go there — if you’re brave enough to listen without fixing, numbing, or spiritual bypassing your way out of the hard parts — they’ll keep leading you back to where the hurt still lives.

Every dirty boot print leaves behind an invitation — not to armour up harder, not to beat yourself up or pretend you’re fine. The world isn’t out to hurt you. Triggers aren’t the enemy. They are the invitation.

Pause.
Breathe.
And ask yourself:

What am I trying to protect? What lie did I have to believe to survive back then — and am I still building my life around it? What am I feeling right now? Where have I felt this before? What story am I telling myself about what just happened?

That’s the work.  Not the crystals. Not the sage. Not the “good vibes only” bullshit. We don’t do “live laugh love” posters here. We hang mirrors and we make you look.

So, if you spiralled today and don’t know why, if you over-explained, over-apologized, or burned it all down and are sitting in the smoke, come closer. You’re not broken. You’re still carrying stories that never got an ending. Your pain is not a prison — it’s your compass.

Welcome, you’ve made it to the reckoning.

Neen, out

PS: Next time we dive into – “Trigger-nometry”: finding the angles where your past still breaks into your present – the broken math of old wounds still trying to solve for safety.