My Trigger Management Manual (5 Powerful Steps)

Hey there, Dr. Dallas Bragg here, recovery coach for gay men who want to break free from the addictive patterns of crystal meth and live their best and highest life. Today we are talking about the 5 powerful approaches for transforming your triggers into your triumph on your recovery journey. If you are finding yourself constantly triggered by something or someone, even though you've quit using meth, or you're trying to quit and you're still triggered constantly, I want you to watch this entire video till the end. On this channel, you're going to find lots of resources to help you break free from Tina and attain your best and highest self. Also, don't forget to look for my podcast called The Aftermath Podcast here on this channel as well. I drop a long-form video just like this one every Saturday. So please turn on the notification bell so you don't miss any. And if that isn't enough of me, join my mailing list at drdallasbragg.com. Click on the blog and you can subscribe to my mailing list. You will receive every Monday a newsletter that's actually a working newsletter with reflective questions, journal prompts, and actionable exercises, as well as a study guide for the podcast that comes out every Thursday. All right. By the way, if you are interested in my one-on-one coaching program called Recovery Alchemy, the link to apply is in the show notes. Through weekly one-on-one sessions, weekly group sessions and daily accountability from yours truly, your life could look much differently in 6 months than it does right now in front of your phone or laptop or wherever you're watching me. So let me ask you a question. What is your number one trigger? And I don't mean trigger to use meth. That could be one of them, but just simply, when do you find yourself the most angry? If I were to ask you, what is your pet peeve? Pause for a minute and answer the question. Whenever I ask this to my clients, there's always one commonality in every answer. It is always somebody else's problem. Some common replies like, when my boss acts arrogant, when my mom is just being my mom, or when someone bullies me, when someone cuts me off in traffic, whenever Donald Trump speaks. We are getting triggers. And by the way, I prefer to call them emotional activations. It's more PC, but for the sake of simplistic communication, we're gonna stick with trigger in this video. Anyway, we get emotional activations, AKA triggers, all wrong. The strong emotion of a trigger is ours. No one caused it. We own it. It is not your mom's fault. It's not Donald Trump's fault, and it's not their responsibility. Emotions are the body's way of communicating with us. They're saying, we need out. In other words, triggers are stuck emotions that live in our shadows where we don't know they're there. The shadows hide the beliefs that we hold about ourselves. So here's an example from my own life. If you had asked me a few years ago what triggered me the most, I would've said, it's my lazy teenage son. He had reached driving age. He had no car. No job, no drive, and worst of all, in my opinion, he didn't even clean up after himself. The huge trigger for me was finding a pile of his dirty dishes in the sink, especially after coming home dragging ass late from waiting tables when I was a server. I would see the sink and I would immediately start screaming and slamming doors. It was not my finest moment. But as time went on and I began my spiritual journey and I became my recovery journey, I began learning about triggers and I began hearing that they're messages. And I began hearing about emotional regulation. So I became determined to observe myself, to be the compassionate observer of my reactions to life, and seek to find the underlying message that my body was trying to tell me. This helped me shift from seeing my triggers as my son's problem, his laziness, to seeing the triggers as happening for me. For my healing. So one day, after I screamed at him and I ran to my own room and shut my door, I was crying. I sat on the bed. Through my tears, I started asking my body, "What's the message? I'm triggered, so show me the message." God damn it! After some time, after sitting there in silence, it came to me. Became very clear. I wasn't angry about the dishes. The behavior of my son. reflected the guilt I still carried about how I behaved in active addiction. I saw the dishes directly reflect my shadow belief: I am a bad father. That belief was the lens through which I saw my life, and I looked for the confirmation of that everywhere. The dishes were confirmation that I am a bad father. This discovery allowed me to show up differently as a man, as a father, and marked a major, major milestone in my recovery journey. It was enlightenment. I became determined at that point to discover all my shadow beliefs. Trigger me, trigger me, trigger me. I was walking around, let me get triggered. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Are you ready to be set free, to be liberated? Because there is a gift hidden in your trigger. Whenever you feel emotionally hijacked, it's a flashlight illuminating something deeper. That rage when your boss criticizes you, that annoying coworker, it's pointing to a belief that you're not enough. I promise you have to dig to find it. That anxiety when your date doesn't text you back, it's highlighting your fear of abandonment. Me. These triggers aren't random. They're precise GPS coordinates leading you to the exact wounds that drove you to keep going back to crystal meth in the first place. These emotional tsunamis that we call triggers aren't evidence that you're failing at recovery, that you haven't come far enough, that you're mentally ill or emotionally stunted or any of that. They're actually golden breadcrumbs. People, some people call them, leading you directly to what needs healing if you let them. So let's break down 5 powerful approaches that go beyond just surface-level coping to help you extract the medicine from these emotional storms. So number 1, the body scan excavation. Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget. Emotions are stored in your body from way back when you were 4 years old if they don't get expressed. That knot in your chest, that fire in your belly, these physical sensations hold the key to understanding what keeps driving you back to crystal to calm the storm. So I want you to pause next time you're triggered, close your eyes, scan your body like I did that day from head to toe. Notice where you feel tension, heat, contraction. Ask that part of your body, what memory are you holding? What are you here to tell me? Document which physical sensations preceded meth use, right? What, what went on before you used meth? Notice if there's a pattern between specific body sensations and cravings. Think about it. Remember that tightness between your shoulder blades before you got to the party, or that hollow feeling in your gut when you're texting with the guy? I know you used to have it, and I would ignore it. Your body was speaking a language you couldn't translate yet. When we slow down and we reconnect to our body and we listen to it, we discover our bodies have been keeping perfect scores of our emotional wounds. I used to think my anxiety was just broken brain. But now I know that flutter in my chest is actually carrying decades, decades of feeling unsafe in my own skin. Crystal meth temporarily silenced that flutter. Learning to feel, learning to name and stay with the trigger has been the most powerful, the most powerful move in my recovery and given me The most freedom that any substance could ever give. All right, number 2, timeline tracing. Our triggers have family trees. That rage that seems completely out of proportion when someone cancels your plans, it's probably not about today at all. I would say it's definitely not. It's echoing from a much earlier chapter of your story. So let's write down a recent trigger in detail and then ask yourself, when was the first time I felt this exact feeling? I use this exercise with my clients all the time. Keep asking that until you reach the earliest memory. When you reach that memory, you're going to notice that a belief came out of that memory, a belief about yourself formed in that moment and probably around I'm not enough in some— somehow. Explore how crystal temporarily altered these emotional patterns, and then draw connections between developmental wounds and substance use. What are you trying to quiet and silence? This isn't just psychological mumbo jumbo either. When you track a trigger all the way to its roots, let me tell you what happens: it loses all of its power over you. It's not in the shadows anymore. You brought it to the light. You realize you're not. overreacting to your boss's criticism, but you're responding to your dad's impossible standards from 20 years ago. Me. You're not really devastated by that guy ghosting you. You're feeling the abandonment when you were 7 and nobody came to pick you up. Me. Crystal was genius at temporarily disconnecting the painful dots. Recovery is about reconnecting them Consciously with compassion instead of chemicals. By the way, if you are interested in working with me one-on-one, I have a coaching program called Recovery Alchemy. The link to apply is in the show notes. Through weekly one-on-one sessions, weekly group sessions, and daily accountability, you'll hear from me every single day. Your life could look much differently in 6 months than it does now. Number 3, the need behind the need inquiry. So every trigger is protecting something that matters deeply to you. Behind that defensiveness is a legitimate need for safety. Behind that people pleasing is a valid hunger for connection. And behind that perfectionism is a real desire to just be enough for once. Ask yourself, what am I afraid would happen if I didn't react this way? If I didn't If I didn't show the anger, if I didn't react this way, what am I afraid would happen? I want you to write that question down and ask yourself next time. And then go deeper. What need is trying to be met through the fear? What am I afraid of what happened and what need is trying to be met? So do you explore that? How did Crystal meet this need for me? And then consider what might be a more direct way to meet the need now. You just unlocked recovery. Identify which specific emotion You were trying to amplify or dampen, and then create a needs inventory that maps emotions to underlying unmet needs. That's a lot. Sit down and do it. Rewind this video. The shift is life-changing. Instead of beating yourself up for being triggered, you start getting curious. What need is crying out to be met right now? Like I said earlier. Trigger me. Come on, come on. I was just wanting people to trigger me. I was trying to— I was figuring it all out. Your anger isn't the problem, right? It's highlighting your need for respect. Your shame isn't a character flaw. It's pointing you to your need for acceptance. Crystal was a brilliant shortcut to meeting these needs. It made you feel powerful when you felt small. It connected when you felt invisible, present when you felt numb. Recovery isn't about white-knuckling through your cravings. It's about finding some direct, sustainable ways to honor these same legitimate needs. You're replacing one with the other. Number 4, shadow integration. Sometimes what triggers us most in others— well, I would say all the time— what triggers you in someone else is what you've disowned in yourself. So that guy whose neediness drives you up the wall, He's reflecting the vulnerable part of you that you've denied. It triggers you because you're not allowed to be vulnerable. The friend whose irresponsibility triggers your, triggers your judgment, she's mirroring your own disowned desires for freedom. You want to be disorganized once in a while, but you're not allowed to because you're a perfectionist. Identify who or what pushes your buttons the most and ask, what quality in this person am I rejecting in myself? And then write a dialogue between yourself and that quality. Write a letter. And I want you to end it with, the gift this shadow brings me is— every time another person triggers you, it's a gift. And the gift that they bring me is— and notice which parts of yourself You've disowned and you've judged harshly because it's all about you. Explore how Crystal allowed you to access these disowned parts temporarily. You got to be free, you got to be perfect, whatever. This gets to the heart of why Crystal is so freeing to you. And for many of us, it temporarily allowed us to access parts of ourselves We locked away a long time ago. The good kid finally gets to express the anger. The responsible kid finally gets to cut fucking loose. The invisible one finally gets center stage at the orgy, right? Recovery isn't about becoming more restricted. It's about becoming more whole. You get to access those parts in a sober state that's sustainable. So when you consciously reclaim these disowned parts of yourself, you need substances less And less because you're no longer waging a war within yourself. Number 5, the belief archaeology dig, as we call it. Under every trigger is a core belief waiting to be excavated and examined. These aren't just thoughts. These are fundamental lenses through which you interpret and filter reality, how you see things happening. And they were most formed before you could even talk. Write the triggering situation that you're in at the top of a page, and below it write, I feel this way because answer. And then ask, why do I feel this way? And then you ask that five or six or seven times until you hit the core belief. So if the core belief, like for me, is I'm not accepted. Next, this is from Byron Katie, The Work. If you haven't heard of her, ask, is this absolutely true? Is this absolutely true that I am abandoned? I'm not accepted. And usually it's not. And who would I be without this belief? Think about who would you be? How would you show up if you didn't believe this core belief? If I didn't believe that I was always going to be left out, that I was abandoned, how would I How would I react in situations, relationships differently? How would I be when I go across Instagram? You show up differently and you think about how would I, who would I be without this belief? And you start acting that way. Connect to how Crystal temporarily silenced or altered those core beliefs to make them be quiet. This is where the deepest healing happens. When you dig down Through the layers of a trigger, you often hit the bedrock belief, right? Like, I'm fundamentally unlovable. The world is never safe. I cannot trust anyone. I have to be perfect to belong. These aren't conscious choices. They're conclusions your brain made based on your early experiences and now running silently like an algorithm In the background of your life, and it's looking and looking and looking for ways to prove it. People want to be right. They don't want to be healed. Crystal was a genius at temporarily silencing these beliefs. For a few hours or a few days, you could feel worthy, safe, powerful, free, sexy— whatever core belief normally you denied. In recovery, instead of silencing these beliefs with substances, we bring them to the light. And we question them directly. All right. I want you to remember, your triggers aren't evidence that you're failing at recovery. Please. They're precisely the raw material needed for the most profound transformation of your life. This isn't about becoming triggered less. It's about relating to your triggers differently. You are not broken. You are not your past. You are not your addiction. You are a magnificent, soul in the midst of the most courageous journey there is, coming home to yourself. All right. I love you so much. Have a good week. If you have any questions, I would love to hear from you. I'd love to engage in a conversation. Just comment in the— under the video and I will answer every comment. I promise. All right. Thank you.