My Child Says I Trigger Them: What Do I Do?.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Family conflict, parent educator, family systems, therapy words, triggered, emotional flooding, Gottman Institute, stress hormones, empathy, perspective taking, conflict resolution, nervous system, relationship dynamics, communication, parenting strategies.

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, a family conflict coach and a parent educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confusing, and sometimes painful, and we do it through a family systems lens, which means we look at much more than just one event and one relationship. We’re going to actually look at the whole system. This gives us much more information about what’s really happening underneath the surface of all your family relationships, because here’s the hope that I really want you to hold on to: when one person in a family becomes more grounded and steady, the entire relationship system can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney  00:47

Today’s episode, we’re continuing the series that I’m doing on therapy words for parents. This is about a word that can show up in the middle of a conversation and just stop us in our tracks. So it might sound something like this. I asked my son a simple question about his job search, and then he said, “You’re triggering me right now. I didn’t even know what I did. Or sometimes it sounds something like this. My daughter walked out of the room, and she said she needed to go because I had triggered her. I wasn’t even talking loudly, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t anything. I was just talking.

Tina Gosney  01:25

If you’ve heard a version of that or experienced a version of that, I want to let you know something, and that you’re not the only person, the only parent that has been left standing in the middle of a room, maybe even in the middle of a sentence, wondering what just happened? And this word, kind of, you know, maybe more than any of the other ones that we’ve covered in this series, it tends to leave parents feeling not just hurt, but really confused. They’re not sure what they’re allowed to say, and not sure really what’s safe to bring up around their child anymore. Today, we’re going to talk about where this word actually comes from.

Tina Gosney  02:05

This word triggered. We’re going to talk about what’s happening in the body when your child uses it, what solid research can tell us about it and can’t tell us about it, and then what you can do next time it shows up in a conversation with your child. Okay, so that’s what we’re going to do today. Let’s get into it. Some of the other words that we’ve gone over in this podcast series, like toxic, you know, that word tells you it’s trying to tell you something about your character. Gaslighting is another one, and that tells you something about honesty.

Tina Gosney  02:39

But triggered is a little different because it doesn’t accuse you of being a bad person. It just tells you something is happening in your child’s body right now, at this moment, and that is serious enough that we really should stop the conversation. But that’s part of what makes it so disorienting too, because you’re not just asked to reckon with your own parenting history, you’re being told something that you just said, something that may have felt completely ordinary to you, caused an actual physical reaction in your child when you were talking to them.

Tina Gosney  03:15

So let’s normalize this right away. It’s really completely human to feel your stomach drop when you hear this word. Some parents really say they feel confused. They start replaying the last 30 seconds or the last 60 seconds of the conversation, trying to find what the trigger was, trying to find the landmine. Some parents feel really frustrated because it can feel like the rules of conversation are changing all the time. Some parents feel like they’re walking on eggshells. Like I don’t even know what I’m allowed to say and what I’m not allowed to say. So maybe I just don’t say anything at all. And all of these are very normal responses to being told mid conversation that you triggered somebody and you just didn’t see that happening.

Tina Gosney  04:01

There is a distinction that I want you to hold on to, though. There are two different things happening when your child uses this word, and they call for two different responses from you.

Tina Gosney  04:11

One is that something real might be happening in their body right now, like an actual spike in stress hormones, and which will narrow what we can think clearly about, and that has to do with it has very little to do with logic or intention. The other thing that might be happening is, and this is how this word has become pretty common. It’s like this casual way of saying this conversation is upsetting me, and I want it to stop.

Tina Gosney  04:40

So whether or not anything close to that physical spike is happening, that might be what they’re telling you as well. Your job is not to instantly diagnose which one it is; it’s to understand both well enough that you can respond to either one of those things without making it worse. Let’s talk about where this word. Comes from and the kind of language that it’s communicating, because I think it really helps to understand the clinical roots of this word “triggered, and then the everyday use your child might be speaking from.

Tina Gosney  05:13

This term “triggered” has its origins in trauma, which we went over in this podcast episode or in the series as well, and it also has its roots in PTSD research. If we’re going back to clinical observations, this is where it happens. Of they studied combat veterans that experienced these sudden involuntary reactions to things that reminded their nervous system of danger. It might have been a sound, a smell, a certain way that somebody moved. It could instantly put a person with PTSD back into that survival response, even if it happened decades later.

Tina Gosney  05:54

Well, that’s a real, well-documented phenomenon, and for someone carrying that kind of history being triggered is not an exaggeration. It’s genuinely involuntary. But, like a lot of clinical language, that word has made it out of the therapy office and into everyday conversation, and it’s moved pretty quickly over the last few years. Somewhere in that journey, it started getting used for a much wider range of experiences, everything from genuine trauma to plain old irritation. And when a word that is really specific gets really stretched in its use and in its meaning, it keeps the emotional weight but loses a lot of its precision. I want to bring in a second related idea here because I think it really fills in something important that the word “triggered” leaves out on its own.

Tina Gosney  06:52

There’s a really well-researched concept called emotional flooding, and most of what we know comes from the Gottman Institute. For those who have not come across the Gottmans before, the Gottman Institute was built on decades of research led by a husband and wife team, doctors Julie and John Gottman, and they studied couples in conflict. They have a lab called the Love Lab in Seattle, and they studied couples there over many years to understand what actually predicts whether a relationship is going to stay together or fall apart, and a lot of what is now considered common knowledge about conflict and communication can really be traced back to the work of the Gottmans and the Gottman Institute.

Tina Gosney  07:37

One of their most well-known findings is this thing we call emotional flooding. It describes what happens in our body during a hard conversation, and it will often pass a threshold that the Gottman Institute’s research puts around around 100 beats per minute, and that makes the stress hormones rise, and then parts of the brain are that are responsible for things like empathy and perspective taking and clear thinking and logic, those parts of the brain go offline. When someone is flooded, they are not simply upset. Their nervous system has shifted into the state that was built for handling a threat, not for having a conversation.

Tina Gosney  08:21

So I do want to be totally honest with you about this research because it’s not just such a tidy explanation when we talk about parent and adult child relationships. The Gottman Institute’s flooding research was studied married couples in conflict, romantic partners, not parents and their adult child. Nobody in the lab was measuring the heart rate of a mother and her 30-year-old son when they were arguing at the kitchen table, and so when I bring this research and this concept into a conversation about parents and adult children, I want to be clear that I’m applying a well-documented pattern to a relationship that it was not originally studied in.

Tina Gosney  09:01

I’m not reporting direct findings, but here’s why I think it’s still a reasonable thing to apply, because flooding is a description of what a stressed nervous system does when it’s under relational conflict. It doesn’t have to have a special setting for spouses that’s different than parents and siblings, or maybe even an old friend, you know the body doesn’t check the relationship label before it decides whether to treat this hard conversation as a threat or not. So while I can’t tell you that a study proved that this happens the same way between you and your adult child, I can tell you that the underlying mechanism, you know, this nervous system responding to conflict as if it were in danger. This is not relationship specific. That’s a really fair and honest way to use this research, and it’s but it’s different from claiming it as a direct proof.

Tina Gosney  09:55

So let’s talk about what the research supports and what it doesn’t support. I want to spend a little more time here because I think this is the section that helps you use this concept honestly instead of over over generalizing it. What the research does support clearly is this: when a person’s heart rate climbs into flooding range that’s over 100 beats per minute during conflict, a person’s capacity for empathy, nuance, logic, problem solving, it will measurably drop. That’s been replicated over and over. It’s also been shown that once a person is flooded, trying to reason your way through that disagreement will usually fail. Not because the point that you’re trying to make is wrong, but because the part of the brain that could actually understand what you are trying to say is temporarily unavailable.

Tina Gosney  10:55

And in Gottman’s research, they have this long-running research on couples, the unmanaged repeated flooding has been identified as one of the strongest predictors of a relationship breaking down over time. What the research does not tell us is whether the exact same breakdown prediction holds true at the same strength in a parent and adult-child relationship, it could, it might hold true. Family relationships carry a lot of history and their own decades of patterns that a marriage relationship does not really carry in the same way. It’s entirely possible that flooding matters even more between a parent and a child than it does between partners, precisely because there’s so much history loaded into every exchange, and that’s a reasonable inference on my part, not a citation from a research study, but I’d rather rather just tell you that plainly than to borrow more certainty from the research than it’s actually offering.

Tina Gosney  12:01

So here’s what you can take from this with real confidence: your child’s body can genuinely enter a state where continuing the conversation productively is temporarily not possible, whether or not they use the right word for it. And your body can enter that same state at the same time as theirs. That’s not a stretch. That’s just what nervous systems do under stress in a relationship at any age.

Tina Gosney  12:30

Why does any of this matter beyond one uncomfortable moment at the dinner table or one uncomfortable phone conversation? Because how a hard conversation ends, whether it ends in genuine repair or a slammed door, tends to shape whether your adult child will think that they can bring the next hard thing to you at all. If a pattern builds where every difficult topic ends in flooding that never gets revisited and repaired. Your child learns that certain conversations are simply not survivable with you, and they start avoiding those altogether.

Tina Gosney  13:13

That’s not usually one dramatic blowup. It’s usually the slow accumulation of conversations that cut they got cut short, and no one ever went back and finished them. I also want to name the other side of the stakes because it matters just as much. If every use of the word “triggered” gets treated by you as an exaggeration or a manipulation, then you are going to risk missing moments where something genuinely is happening in your child’s body, and you also teach you risk teaching them that bringing up their internal experience with you is not worth it. Both extremes: dismissing the word completely, and then treating the word as an emergency every single time, those both tend to move you further away from your child. They promote disconnection, not connection. Well, the stakes are really not about the word itself.

Tina Gosney  14:11

They’re about whether a hard conversation in your family can is something that can be returned to, or something that quietly got marked as too dangerous to try again. Let’s get really practical for a minute. When your adult child says you’re triggering them, a few different things could genuinely be going on, and it helps to know what those things are. I’m going to go over a few of them, but ICE is not a comprehensive list by all means.

Tina Gosney  14:41

Sometimes it’s a real in-the-moment emotional flooding event. Their heart rate has spiked, their thinking has narrowed, and continuing the conversation in that atmosphere is not productive for either of you. This is closest to the clinical use of the word triggered, and that does. Serves to be taken at its face value. Sometimes it’s an old pattern getting reactivated by something in the present, maybe a tone of voice, a specific specific phrase, a topic that has come up painfully before. Those things can put your child back into an old emotional state faster than a current conversation would justify all on its own. That doesn’t mean that their reaction is fake. It means the size of their reaction is being shaped by their history, as much as it is by this exact moment. Sometimes, honestly, it’s a way of ending a conversation that’s become uncomfortable, whether without either person having the tools to say that more directly.

Tina Gosney  15:47

This is not a character flaw in your child. Most people at any age, when they’re in a hard conversation, are going to reach for the easiest available exit, and this word has become a way to end that conversation fast, and in their their generation, it’s a socially acceptable one. So, from those reasons, you usually can’t tell just from the word itself which one you’re dealing with.

Tina Gosney  16:15

What you can do is respond in a way that works reasonably well, no matter which one it turns out to be, which is exactly what we’re going to go into next. First, pause and notice the flooding. Notice what’s happening in your own body, and if you are emotionally flooded, ask for a break and come back to it later. If you notice your child’s physical state has changed, you might say, “I hear you, and I also see something’s happening for you right now, and I don’t want to make it worse by pushing through this. So this does two things at one time. It tells your child you’re not going to fight them on a label of triggered. It’s going to give your nervous system a beat to catch up before you respond any further.

Tina Gosney  16:57

Second, take an actual pause, not a symbolic one. The Gottman Institute’s research is very specific about this part, and it’s worth taking seriously. A real physiological reset takes somewhere in the range of a minimum of 20 minutes, and it only works if you are genuinely disengaging from the conflict during that time, so if you take a break and you’re replaying the argument in your head, or you’re drafting your rebuttal, what you want to say while you’re waiting, that’s going to keep your body activated instead of calming it down. So step outside, get a drink of water, go take a walk, do something that has nothing to do with the conversation. The goal isn’t to win the pause; it’s to actually come down during the pause.

Tina Gosney  17:48

Third, come back to the conversation. This is the step that gets skipped most often, usually with great intentions. But a pause that quietly becomes permanent avoidance teaches your child that hard topics don’t get revisited in your family; they just get pushed under the rug and abandoned. Once you’re both regulated, come back to it. Close the loop. Say, “Hey, I want to come back to what we were talking about earlier, but when we’re both ready, so that one sentence is often the difference between a pause that helps and a pause that just leaves something that’s unresolved between the two of you.

Tina Gosney  18:29

Fourth, do this over and over again. Make it a pattern, not a one-time thing. One good pause in return does not do undo years of conversations that ended badly, but a parent who can reliably notice their flooding and when their child is getting flooded, and can take a real break and then reliably come back to that, finish that conversation, that parent is teaching their child something that matters a lot more than just one single exchange. It teaches them hard topics in our family are survivable, and we can do this again and again.

Tina Gosney  19:09

Let’s talk about how how do we actually grow through this experience? How do we actually move through it in a way that promotes better family relationships? Well, most parents that I talk to, when they get hit with this word “triggered, are super confused, and then they become really hyper vigilant, trying to figure out which words are safe, which words are not safe, and if that hyper vigilance goes on long enough without them having an outlet to talk it through and have support through it, it kind of gets solidified into a pattern that the the parent just stops bringing up anything difficult at all, and so they end up having a super surface level relationship with their child.

Tina Gosney  19:52

Here’s a steadier path. This is not about becoming so careful that you stop having real conversations. It’s about. Learning to recognize flooding in yourself and in them, and then having a reliable way to move through it together instead of just avoiding it. And I’m going to be super honest with you. That doing this well in the heat of a difficult conversation with your actual child is genuinely really hard to do by yourself, especially the first several times. And I’ve developed a way of walking my clients through these types of situations, and tailor them to their specific family and their specific patterns, because what works for one parent and one child does not always translate to directly into another relationship.

Tina Gosney  20:45

If today’s episode is resonating with you and you find yourself wanting more than just one conversation to go on, that’s what Bridge to Connection is there for. This is my hybrid coaching program, which has education, which is so important, these are online lessons that teach you the skills to be able to do this, and then there’s group coaching where you get to see other parents working through the exact, very similar situations as yours, and then there’s one-on-one with me where we’re going to go deep into your specific family and your specific relationship history.

Tina Gosney  21:23

I want to go over a few of the most common mistakes that I see because help if I name them, I think I can help you avoid them. I hope that I can. So mistake number one is arguing about whether that word is being used correctly. Are they using the word triggered correctly, especially in the moment, even if you’re right that they are not clinically triggered, if you correct their vocabulary while your child is flooded, I guarantee you it will not land in a way that will be helpful for you. So save that conversation for a calmer time, and you might not need to use and ever come back to that part of the conversation and correct their use of this word.

Tina Gosney  22:05

Mistake number two: treating the pause as the whole situation. So a 20-minute break that never gets followed up on is not repairing what happened. It’s just a longer way of avoiding the topic. The pause only works if you come back to the conversation.

Tina Gosney  22:27

Mistake number three is assuming that every instance that they use this word “triggered” is fully genuine or fully manufactured. So most of the time, it’s some real mix of a physical response and a convenient way to exit a hard conversation. You don’t have to sort that exact percentage out to be able to respond well to them.

Tina Gosney  22:51

Another mistake, the fourth mistake, is that we become so afraid of the word that we stop bringing up a real anything. We stop having real conversations. A parent who never raises a hard topic is not protecting the relationship. They’re just moving distantly quieter.

Tina Gosney  23:09

Mistake number five: deciding. This is a big one, actually. I think this maybe this should have been number one, but deciding that this is really just about your child’s generation and how they can’t handle hard conversations, and then dismissing them as being non as being as being soft because of it. So I know that that thought is really tempting, especially if you grew up sitting through conflict without a word like triggered available to you at all. But writing off what your child is experiencing as a generational weakness lets you off the hook from what’s actually happening between the two of you, and it quietly tells your child that you’ve already decided their that their reaction doesn’t count. Whatever role generation plays in the vocabulary being used, the nervous system response underneath it is not something that you get to dismiss just because you would have handled it differently at their age.

Tina Gosney  24:08

So getting it right looks like this: your child says you’re triggering them. Your first instinct, defend yourself or argue the word, but you’re going to pause that instinct instead, and take an actual break, not just a token symbolic one. So you come back to finish that conversation once you both feel steady, and you do it again the next time and the time after that until your child learns hard conversations don’t have to end with us slamming a door. They can end in both of you catching your breath and then finishing what you started. That’s not weakness. That’s growth and strength.

Tina Gosney  24:49

Here’s what I want you to take with you today. The word “triggered” can describe something real that’s happening in your child’s body. It can also just. Be a really quick way to end a conversation that’s become too much to handle. You don’t have to sort out that distinction right there on the spot. You just have to know how to respond to either one. Notice what’s happening, take a pause, and come back later to finish what you started.

Tina Gosney  25:17

The fact that you’re here listening to this podcast episode tells me that you really care about this relationship with your child, especially if you’ve made it all the way to this point in the podcast. It tells me that you’re willing to look at hard things, and including parts of the research that are still uncertain about parent and adult child relationships, and that really matters. It’s really important that that that you are there and that you’re willing to look at that. So just take a breath, take a real pause when you need it, and then come back to the conversation. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

Tina Gosney  25:54

Remember, you do not have to do this perfectly. Just keep working on how you’re showing up, because when one person in the family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system begins to heal. This is coaching your family relationships, and I’m Tina Gosney. If this episode helped you to make sense of a hard moment, send it to another parent who could use that today.