Every mom has had that moment — the reaction that came out of nowhere, that was bigger than the situation called for, and that left you wondering what just happened inside you. In this episode, I walk you through what’s really going on when we lose it with the people we love most. We look at the difference between sparks and full flooding, what Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain shows us about why our thinking shuts down in those moments, and how to work with your nervous system instead of against it. I’ll give you two practical frameworks — one for understanding your triggers after the fact, and one for handling them in real time — so you can move from reacting on autopilot to responding from the mom you actually want to be.
What you will learn in this episode
- Your triggers are not proof that something is wrong with you — they are signals from your nervous system asking for your attention.
- There is a difference between a spark (early activation) and flooding (full overwhelm), and catching the spark is where your power lives.
- When your brain goes into threat mode, your rational thinking shuts down — this is biology, not a character flaw.
- Understanding where your triggers come from gives you the ability to work with them instead of being controlled by them.
- You can learn to respond to the people you love from your values, not from your wounds.
Transcript
The things that cause you to lose it are not random, and they are not proof that something is broken in you. They are just a map. And once you learn to read that map, everything changes. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Stop Losing It with the People You Love. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Welcome back, friends, to our time together here on Leadership Parenting. I’m so glad that you’re with me today. I want to start with a scenario. See if any of this sounds familiar. Maybe a regular weekday, nothing unusual, you’re making dinner, kid is doing homework at the counter, another one keeps asking you the same question you’ve already answered a couple times. And then maybe another kid walks in and drops their backpack right in the middle of the floor, which they do every single day, which you have mentioned a hundred times, and something in you just snaps. Not a little, a lot. The reaction’s way bigger than the bag or the backpack, right? Way bigger than the questions, way bigger than anything that’s actually happened. And then there’s this aftermath, the shame, the confusion, the I don’t even know why I said that or reacted that way. Because you genuinely don’t. You’re a loving, thoughtful person. You know that. And yet something keeps happening in your body that you don’t feel like you can control. Sometimes we call that a trigger. You can like or love that word, but I think it’s a great word for us to use to kind of help us put handles around this and try to look at it. Today I want to go deep into what’s actually happening when we get triggered, why it happens, specifically in the ways that it does, and most importantly, steps that you can actually practice so that your triggers stop running your home and you start running your home. This is some of my favorite material to teach. So let’s get into it.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a mom who came in because, as she put it, I have a yelling problem. She had read the books and studied. She knew she wasn’t supposed to yell, that there is some research that it makes our homes heavy and hard. And she’d made the promises to herself many times. And she kept breaking them, which had created its own layer of shame on top of everything else, by the way. And what she’d never done, because nobody had ever asked her to, was to slow the whole thing down and look at what was actually happening right before she yelled. So together, that’s what we did. I asked her to be a student of her own behavior. Not an easy thing to do, because it requires us to take a step back, get out of the shame, and just start to observe, which is an awesome experience to do that, by the way. So I asked her to think back to the last time that this had happened when she had yelled. Not just the yelling itself, right? That’s the end result. But the 10 seconds and maybe the 30 seconds and maybe even the couple minutes before it happened. What had she been doing? What had her body felt like? What was the other person or the people or the situation? What was going on there? A huge detective kind of assignment. And it doesn’t always come easy because we don’t think this way. We don’t have that level of observation happening most of the time. But this is what we did together. And she got very quiet. And then she said something that I’ve thought about many times since. She said, I always feel like I’m not being heard. Right before it happens, I always feel like no one is listening, like not just listening, but that they don’t hear me. They don’t see me, like I’m invisible.
Now, when she said that, that was meaningful. We had moved from the actual situation, the details, the blame, right? All the pieces, and we got to how her mind and her body was interpreting all of that. That’s the map. That was underneath what was triggering her. We thought the trigger was the backpack on the floor, right? The straw that broke the camel’s back, or the repeated questions, or the eye rolls, or whatever those things are that we think are the triggers. Those were just like little sparks, right? The kindling was much older, a very deep and very learned sense that her voice didn’t matter. I’m not quite sure where that comes from at first glance, but it’s worth looking at. She needed to know that she could say things and they wouldn’t go unheard. And every time that that had happened to her, her nervous system flooded with the weight of every time it had happened in the past. And she wasn’t overreacting. When you look at it at that situation, she was reacting to everything all at once. She just didn’t understand it. And when we had a chance to slow things down, hopefully we created enough of a safe environment so that she knew that I didn’t think that she was a broken person or a terrible mom or a person that didn’t care. And we were able to establish that from the very beginning. And you’re going to need to establish that with yourself so you have enough flexibility, enough trust in yourself that you can actually observe and read the map, right?
So let me give you a definition. And I want you to sit with it for a minute so that you can start to build your own map. A trigger is not just a reaction to what is happening right now. A trigger is a reaction to what this moment reminds your nervous system of. It’s a present event that’s colliding with a stored memory, a learned expectation or an old wound. And the collision happens so fast that your body is already in it before your mind has a chance to catch up. And this is why this matters, because when you get triggered and react in a way that’s bigger than the situation, you’re not failing to control yourself. You’re not weak. You’re experiencing something that’s physiologically going on in your body. Very, very real. Neurologically, it’s predictable. If you can map it out, you won’t be so surprised by it and then hopefully not so judgmental about it, right? It’s just a human response. It’s how the brain has evolved to protect us. Only it all happens so under the radar, so under our awareness. Most of the time, we have a hard time putting the pieces together.
So the trigger response is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: detect threat and respond fast. Problem is, the brain’s threat detection system doesn’t always distinguish between an actual danger and a situation that just feels a little bit similar. Here’s what the research tells us about this. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, he describes what happens in a trigger moment as flipping our lid. He uses the hand as a model of the brain, right? The fingers folded over the thumb represent the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of our brain responsible for reasoning and empathy and nuance, that wise decision-making brain, where we all want to live. When we get triggered, then our emotional brain starts to become very, very active. It takes control. This is our amygdala. And then our body, this is our spinal cord, our body starts to feel all of the messages that our threat center, our emotional brain, has sent it, that we’re in danger. That’s our heart pounding, that’s that feeling like we need to fight or we need to run. For us as moms, that comes out as yelling, as kind of pushing back, or as I’m done, I’m walking out of here, or I’m shutting down. Those are brain responses. And those are coming from the emotional part of our brain that is feeling threatened.
So, what Dan Siegel explains is that when we are sensing something that’s happening now that feels dangerous, like it was dangerous to us before, and our this part of our brain comes online and it flips the lid of our prefrontal cortex and it leads us out. You guys, this is what we’re complaining about. This is what maybe other people complain about. We don’t like that feeling of not having access to our wise mind and our wisdom. We judge ourselves on this. We look at ourselves like something is wrong with us, that we don’t have a value system, that we don’t care about our kids, that we that we aren’t the kind loving people that we think or thought we were. The truth is, you are all of those things. You aren’t a bad person. You’re not broken. You just had an amygdala-led emotional brain, threat-centered response come first. And it caused the wise part of your brain to take a back seat.
I know the hand model of the brain is an example, but this, what I’m describing, is not a metaphor. It’s not just a great story to help you understand what happens. This is a neurological process, which means the goal is not to try harder to not react. The goal is to learn to notice when you’re close to flipping the lid. Because when you try to just not react, you’re fighting against an evolutionarily focused, survival-based part of your brain that is going to be very hard to fight against. It’s going to win against you when it’s in charge because your whole body is on fire, right? Your whole body is feeling the intensity of that. And it’s very hard to make those conscious choices. It’s hard to build a long enough pause, enough window that you can respond from the part of you that actually knows what it wants to do. And that’s why, if you can understand what’s happening, you won’t jump into shame. Because when we act in a way that doesn’t match our values, it’s not our first choice. It’s not anywhere close to what we want to be doing. When that happens, we then get hard on ourselves. And then we’ve or justify ourselves, right? We fight more and say, look, it’s all your fault. And what does that do to your body? It makes you feel even less safe. And what does that do to your emotional brain and your brainstem? It creates more of a fire. And then we get hard on ourselves, which creates more of the alarm. That shame tells us that something’s terribly wrong with us. None of that calms us down. None of that helps the wiser and the higher mind to come online. And I’m going to give you some steps to help you get ahead of this or at least know how to deal with it. But before we get to the steps, it’s so important to understand that cycle because triggers don’t come from just nowhere. They’re following a pattern. And once you can see that pattern, you can interrupt it.
So that cycle has four parts. First, I’m going to call it the spark. This is the external event, the bag on the floor, the backpack on the floor, or that repeated question, right? That eye roll, the tone of voice. On its own, the spark is minimal. It’s not a big deal. But number two happens, and we could call it the flood. This is the moment that your nervous system reads the spark as a threat, and your body starts to respond. Your heart rate goes up, your breathing gets shorter, your muscles get tight and they brace, thinking that something dangerous is happening. And it’s hard to think about the grand scheme of things. Your thinking gets really narrow and very threat-focused. And this happens in a millisecond, and we don’t even notice it usually. Third, then we have the reaction. This is what comes out of you. The snapping, the yelling, the sharp words, the shutting down. It’s driven by the flood, not by the spark, which is why it feels disproportionate to the situation, right? Because it’s like the flood is reacting, not you. Who you really are is that you know a backpack on the floor is not the end of the world. Even if you have taught them a hundred times, that’s not where it goes. That’s not the end of the world. There’s so much more to your kid than that. They don’t deserve this fury that’s coming out of you, this flood of emotion, hear the word flood, for just leaving a backpack there. The truth is, our kids and our spouses and us too, there’s some behaviors that as much as people tell us what we should do and what they want us to do, we’re never gonna change. And that doesn’t make us bad people, and that doesn’t mean we’re in an untenable situation with our loved ones. What it means is that all of that spark stuff is not the problem. It’s the flood that comes from it. It’s the way the nervous system reads the message. Fourth, the aftermath, right? That’s not just the aftermath of what happens with the people that we’re upset with and how they’re responding, but I’m just talking about what happens in you. The aftermath of self-criticism, that feeling like you should apologize, or you’re going to maybe do the opposite, that blame of other people, that feeling like no one loves me, no one’s here for me. I can’t make this work. The promises maybe that we make to ourselves or that we want to get out of the people that are giving us the sparks, so that they promise that they’re never going to do that again, so that we don’t get flooded. That’s an interesting concept. We’re looking for our kids to help us stay calm. That’s kind of backwards, right? We’re looking for our spouse to not say anything that upsets us. It’s a huge burden. And we know what it feels like to carry that burden on the other side when someone else gets upset because we just kind of accidentally said the wrong thing or forgot, or you guys, when you understand this map, you understand that it’s not those sparks that are causing the problem, it’s the flood that comes afterwards.
The place to intervene is between the spark and the flood. That’s the window. It’s small and it takes practice to find it, but it’s right there. Once we locate it, other things become possible. And these are the steps to try to deal with that little space now that you kind of see what’s happening. And these four steps I’m going to give you, they’re not a formula that you have to follow perfectly in order, but they’re a practice for you to put in your head as a framework that I want you to use instead of going to shame, right? Because once we go to shame or blame, we’re stuck. We’re not improving, we’re spinning. And it’s no wonder that our triggers and our behaviors that we don’t like continue to happen in a pattern. It’s because how we’re handling it is causing that to cycle. And we’re going to break that cycle.
Okay. So I’m going to give you these steps and you don’t have to follow them linearly. It’s just knowing that you have some tools so that you can work with it. Okay. Step one: know your specific triggers. You know, remember we’re going to use the word trigger to represent the spark and the flood. Okay. Something happens and then the thing that happens inside of you. That’s where I think we go wrong with using the word triggers because it alludes to the idea that the trigger is the person or that thing. And I really want to say that it’s a combo of that. It’s that response that we’re really working on. And we want to know when we get that one-two experience, that spark and flood, okay? Before they happen is ideal. Most people try to manage triggers in the moment. And guess what? It’s the hardest possible time to do it. Your lid is already flipped, right? Where is all this learning today that we’re talking about? It’s in your prefrontal cortex. It’s in your wise mind. You’re bright, you’re brilliant, you’re wise, you’re capable. That’s all in your upper brain. And when you get triggered with that spark and that flood, that’s gonna happen in the emotional brain. So we want to be ready for that. The most powerful work happens before the moment when you can think clearly. So that’s now. This is the first practice this week. I want you to do a trigger inventory, right? What are the sparks that set off your flood? And I love that word flood because you know what else we could add to it? It’s a flood of adrenaline. It’s a flood of cortisol. You even from an emotional sense, it’s a flood of anger. You could use those words. It’s a flood of despair, discouragement. Like the whole world looks just dark and hard and scary when that happens. This is a neurological biological process. You can track it. So sit down with a piece of paper and ask yourself three questions. What are the top three situations that usually trigger me, spark, and flood me? And what does my body feel like right before I react? That’s question two. And third, if I look underneath the surface reaction, right? Under your anger or your frustration or that shutting down or that walking out of the room, what do you hear in your head? Is it like the mom I was working with? I’m not being heard, I don’t, I’m not respected, I’m not being seen, I’m out of control, I’m responsible for everything. If you look, you will find your triggers are almost never about the spark itself. Back back on the floor. It’s what it means to your nervous system. And this little questioning, this little quizzing yourself and sitting down and thinking about it, it’s gonna help you find the meaning underneath those sparks.
Second, let’s learn your body’s early warning signs. You know, your body knows you’re being triggered before you do. Every time. The question is whether we can learn to listen and pay attention early on. So for some of us, the early warning is a physical feeling, right? It could be that your chest tightens up, or that you start to get hot, that you have a jaw that’s clenching, or your breath gets short and shallow. For others, it could be kind of a mental thing, a narrowing of your thinking where a voice in your mind that just kind of keeps focusing on the thing that you’re starting to notice, or a sense of time speeding up. Sometimes when we get overwhelmed and we’re starting to get that pressure and that cortisol and that adrenaline, it will start to feel like things become more intense. For others, you might notice a dulling or a numbing, going quiet inside, a feeling of wanting to leave yourself, even if you don’t leave physically or feeling like you’ve got to leave physically. Your early warning system is unique to you. I like to call it your stress signature. And the phrase stress signature I use in my work encompasses more than just this. But the reason why I love the phrase stress signature is that everybody’s signature is unique to them. And it’s very true for us when we’re dealing with our nervous systems. Your nervous system uses the same signals probably almost every time. And so you’re learning how that alarm system gets triggered. And you have a window when you learn that a few seconds, you’re going to create a pause and make it a physical, real pause. Because here’s what most people try to do when they feel a trigger coming. They try to reason their way through it. So think about it. The spark sends a flood. Once you’re flooded, this part of your brain is leading, right? That’s your amygdala, that’s your emotional brain. And the higher brain is flipped back, it’s disconnected. And most people, including me, when I feel like something is happening, I try to reason my way through it. But guess what? There’s distance. I can’t access my normal reason. We try to talk ourselves out of the reaction, and it almost never works because reasoning is a prefrontal cortex function. And in a triggering moment, the prefrontal cortex has gone offline. So what works is something physical, something that speaks directly to the nervous system in its own language. And the simplest, most reliable way I know to do this is to place a hand on your chest, right over your heart, and take a breath, in through your nose for a couple of counts, and then hold it for just a second and out for twice the number of counts. So inhale to the count of four, hold it for two, and exhale to the count of eight. That extended exhale is not just random. It directly activates what we call the vagus nerve, which is your body’s own built-in calming system. That breath can shift your physiology. And I almost imagine that when I breathe, that prefrontal cortex, my lid that is flipped, when I take that long slow exhale, there’s almost like a string on it that helps it come back online. It reopens the window of our choice. It gets us out of that automatic response because we know where we are on the map. That’s what we need to do to lengthen that little bit of a space that helps us decide what we’re gonna do next.
Remember the woman I told you about who was worried about her yelling? We had her practice this for several weeks. Just this one thing. Not a parenting strategy, not a consequence system, not better conversations with her kids so that they wouldn’t trigger her, right? We just had her put a hand on her chest and take one long, slow breath. And she told me the first time she did it in real life, in the middle of a moment with her teenager, she felt ridiculous, like she was pretending to be calmer than she really was. And I told her, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re pretending to give your body more calm than it feels in the moment. And pretending is a poor word. You are practicing giving your body more calm than it has. So you’re kind of leaning toward something you don’t have yet. You’re giving your body the signal before you feel it. It’s another way to say it. And your body catches up. This is the best news ever. We didn’t always know this. Before nervous system research, we didn’t understand the biological impact. And we were left trying to kind of be stronger, be better, try to think our way through it. And it just doesn’t work as well. But this, it works so much better.
You want to be able to then calm yourself down, even in that tiny little space, so that your prefrontal cortex can come online and you can respond from the things that you value, not from the old wound or whatever that old memory is that is getting threatened, right? Because once you have that pause, even a tiny, tiny, tiny one, you get to have more choice. Especially a choice that was not available to you before when everything was running in automation. And the question that helps me most in this moment is what do I really want to do right now? Now my body is saying I want to yell, I want to scream at somebody, or I want to just walk out, I want to leave, or I want to sit down and lecture again and teach again why you shouldn’t do this. Guys, you know why we don’t want them to do that? Because we don’t want to get flooded. That’s the wrong reason to teach our kids to put their stuff away. You want to be able to reason with them from an adult, non-emotional place. And could there still be consequences for not putting your stuff away after you’ve been trained, taught, pleaded with, practiced with? Yes. But you’re not yelling when you do it. You’re doing it because you are teaching the skill, and that is your job. Instead of your child hasn’t done this weird job, which is to keep their mom calm. We all have been there. Notice if you have any shame coming up, because when I said that, I felt a little bit come up because I’ve been there, and it’s not the way I want to parent, but biologically, neurobiologically, it’s the way my body will respond if I don’t know my map.
We want to be able to say the mom I am working to be, what is she gonna do in this moment? Right? And sometimes the answer is she names what she’s feeling. I’m really frustrated right now. I need a minute. That’s not weakness, that’s not guilting, that’s modeling honesty for your children in real time. You know your lid is close to flipping because hopefully you’re catching it early, right? And you’re removing yourself from this situation. My favorite place to send moms is to the bathroom. Very rarely does anybody argue with you that you have to go to the bathroom. Don’t stay in there forever. I know it’s tempting. Stay for 30 seconds. Take a breath long enough to get your feet back under you. Sometimes you don’t have to remove yourself. Sometimes you can see this thing coming at you knowing that the behavior itself isn’t the problem, but you’re getting flooded and there’s some complicated stuff around it. It’s probably not about the backpack, it’s about the fact that you didn’t get enough sleep and you’re outnumbered parent to kids, and that you had some disappointing news today, or whatever that is, and that you’re having a big reaction and you’re going to let that just be. Whatever the backpack thing or the rolling of the eyes, you’re not going to let that be the thing that sends you over the edge because you have a sense of that space between the spark and the flooding. And our focus now is for you to take care of yourself. Because the thing that needs to be said, if you have to say something, will still need to be said in 10 minutes. I promise. And it will land completely different when you say it from steadiness and calm rather than from the flood. So responding from your values is what we’re going for. It’s not perfect. It’s just that you are in the place you want to be when you’re composing your response.
I believe all the way to my bones, you are not too reactive. I know we say that, we feel that. You are not too much. You are not broken in some fundamental way that makes calm impossible for you. You just have a nervous system and it’s learned to protect you, and it has been doing that for a very long time. And it’s been doing it in the best way it knows how. What we’re doing now together is not fighting that system. We’re teaching it something new. We’re teaching ourselves something new. We’re giving more information to ourselves, more tools, more language, and we’re helping our nervous system understand that those sparks, that backpack on the floor, is not the same as maybe not being listened to when you were a kid. That eye roll from your teenager is not the same as every time you were dismissed before. The present moment has more possibility in it than the past moment did. That learning just takes some awareness. It’s not a straight line. There’ll be moments, probably this week, where your lid flips before you see it coming. And when that happens, when you do the thing you were trying not to do, what matters more than anything is what you do then. Whether you compound the shame or whether you return and calm yourself, whether you spiral in the fear and the threat, or whether you start to repair. And I’m showing my spouse or whatever person is with me that I am taking responsibility for this. That this is not about other people having to be perfect so that I don’t get upset or about me being such a terrible person that I have to take myself out of the equations because I can’t hold it together. You guys, this is so painful. We need to get out of that trap.
You can do this little bits at a time. You’re allowed to get upset, lose your temper, feel overwhelmed. You can’t do human life without that. But if you can understand why it’s happening, then you can work with it and you can repair it, and you can still love yourself at the end of the day because you, I promise you, are so worthy of love. We’re just working to understand ourselves more deeply, and that’s, I hope that’s exactly what our kids are learning to do too, right? Because perfection is off the table. It’s this practice that we need to focus on. And the fact that you’re here, learning with me as I geek out on all of this stuff tells me that you’re in it already and you’re open to it. The more that we open our mind to it, the better we do at it little by little. Give yourself a big hug. I believe in you. Thanks for spending time with me today. I will see you all next week. Take care.
The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.