When Your Trigger Meets Mine and Catching the Ball Before We Destroy What Matters
Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international No.1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute and Serenity By The Sea. Drawing on over three decades of study and practice, she explores trauma, resilience, emotional mastery, embodiment, and what it means to truly come alive.
Two people can love each other and trigger each other. Two good people can misunderstand each other. Two people can each have a legitimate need, a legitimate boundary, and a legitimate reason for being upset, and still end up hurting one another. It happens in marriages and friendships, between parents and children, in workplaces, and sometimes between people who barely know each other. Someone says something. The other person hears something different from what was intended and reacts. That reaction activates something in the first person, who reacts in return. Within minutes, the conversation is no longer really about what happened. Instead, both people are protecting themselves from each other.
I have used a metaphor for years when working with couples that I call protective ping pong. Something happens, and one person's protection comes online. Their reaction erupts out of them like a ball being hit across the table. It lands in the other person's protective system, activating their own hurt, fear, anger, or defence, and they hit the ball back. But now it comes back carrying more than the original issue. It carries the second person's reaction too.
The first person receives that reaction through their own protective layers and sends the ball back again. The other person reacts to that. Back and forth it goes, protection meeting protection, defence provoking defence, each hit amplifying the trigger. The ball gets hit harder. The pace gets faster. The words become sharper. Both people become increasingly certain that the other person's behaviour proves why they needed to defend themselves in the first place.
See? You're not listening to me. See? You're attacking me. See? You don't respect me. See? I can't talk to you.
This is how two people can begin with one relatively ordinary disagreement and end up somewhere neither intended to go. At some point, they aren't even responding to the original event anymore. They are responding to each other's protective reactions. The protection has become the conversation, not the actual situation.
It can keep going relentlessly. Both people want to be seen and heard, yet that becomes almost impossible when we are caught in protective ping-pong. One person's defence gives the other person another reason to defend. That defence comes back as more evidence of threat. Back and forth, back and forth, until somebody shuts down, walks away, says something they cannot easily take back, or damages a relationship neither person originally wanted to damage.
Unless somebody catches the ball. That's the interruption. As long as I return your protection with mine, and you return my protection with yours, the game continues. Somebody has to become aware enough, somewhere in the volley, to recognize what is happening and choose not to send the ball back.
That person isn't necessarily the one who was wrong. They aren't necessarily more responsible for what happened. They are simply the person who, in that moment, has enough awareness to see the pattern from inside the pattern.
We're not solving the original problem anymore. We're protecting ourselves from each other. If I hit this back again, we're going somewhere neither of us actually wants to go.
So they catch the ball. That can be incredibly difficult because everything in a triggered protective system may be screaming to do the opposite: defend yourself, correct them, make them understand, prove your point, show them what they just did, and get the final word.
Catching the ball means interrupting that momentum. Sometimes it means becoming quiet long enough to regulate. Sometimes it means being able to say, I can feel that we're both getting activated. I don't want us to keep hurting each other, and underneath this activation there is fear and pain on both sides. Sometimes we need twenty minutes, a night, or enough space for our biology to settle before we can return.
The form matters less than the awareness underneath it: I know what my protection wants me to do right now, and I don't have to do it. I have the power to choose not to let the trigger direct me. I can consciously direct what I do with it.
This isn't surrender. It isn't admitting the other person is right. It isn't abandoning the issue that started the conflict. It is choosing not to add another hit. Once somebody catches the ball, something becomes possible that wasn't possible while it was flying back and forth between two protective systems: we can finally look at what actually happened and find a path forward that leads toward healing rather than repetition.
We don't enter conflict empty-handed
What actually happened is not always as simple as it first appeared, because none of us enters conflict as a blank slate. We bring our histories with us. We bring the relationships that taught us what anger means, the times we weren't heard, and the experiences of being controlled, abandoned, humiliated, dismissed, misunderstood, or overpowered. We bring our families, cultures, languages, previous relationships, experiences with authority, and all the meanings our nervous systems have accumulated along the way.
This means what one person experiences as directness can be received by another as aggression. What one experiences as setting a reasonable boundary can be felt by another as rejection or control. One person may genuinely be asking for clarification, while the other hears criticism or judgment. That person becomes defensive, and their defence is then experienced by the first person as an attack.
Now both people may sincerely believe, I am protecting myself from you. This is one of the reasons misunderstandings can become so painful so quickly. So much gets lost in translation between us human beings, even between people who know and love each other intimately. Add differences in culture, language, communication style, family history, and vulnerability, and there are countless places where meaning can change somewhere between what one person intends and what another person receives.
Years ago, I came across a quote by Khalil Gibran that touched me deeply because it put words to something I had already witnessed so many times in relationships:
“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.” – Khalil Gibran
There is so much truth contained in those few words. What we mean, what we say, what another person hears, and what our protection causes us to say can be very different things.
Most misunderstandings are not calculated attempts to cause harm. That doesn't mean harmful behaviour should be dismissed as misunderstanding. Sometimes people behave badly. Sometimes boundaries are genuinely violated. Sometimes we need to leave. Discernment matters.
But there is a paradox here that I have come to understand not only through my work, but through knowing the places where my own triggers once overrode my capacity to regulate. For example, consciously, I may have no intention of harming you. Unconsciously, however, a protective part of me may be trying to do exactly that, to push you away, overpower you, punish you, silence you, or make you hurt enough that I can feel safe again.
That doesn't mean we are secretly malicious. It means we are extraordinarily complex human beings, and self-preservation is not always gentle. Without self-awareness, we can remain blind to protective impulses that are capable of causing harm precisely because we don't recognize them as our own.
If we automatically interpret the intensity of our activation as proof of another person's intention, while remaining unconscious of what our own protection is doing in return, we can destroy things that never needed to be destroyed. This is where one of the oldest teachings becomes extraordinarily practical.
Know thyself, especially your dynamite
"Know thyself" can sound almost philosophical after centuries of repetition. We may think of self-knowledge as knowing our values, desires, strengths, preferences, and purpose. All of that matters. But some of the most consequential self-knowledge is far less comfortable.
We need to know what happens to us when we feel threatened. What makes me defensive? What happens inside me when I feel dominated, dismissed, or misunderstood? Where and when am I capable of becoming mean or cruel? What happens when I don't feel heard? What tone of voice changes my internal state? What makes me want to withdraw, attack, prove myself, control the situation, punish somebody, end the relationship, or leave before I can be hurt?
In other words: "What ignites my hidden inner dynamite?" Because if I don't know where my dynamite is buried, another person can step on it without even knowing it is there.
Then I may measure the size of my explosion and mistake its intensity for evidence, assuming it tells me everything I need to know about what they did.
It doesn't always. Sometimes the intensity of our reaction is telling us something important about the present situation. Sometimes it is also telling us about the size of what that situation represents inside us. A relatively ordinary moment can touch an extraordinary history. The nervous system isn't responding only to a sentence spoken five seconds ago; it may also be responding to everything that sentence has come to mean.
Our triggers are already within us long before another person activates them. The encounter reveals the trigger; it did not necessarily create it. That is why the process of inner inquiry matters. We need to understand the hidden survival mechanisms, meanings, and protective patterns operating beneath our conscious awareness.
Knowing ourselves, then, isn't simply a personal development exercise. "It is a relational responsibility." The better I know my own mechanisms, the more likely I am to recognize when an old protection is beginning to interpret a new moment through an old lens. The sooner I recognize it, the more choice I have about whether I hit the ball back.
The humility of knowing our shadow
There is another dimension to self-knowledge that we don't always like to talk about. We human beings have extraordinary capacities for compassion, generosity, courage, tenderness, and love. We also have a nervous system built for survival.
Under sufficient threat, we can become aggressive, cruel, controlling, punishing, or destructive. Fight is one of the defensive possibilities available to us. Recognizing that doesn't excuse violence or harmful behaviour. Being triggered does not remove responsibility for what we do. Quite the opposite: knowing these capacities exist gives us more reason to understand ourselves deeply enough to recognize when we are moving toward them, so we can interrupt the unconscious process before it causes unnecessary damage.
It is easy to look at somebody else's worst behaviour and say, "I could never do that." Genuine self-knowledge asks us to hold that certainty with a little more humility. Are we absolutely sure who we might become under circumstances we have never experienced? Under enough fear, enough threat, enough humiliation, enough desperation?
This isn't an invitation to distrust ourselves. It is an invitation to become intimate with the full spectrum of our humanity. There are versions of ourselves that may emerge under the right or wrong circumstances that we would rather believe don't exist. "I am human enough to know that I need to know myself."
In fact, it was witnessing my own unconscious triggers that set me on my path of self-knowing. I didn't understand what happened inside me or why it happened. My reactions sometimes felt so opposite to what I knew to be the true nature that I needed to understand them. That search led me deeply into human nature, psychology, and spirituality, not only to make sense of myself, but to learn how to unlearn the mechanisms that were no longer serving me.
There is freedom in that humility. If I know what my survival nature is capable of, and I know the early signs of my own escalation, I have more opportunity to intervene before protection becomes destructive behaviour. I can notice the tightening in my body, the growing certainty that the other person is against me, the urge to retaliate, and the sentence forming in my mind that I know will wound them.
I don't have to pretend the impulse isn't there. I don't have to shame myself for having it. I need to recognize it.
Because a trigger is real, but it is not an instruction. I have spent my life developing this capacity with each trigger I meet. As long as we are human beings with nervous systems, triggers will arise. Our nervous system remembers because remembering is part of how it protects us. But that doesn't mean it has to rule us.
When a trigger becomes a doorway to self-knowing and healing
Triggers can be incredible catalysts. They have the potential to bring us into contact with old pain, unresolved experiences, and protective patterns that have remained buried beneath our conscious awareness. When we are willing and able to meet what is revealed, understand it, work with it, and integrate it, healing becomes possible.
But triggers do not automatically produce healing. Without awareness, they can create tremendous destruction. We can repeat the same protective pattern for decades, injure people we love, sabotage relationships, and reinforce the very wounds we are trying to protect. The possibility for healing appears when we engage the trigger consciously.
Instead of remaining only with What did this person do to me?, we become willing to ask another set of questions: "What happened inside me when they did it? What meaning did my system assign to this? What am I protecting? What does this remind me of? Is everything I'm feeling about what is happening now? What is my protection urging me to do, and what will I create if I follow that impulse?"
These questions don't excuse the other person. They don't mean our boundary was unnecessary or our perception was wrong. They give us access to something that disappears quickly when protection takes over: choice.
Once I can see my protection, I am no longer required to become it. That is where a trigger can lead inward rather than simply exploding outward. It can reveal a vulnerability we didn't know was still running us, an old meaning we have carried into new relationships, or a defensive strategy that once helped us survive but is now creating consequences we no longer want.
The trigger becomes information. When information meets awareness, something new becomes possible. "Put down the paddle. Keep the boundary."
There is an important distinction here, because conscious relationship is sometimes confused with appeasement. Choosing not to hit the ball back does not mean abandoning ourselves in order to preserve connection. Catching the ball doesn't mean saying, "You're right. My needs don't matter. Forget what happened."
We can put down the paddle and keep the boundary. We can say, "No, you cannot speak to me that way." We can say, "This still needs to change." We can acknowledge that another person is hurt and still disagree with their interpretation. We can leave situations that are genuinely harmful. We can remain true to ourselves without needing to use our truth as a weapon. "Regulation doesn't erase the boundary. It changes the way the boundary travels."
This is where relational maturity becomes much more nuanced than deciding who was right. I can care about the impact I've had on another person without pretending my intention doesn't matter. I can acknowledge their experience without making mine invalid. I can hear that someone is hurt without automatically concluding that I have done something wrong, just as I can experience hurt without automatically concluding that the other person intended to harm me. There is room for more than one human experience in the same conversation.
The field beyond being right
Rumi wrote of a field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, and of meeting there. I don't understand that field as a place where truth, accountability, or boundaries disappear. I understand it as the place we sometimes need to find when the battle to establish who is right has become more destructive than the original problem.
The question shifts from "Who gets to be right? to What is happening between us?" Sometimes two people are both holding pieces of truth. Sometimes both are hurt. Sometimes one person needs to take responsibility for something they did. Sometimes both do. Sometimes, once the nervous systems settle and the defences come down, what looked like malice turns out to have been an innocent misunderstanding that collided with an old wound.
Nobody has to be a villain for a relationship to begin breaking down. Sometimes there are simply two protective systems standing across from each other, each trying desperately not to be wounded again. The tragedy is that, in trying not to be hurt, we can become the source of the next hurt.
This is why catching the ball matters. It gives us the possibility of meeting each other again as people rather than as threats.
Not always. Not every relationship can or should be repaired. Sometimes the clearest expression of self-knowing is knowing when to leave.
But many relationships are damaged not because there was no love, no care, or no possibility of understanding, but because protection kept answering protection until neither person could see the other anymore.
The gold inside the trigger
I don't believe the goal of self-awareness is to become untriggerable. Life will keep touching us. People will misunderstand us, and we will misunderstand them. Boundaries will collide with wounds. Words will land differently than intended. Old pain will occasionally walk into new rooms.
The work is to know ourselves well enough to recognize when it happens. When we meet a trigger consciously, it can show us something extraordinarily precise: "There. That's one of my places. That's where I become defensive. That's where I stop listening. That's where I need to prove myself. That's where I want to run. That's where an old story starts interpreting a new moment."
That is the gold. Not the trigger itself. Not the pain. Not the conflict. "What the trigger reveals when we are willing to turn toward it."
Sometimes we recognize it while the conversation is happening. Sometimes we need twenty minutes, a night, a walk, a trusted person, or enough distance for our biology to settle before we can see clearly again. Awareness doesn't have to be instantaneous to be transformative.
What matters is that eventually we become willing to turn toward what the trigger is revealing instead of only obeying what the trigger is demanding.
Because conflict isn't only where relationships reveal their problems. Conflict is one of the places where we reveal ourselves.
Who comes out when you feel cornered? Who comes out when you're misunderstood? When somebody tells you no? When you don't feel heard? When you feel disrespected? When somebody you love touches the place you have spent a lifetime protecting?
Know that person too. Know them with compassion and humility. Know them well enough that when their hand reaches for the paddle, you recognize it.
Then, somewhere in the volley, we can harness the moment and land in presence. Awareness can become stronger than the need to defend, and the very thing that could have created more pain can become an opportunity to heal and grow.
We catch the ball. We put down the paddle, but keep our truth. When we can do that, we can look across the table again and see what protection made it impossible to see before.
There is still a human being over there, carrying their own history and pain. There is one over here too. "Mirrors with different stories, but the same human instinct to protect."
There, with the ball no longer flying between us, we have the possibility of stepping into Rumi's field, beyond the battle of rightdoing and wrongdoing, open enough to listen, curious enough to understand, and conscious enough to discover what the trigger could never show us while we were busy throwing it back.
Read more from Luannah Victoria Arana
Luannah Victoria Arana, Mentor, Author, Healing Facilitator, and Visionary
Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international #1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute for Personal Transformation and Serenity By The Sea Healing Retreats. For more than three decades, she has studied and practiced approaches to trauma healing, emotional resilience, embodiment, and personal transformation. Her work bridges lived experience, therapeutic and somatic practices, traditional wisdom, and contemporary understandings of the nervous system. Through her writing, retreats, mentoring, and courses, Luannah helps people move beyond survival, reclaim trust in themselves, and come fully alive.
