Your Brain Makes Up Stories That Trigger You
ABOUT NINE YEARS INTO THEIR MARRIAGE Eric and Donna were hoping to get some of the passion back by making a date night part of their weekly routine. At that point, they had not yet fully recognized how their sense of intimate connection was being eroded by so many years of unrepaired upsets.
One particular date night led to a significant triggering event. Despite having an important work deadline Eric would have otherwise stayed at the office to meet, he went on the date anyway, since he did not want to risk Donna’s disappointment by canceling. However, during the meal, he occasionally glanced at his cell phone to see if his partners, who were working late that night on this critical project, were trying to reach him.
Donna had been eagerly anticipating an evening of Eric’s undivided attention. She had really been looking forward to this evening together. But Eric’s frequent lapses in attention eventually got to her.
After noticing Eric looking at his phone for the fourth time, a familiar story arose in her mind: “Even on our date night, his work is more important than I am. I’m always second priority.” She began to feel a familiar knot in her stomach.
Her frustration continued to build as they ordered their meal. When the server left the table, she complained sharply to Eric, “At least the waiter listens to me!” This sent a shock wave through Eric’s body. There was a familiar sense of danger and a sinking feeling in his chest. A familiar story came up in his mind: “I can never satisfy Donna. Nothing I do is ever enough for her. I planned this fabulous date night, and she’s still not pleased. She can’t see how hard I’m working to provide for us — even now, trying to close this huge deal. You can’t win with this woman!”
On the surface, Eric tried to seem calm. He ignored Donna’s comment and changed the subject to their kids, thinking that was a relatively safe topic. He didn’t want their evening to be ruined by some seemingly unnecessary conflict. But he didn’t stop checking his cell phone. Donna’s frustration grew. As her adrenaline level increased, and her stomach churned, her storytelling brain took over: “I’m all alone here at this table — and in this marriage. Eric is just not interested in me anymore. He never asks about my life or my needs.”
After finishing their meal, they ordered dessert. Typically, they would share a dessert when they went out, so when Eric ordered the cheesecake, a dessert that Donna didn’t like, she finally erupted: “You’re always so self-centered! You know I don’t like cheesecake! All you care about is what’s important to you.” Her eyes were glaring and her nostrils flaring.
At this, Eric’s inner alarm started blasting. A sinking feeling extended all the way from his throat to his belly. A familiar story played in his head: “This is hopeless. I can never please her. She expects me to read her mind!” Feeling numb and blank, he grew silent. He didn’t know what to say.
Eric and Donna finished their meal in uncomfortable silence. Driving home, Donna was fuming. Eric was stuck in a frozen state. They ended up sleeping in separate rooms.
As outside observers, we might be astonished that Donna and Eric couldn’t simply express their needs more directly to each other. We may wonder why they had not long ago discussed and resolved issues around interruptions from work and how something so small could provoke such big reactions.
But they did not yet understand how one’s survival alarm system can quickly hijack the higher brain’s capacity to engage in rational problem solving. Years of unrepaired upsets had led each of their primitive brains to expect the worst, thus producing their mutually feared outcomes.
Compounding this was the fact that romantic coregulatory behaviors like eye contact and physical touch had diminished over time in their relationship.
In the next chapter we’ll discuss the dynamics of reactive cycles and how our brains are programmed in childhood to fall into predictable patterns of reactivity. And over the next few chapters, we will see how Donna and Eric developed a deeper understanding of their triggers as well as the emotional language to repair triggering incidents.
The Mind Creates Stories
When your brain’s alarm system is triggered, it initiates a state of fight-flight-freeze in your body. Once your higher brain receives these danger signals, your mind tries to make sense of why your body is in this state. Not realizing how brain chemistry works, most people believe and act according to whatever stories their minds come up with. Under stress, the part of the brain that makes meaning of what is going on seems to formulate worst-case stories. Instead of reassuring us that we are safe — that there is no cause for alarm — this part of the human brain fabricates quite a different story.
In this book, we call this our storytelling brain. It is the part of our wiring that concocts meaning. This meaning-making function is generally considered to be located in the brain’s left hemisphere. The explanations provided by our storytelling brain usually justify why our alarms are ringing: “My feelings don’t matter.” “I’m never appreciated.” “I always come last.” “Nothing I do is ever enough.” This kind of self-talk escalates activation, and we become even more upset.
Such stories can become an internal source of self-triggering that persists long after an incident is over. Eventually, these explanations coagulate into more rigid and long-lasting stereotypes that limit how we see each other and our relationship. This shifts how we feel about each other and sets up negative expectations that become self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, Eric starts to “see” Donna as someone who is always upset, so he starts defending himself as soon as she opens her mouth to speak. Donna starts to see Eric as someone who is always resistant to her requests, so her voice becomes anxious and strident whenever she asks for his attention. When we believe the stories our minds make up, we make our fears come true.
These mistaken assessments can keep us in a state of constant vigilance, always on the verge of being triggered. As they continue over time, they take us ever deeper into the Hole, where seeing and hearing what’s actually happening becomes impossible. So it is of critical importance to recognize how the stories in our heads originate and how damaging they can be.
It pays to remember the wise adage “Don’t believe everything you think!”
When Eric heard Donna’s reaction at the restaurant, he had no idea what she was really feeling. Of course, her communication did not help him understand this, either. So his storytelling brain manufactured an explanation: “Donna doesn’t respect me. She is never satisfied. Nothing I do is ever enough!”
As his activation level escalated, Eric’s mind built a case to justify this story: “Here you are, Eric, taking her out to a special restaurant — after working so bloody hard all day long! Even now you’re still trying to make sure that big deal at work succeeds. Does Donna ever appreciate what you do for her? Does she even respect you? No! She has no idea how much hangs on this deal. She thinks money grows on trees. There’s nothing you can ever do that will satisfy this woman! It’s just hopeless! Why do you even bother?”
Meanwhile, Donna had her own inner story: “I always come last, after his work. I’m not sure I matter at all to Eric. Here we are on our date night, and I’m all alone!” These stories triggered even higher levels of activation. For the moment, they thought these stories were true.
The Story Is a Self-Triggering Event
Just like Donna and Eric, when we believe whatever our storytelling brain fabricates, we are pushing our own buttons! As we listen to this sort of mind chatter, our survival alarm quickly escalates to higher levels of activation. Then our upset reactions seem completely justified!
Even after the reactive incident, we can keep escalating our own upset as our brain replays these stories again and again. With time and repeated unresolved upsets, people become even more convinced that their stories are true. Partners begin to see each other through the filter of mistaken generalizations.
As their stories take over, partners lose the ability to understand each other accurately. Did Donna have any idea that Eric was also hoping for a romantic night of reconnection on their date? Did Eric have any idea that, for Donna, going on a date meant having his undivided attention? They each mistakenly believed the other did not value them, did not care about their feelings, or did not want to connect.
You probably hear such worst-case stories in your head when you get triggered. Next time this happens, notice your self-talk. Is there a common theme — like how insensitive your partner is, or how you always come last? Can you see how believing such stories gets you even more upset?
The meaning-making part of your brain seeks to establish cause-and-effect links between things. In many situations, this helps you function well. It’s good to have a predictive model for how things work and how to stay safe in the physical world. You learn to look both ways before crossing the street, predict how billiard balls will rebound, and think four moves ahead in chess. So the analytic brain is quite useful for many things in the world, especially where simple rules apply.
However, for matters as complex as human relationships, the analytic ability of your brain is often not quite up to the task, especially when your primitive alarm starts to ring. That voice in your head that explains what is going on can easily get it wrong. You know this well, since you have probably been misunderstood by others many times. You at least know that other people’s brains get it wrong. But you’ve got one of those storytelling brains, too! And not only is it severely limited when it comes to understanding relationships, it may be causing a lot of damage to your love life. When the storytelling brain processes information, it will oversimplify, and it will arbitrarily connect the dots based on past experience and past unfinished business — not on present reality!
Stories Are about “Why”
In the 1940s, before effective pharmaceutical drugs were discovered, brain surgeons found they could cure severe epilepsy with an operation that separated the left and right sides of the brain. In this radical surgical procedure, doctors severed the corpus callosum, a major channel of connection between the brain’s right and left hemispheres. This prevented the interhemispheric thunderstorm that causes seizures, and thus saved patients’ lives. As a result, though, most information no longer flowed between the two halves of the brain.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga realized that these patients provided a rare opportunity to look at how each side of the brain functioned in relative isolation.* In the 1960s, he started over four decades of research on patients who had had this operation. In one study, he projected a silly picture that was only visible to the right visual field of a patient, who would then start laughing. Then he asked the patient, “Why are you laughing?”
The patient did not know, but the storytelling brain (in the brain’s left hemisphere) would still fabricate an answer. The patient would say something like, “This is a funny projection machine,” or “You guys are running a silly experiment here.”
In another study, Gazzaniga projected a frightening movie that was only seen by the patient’s right brain. The patient reported feeling nervous. Asked why, the patient quickly claimed that Gazzaniga’s research assistant looked a bit creepy. Even though the patient’s upset feelings were triggered internally in the right brain, the left brain asserted that the cause was a random person in the room.
Through years of such inventive studies, Gazzaniga conclusively demonstrated how the meaning-making part of the brain ad-libs and just makes things up. It makes up stories that sound like reasonable explanations for what we are doing and feeling, or what the other person’s behavior means. And we believe these stories as if they were facts.
In a similar way, when our alarm gets triggered, and we do not realize what is truly setting it off (which we will discuss in the next few chapters), our brain makes up a story: “My partner doesn’t care about my feelings,” or “I can never please her.” It is as if a frightening movie starts playing in our right brain while we talk with our intimate partner. We start feeling and even acting upset, but we don’t recognize the cause. When our partner asks, “Why are you so upset?” we blurt out our story: “Because you never listen to me!” or “Because you always have to be right!”
Stories That Keep Us Triggered
What stories come up in your head when you get upset? The following list shows some of the more common stories that come up when there is distress in our love lives. Check off any stories that your mind has fabricated when you were triggered by a partner. Change the pronouns “he” and “she” to suit your situation.
This exercise is in the online workbook’s “Reactive Stories” section (available at www.fiveminuterelationshiprepair.com). You will refer back to this list later in chapter 8.
“I am all alone.”
“He shuts me out.”
“She is so distant.”
“I am way down on the list.”
“I always come last.”
“He just doesn’t seem to care.”
“My feelings don’t matter.”
“We are never close anymore.”
“She is not that into me.”
“I am just not sure I matter.”
“It’s like he doesn’t see me.”
“I don’t know how to reach her.”
“If I didn’t push, we’d never be close.”
“He doesn’t really need me at all.”
“Nothing I do is ever enough.”
“She doesn’t appreciate me.”
“I can never get it right, so I give up.”
“I must be flawed somehow.”
“I feel like a failure as a mate.”
“It just all seems so hopeless.”
“I try to keep everything calm.”
“I try not to rock the boat.”
“I go into my shell where it’s safe.”
“I am just not as needy.”
“She just gets overemotional.”
“I can handle things on my own.”
“I don’t know what he is talking about. We’re fine.”
“I try to fix things, to solve the problem.”
Why Are Our Stories Worst-Case Scenarios?
We formed our basic beliefs and expectations about relationships with our first significant others — our parents and early caregivers. How we were treated by them, and how we saw them treat one another, led to the expectations and interpretations our minds continue to feed us today. This programming continued with siblings, friends, peers at school, and any other meaningful relationships where we sought to get our needs met.
If we experienced emotionally painful or frustrating events, this installed certain fear buttons in our brains. Here are some of the common fear buttons that show up in intimate partnerships. These include the fear of being . . .
abandoned, rejected, left, all alone, unneeded, insignificant, invisible, ignored, unimportant, flawed, blamed, not good enough, inadequate, a failure, unlovable, controlled, trapped, overwhelmed, suffocated, out of control, helpless, weak.
Which of these have you ever felt in a significant love relationship? Such fears can get triggered by any event that seems similar to a past incident where our significant needs were frustrated.
Donna’s fear button of being not good enough was connected to the way her father used to lecture her about how she should act in school, how she needed to perform better in some class, or how she could improve herself. As a child, Donna got the message that she was not lovable. A core need for being accepted and valued seemed to be threatened when her father launched into his lecturing tone. Hearing Eric use a similar voice tone triggered this fear button, and the story came up in her mind that “Eric is talking down to me like I’m stupid!”
Donna had not yet learned that her storytelling brain was leading her astray. In the same way, Eric’s inner storyteller misunderstood Donna. He grew up with parents who argued constantly. He felt helpless and scared when he heard their loud voices, and he usually ran and hid in his room. So as an adult, he would easily fall prey to the story that he was powerless when someone got angry or raised their voice around him.
Donna and Eric are like the patients in the experiment, where they had no real idea why they felt afraid or upset. But their minds filled in the blanks with stories. So if you find yourself getting upset, it may serve you and your relationship to pause and question any story about “why” that comes into your mind.
When you’re upset, get in the habit of asking yourself:
What if I’m inaccurate in how I see this?”
What if my story is simply what I fear to be true?”
* Michael S. Gazzaniga, “Two Brains: My Life in Science,” in Inside Psychology, ed. Patrick Rabbitt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 101–16.