Relationship Matters

Ep.11 The Inside Team Part 2: Finding alignment with a triggered selves

November 30, 2022 CRR Global Season 4 Episode 11
Relationship Matters
Ep.11 The Inside Team Part 2: Finding alignment with a triggered selves
Show Notes Transcript

Across 3 episodes in season 4, Katie talks with master coach Cynthia Loy Darst about the Inside Team: How To Turn Internal Conflict Into Clarity and Move Forward With Your Life. Based on ORSC concepts the Inside Team approach explores the collection of internal voices, parts, and beliefs that exist within us all and offers a framework for exploring these different parts of self so that we can explore our thought processes and better understand what these parts of self really want. By doing so your creativity and resourcefulness will have room to grow, turning internal conflict into clarity, negative thoughts into positive ones, and moving forward with more ease and fun in your life. In part 2, we explore how to find alignment with triggered selves. Topics include:

  • What to do when your inside team isn’t getting along
  • How to build a relationship with a triggered self
  • Creating alignment between primary and secondary identities.


Cynthia Loy Darst is known as a passionate pioneer in the world of Coaching and has a reputation for being both playful and inspiring. She works with all kinds of people to move them past their limitations and into more effective action. As well as being a senior course leader at CRR Global and CTI, Cynthia was one of the first eight to receive the designation of Master Certified Coach (MCC) from the International Coach Federation in 1998. Passionate about quality and excellence in the world of coaching, Cynthia was a founding member of the International Coach Federation and has served as President of ACTO (The Assoc. of Coach Training Organizations). Cynthia is also the Author of 'Meet Your Inside Team – How To Turn Internal Conflict Into Clarity and Move Forward With Your Life.' Her book is required reading for the EMBA program at Loyola Marymount University where she is a frequent guest speaker.


For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Key 

 

KC – Katie Churchman 

CD - Cynthia Loy Darst   

 

[Intro 00:00 – 00:09] 

 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and across the three episodes I’m talking with master coach Cynthia Loy Darst about the inside team, how to turn internal conflict into clarity and move forward with your life. Based on ORSC concepts the Inside Team approach explores the collection of internal voices, parts and beliefs that exist within all of us and offers a framework for exploring these different parts of self so that we can explore our thought processes and better understand what these parts of self really want. By doing so your copy and resourcefulness will have room to grow, turning internal conflict into clarity, negative thoughts into positive ones and moving forward with more ease and fun in your life. In part two we’re exploring how to find alignment with triggered selves. If you’ve not listened to part one already, we’d highly recommend checking out part one first which is all about how to get to know your inside team or the me system. Topics in this episode include what to do when your inside team isn’t getting along, how to build a relationship with a trigged self and creating alignment between primary and secondary identities. So, without further ado I bring you Cynthia Loy Darst. 

 

KC – Cynthia, welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. 

 

CD – Oh thank you thank you, I’m excited about this conversation today! 

 

KC – Likewise. So, last time we spoke about getting to know that system of me, that inside team, and today we’re going to be talking about finding alignment with triggered selves. So what to do with those Trixie Triggered Selves. 

 

CD – Fantastic. Because this is, this topic is something that so many of us, we get triggered! We get triggered, as human beings we get triggered and we often don’t know what to do with that. And if you’ve done the geography course at CRR Global then you have access to the idea of de-triggering. And so what we’re going to do today, I think, were gonna kinda probably look at that a little bit through an inside teams lens, but we’re gonna deepen our awareness of what happens when one of those powerful players on our inside team, aspects of ourself, secret self, whatever terminology you wanna use, what happens when that one takes over without your permission. 

 

KC – I like the way you held it as a powerful player, because in my mind, a triggered self, I think even the way I’d story that would be I’d marginalize that part of self, or that awful, nasty part of me takes over. Whereas you held it as a player which then, is a voice of the system. 

 

CD – Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They’re not nasty at all. They’re so freaked out that they behave in a nasty way, maybe, or they have us go totally deer in the headlights or whatever they do. But they’re trying so desperately to make sure that we’re safe, that we’re ok, that’s their whole I assert is almost always what a triggered aspect is trying to do.

 

KC – This is very humanizing and normalizing, and I guess for those listeners who aren’t familiar with this term triggered self, have you got any examples Cynthia of some triggered selves that you’re familiar with? 

 

CD – Me? No! No, ok, so let’s look at this. What does it even mean to be triggered? So triggered is when you, think of a time where somebody says something or did something and all of a sudden you reacted out of character, our of your normal and what tends to happen is then people say oh my god, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know why I screamed at that person, I don’t know why I got quiet in that meeting and couldn’t talk, I don’t know why every time my ex-husband comes into my, I it’s the am pissed off at him. So there’s a sense of like what happens? What is this? We get triggered by all kinds of things. This is a normal human thing to have happen. So here’s what, in my opinion, I don’t know this to be the absolute truth because I’m not a scientist, but in my opinion what I have learned is that these triggered aspects have come into our being because of some kind of trauma. Now it doesn’t have to be a massive trauma, in fact, more often it was the time where I was a little girl and someone at school made fun of me. Right? And now, because they made fun of me for laughing so loud and called me a donkey or something like that, as you can tell, it’s still here. You know like, because they made fun of me in that way there may be situations, like if I’m around that person ever again I’m going to be quiet, I’m not gonna laugh, I’m not gonna respond because I’m not… you know, how dare they, right? And that’s not me being fully relaxed in myself, right? 

 

KC – What’s fascinating is, these responses, well, these reactions, they’re so hard wired that even when we’re out of that situation and we’re in the office 20-30 years later, it can show up again and I think that’s what shocks people so much. That it hits us out of context a little bit. 

 

CD – Absolutely. And this is the one place to me that when it, there’s a kind of ghost. There’s a, like we normally, in the coaching world, are talking about what’s here and we’re moving forward and we’re not so much going into how did this get here, what happened, what’s the trauma, what’s the- we don’t, that’s more of a therapeutic world. Right? However, if we look at this through the lens of sort of a ghost, what is it, what’s our first memory of that triggered self? Of that self taking over, right? And that often has something to do with when it came on the scene. 

 

KC – So interesting. I’m sure afterward, when we’re at that sort of come down place from that trigger, many of us have had that experience in lots of different points of our life. We can probably trace it back to some kind of teenage/childhood experience. 

 

CD – Right? Marita, Marita Fridjhon, when she leads the geography course she talks of going to the dentist and just the mere thought of going to the dentist has part of her get triggered, has her start to get anxious. So that kind of one or two bad experiences in a certain thing, now have it be oh my god, it’s always gonna be that way, and this self comes in. 

 

KC – It’s a hard wired narrative in a way, and the brain’s sort of holding on to that negative bias that it’s always going to be like this, probably trying to protect us. 

 

CD – Absolutely. So I want you to imagine this. This is for everyone. I want you to think of some, this could be very minor, a minor trigger, it could be a major trigger, I want you to imagine that you’ve got this aspect of you, this secret self, and it’s, it’s right there, kind of on guard. And this situation comes up, like let’s just say, because a lot of people get triggered when someone screams at them, right? That’s kind of normal, you know? Some people can be cool and not a big deal but sometimes people get triggered. So, someone screams and now let’s check, let’s notice what happens. The metaphor we use at CRR that I dearly love is to imagine that here you are in your house, in yourself, and all of these selves are in there with you, and some triggering aspect, some screamy person maybe rings the front doorbell. 

 

KC – Yeah. 

 

CD – Right? And you go to the front door bell to find out who’s there, here you are, your adult self, you’re doing that, and all of a sudden this other self – ‘No, no, no, no! I’ll get it!!! I’ll get it!! I’ll do it! I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ And then in comes, so there’s some kind of agreement that got made probably unconsciously, most likely unconsciously. There’s an agreement that got made with this part, this secret self, that it would take over when this situation arose. And so that’s part of the work, is to start to find out who is this that’s trying to take over. Let’s have a conversation, let’s find out about him, let’s get him over here, let’s pull them out a little bit, let’s have a conversation – what agreement did we make? 

 

KC – And I imagine for a lot of people it’s probably nothing at all, actually, because this has just been a pattern that’s highjacked me a couple of times a year for most of my life. 

 

CD – That’s right! So almost no one has taken the time to say hang on, let me find out about you. Let me find out about you secret self, what is it? What do you think you’re doing? Like, what is it you’re so worried about that you’re gonna just take over? 

 

KC – How does one lean in when it’s a part of self that they can, I’m speaking in the sort of third person, but how do I, how do I lean into a part of me that terrifies me? A part that I’m just appalled by? Because it’s easy to get to know the inside team when they’re all lovely and friendly and aw this is my gang, but how do I lean in when it’s just monster inside of me? Like how does… how do we do that? 

 

CD – Oh, I love that question Katie. So here’s part of it. Is that I want you to notice like, remember last time were talking about when we can see these parts in front of us, when we really can, and we’re really grounded in our adult self we can see that it’s like characters in a movie. Like I don’t have to be scared, personally, this moment of Darth Vader. I don’t have to be scared right this moment of the Wicked Witch of the West. Or even of some murdering, you know, I don’t have to be scared because it’s over there! I can see it, it’s in the movie, it’s not here. So that’s part of what you wanna be doing by bringing these aspects outside of you. Is to separate from them. Is to let, to start to see that there, they themselves are not a threat to my adult self. Now, what you’ve brought up is very interesting because this happens with us a lot as humans. Is we see one that’s really, really nasty and scary, and what happens is there’s a double trigger. What happens, one gets scared over here and it’s quite often a young one. 

 

KC – Ok. 

 

CD – Right, so it’s quite often like oh! My young girl is terrified of that monster! 

 

KC – Oh, how interesting. So you’ve got this fight going on inside your inside team. 

 

CD – That’s right. 

 

KC – Wow. 

 

DC – And so that can be tricky, and it can be tricky as a coach. And so as a coach you want to be able to see if someone actually says oh my god, I’m so scared of that judge, that monster, whatever it is, you as coach, have that one go over there but now notice that there’s probably another player here who is a, who usually is very young, who’s terrified, who does not know how to be in relationship to that judgey one or mean one except to be like oh, they’re right, oh I’m a bad person, oh I don’t know.. something like that. I don’t know what your version is. 

 

KC – Something like that! Exactly. And what I’ve noticed with some of my clients as well is they’ll go through the exercise but they’ll be like not looking at the triggered self, so when we put them out there, and I think some of those signals can be really helpful for us as coaches. When they’re looking away and they just can’t create that relationship with that part. 

 

CD – Wow. What a beautiful thing to observe. 

 

KC – Would you say then that’s them probably in a second triggered self, not able to really look? 

 

CD – Maybe. I would actually ask. I would say so as we do this I’m noticing you’re looking away from that – what’s going on? Maybe it moved. But maybe they are like trying to ignore it-

 

KC – Yeah. 

 

CD – or trying not to engage and so that’s the part of what you’re pointing to Katie, and I wanna highlight, is how much we tend to maintenance these selves. And we see it in the world today. We see that there are very loud, nasty voices and our tendency is to just say ergh, I don’t want that, go away, go away. So, let’s imagine, rather than the larger self, let’s imagine you’re working with a team, right? And let’s imagine that almost everything you bring up, there’s someone who’s loud and nasty. Loud and toxic. What do you do with that? 

 

KC – Wow. 

 

CD – So, leader, as a, like if I’m doing relationship work with that group, on a good day, on a good day I’m not getting triggered by that person but I’m starting to say oh, I’m noticing this. Oh, look at this. You’re a voice of the system, what’s the other voices? You’re a, you know. So the more that we can look to see there may be something they’re trying to say. So, I actually wanna like forward to a different piece of this conversation and that’s a piece about this. So, quite often these nasty loud ones, if we think of it from a roles piece, they’re occupying some kind of role. Quite often they’re occupying a role of the pretender or of cautioning. The way they’re doing it may be really crappy. 

 

KC – Yes. Absolutely. 

 

CD – Right? And so the start to have, once you can just have that one move out a little bit, to start to have the conversation of hang on, it’s no longer ok for you to talk to me like that. It’s not ok for you to call me names, for you to be belligerent or sarcastic or any of that, it’s not ok. What is it? And we’re listening for that 2% wisdom or truth in what it’s trying to offer. 

 

KC – I think what I’m noticing Cynthia is to find alignment with these triggered selves, a big part if firstly normalizing that this is human, and then seeing them as a role of that system or seeing them as a player within your inside team, as opposed to, and I know my go to is just to push it down and get rid of it, I don’t wanna look at it, I don’t wanna believe it’s part of me, but that doesn’t really make it go away, ever. 

 

CD – In fact it will tend to get louder because it’s doing more and more to try and get your attention. 

 

KC – And so are we holding that there’s wisdom there even if it’s really unskillful? 

 

CD – Yes. 

 

KC – Ok. 

 

CD – Yes. I assert that that’s useful to do. 

 

KC – And that’s hard, that’s so hard when it’s us and we’re in sort of come down space of oh my gosh, I can’t believe I acted in that way or shouted in that way. And so how do we then start to lean in from here and create a relationship with these parts of self? 

 

CD – Yeah. Yeah. So once we’ve moved it out and we’re starting to find out, what’s so, what are you trying to get my attention about? What is it that you’re trying to do for me? The way you’re doing it is not working, let’s talk, and as we start to have this conversation, we start to have a conversation about what is the agreement that we made many, many years ago probably – I don’t remember it! What permission do you think you have to come in and do this, what’s going on? Now that we’re starting to have this conversation and I start to find that 2% wisdom or truth, what often will happen is that we’ll start to relax a little bit and now we can start to create a new relationship. We can start to design a new alliance. More often than not that triggered self does not believe that you have the wherewithal to be able to handle this situation. 

 

KC – Ok. 

 

CD – That’s what happens. Is it doesn’t know that you are now an adult, it often thinks your still a child, and so let’s just use that idea of someone’s screaming, let’s say, somebody’s boss is screaming at them and the triggered way is like ahhhh, I’m wrong and I’ve just shut down and they must be right and whatever – hang on a second. How would I, if I were really solid and secure in myself, how would I want to deal with someone screaming at me? Huh? I might say ‘hey, I notice you tend to scream at me – it’s not good. It’s not ok for you to come in and scream at me, I wanna do our work together well, let’s design a new way we work together. Do not scream at me. No.’ I would start to put boundaries in place. Right? If I’m in my wherewithal, right? So what that means is that part of our work is for us personally and for us to work with our clients on how do we grow that adult self, how do we grow that into a primary that can be solid in the face of weird stuff coming at us? 

 

KC – I really love this because it offers so much of a framework around that response piece. I think there’s a lot of work in the development space around you should chose your repones which is very easy to say and to do if life is dandy. When things come along that trigger us, it’s much harder to actually chose a repones and this seems to create a space that Victor Frankl talks about, between stimulus and response there’s a space, and would you say the more you do this the more you get that space? 

 

CD – That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So what we now want is a, if I now have had this conversation with this self that gets triggered, it’s now a little calmer, maybe now we have a new alliance. So let’s imagine that this triggered self is now a screamer, right? Someone screams at me this triggered self normally comes up and screams right back at them. Ok. Guess what? If I’m in my adult self, like you’re saying, I now have a choice. There may be a conscious choice now for me to say you know what, I need to scream at this person, to get their attention. It might be a conscious choice to say huh, I’m just gonna stick by it here and see what happens. But what we’re pointing too is how do we make that a conscious choice rather than this automatic triggered reaction? 

 

KC – Which makes sense because our brain loves pattern. 

 

CD – Right. 

 

KC – And so it’s of course natural that we’d fall into these patterns around particularly traumatic experiences, and then to have this sort of over the top reaction, perhaps, to something that’s similar – it makes sense. But this almost feels like going to the gym and doing the reps, to really understand but also align with your inside team so that you have that choice. 

 

CD – That’s right. That’s right. Because you’re creating, I love the direction you’re pointing here Katie, you’re really creating that awareness and creating that strength. You’re creating that ability to be in relationship with this aspect so that you can have it stand down, so that now we have a new agreement, and once that agreement is in place this is no longer a triggered self. This is now a secret self of yours that you can partner with or have access to when needed. 

 

KC – So I’m wondering, this gets more complicated then doesn’t it when we think about say our relationship with family members or with our colleagues, when one of my triggered selves triggers one of your triggered selves, gosh that must be an interesting one! 

 

CD – That’s normal! That’s so very normal! And, Katie, what you’re saying there it’s like so if I, let’s say if you and I started doing some work together, right? And at some point one of us would probably trigger the other because that’s what happens with humans, right? And so to be able to have that conversation – oh my gosh, you did this, I noticed I got triggered here, I then did that and now you’re triggered because of… - wow, let’s take a look at this, let’s work together to notice these triggers and see how we can not have that happen, perhaps? Right? 

 

KC – I guess otherwise you might end up with a trigger party, one is triggering the other and then there’s someone else gets trigged and we’re all up. 

 

CD – Yeah. David and I used to do a, so David’s my husband for anybody who doesn’t know, he’s also one of, a CRR leader, and we would, back in the day before Covid we would go off and we would lead courses and on Monday’s we would take Monday’s off together and we would always go out to lunch. And so we’d get in the car together and he’d be driving, and when he’s driving he’s focused, right? And his attention’s on the road. But what would I do? I would start opening up about the weekend and about some great learning I had and some la la la la la, and I’d say something very vulnerable, feel very vulnerable, and he would go, he'd be like ‘uhuh. Did you see that car over there?’. Like he would be in a totally different, he's barely interacting with me because his focus is there, this is not the time or place for me to be open or vulnerable to try to share and connect with him because he can’t do it right now. However, that’s neither here nor there. Now I’m triggered. Now I’m like ahh, he doesn’t wanna connect with me, he doesn’t love me, it’s really clear he doesn’t love me. Right? So now I’m there and I start to like [cry noise], and what does he do? He suddenly realizes he’s done this thing and now his little boy aspect of oh I can never win, I always do it wrong, I always do it… and now we’ve got our two [various crying noises]. And this happens, right? And because of this work we started realizing that that was a perpetual, it really was, and to start noticing we’re really sort of setting each other up for this, and how do we take co-responsibility now and not, so now I don’t do the sharing in the car whilst he’s driving, that’s not the place for it. 

 

KC – I also find that sharing during the soccer match or the football match is not an appropriate time either for deep meaningful conversations. I’ve learnt that the hard way. 

 

CD – See, that’s exactly it! So there’s a conscious responsibility and then there might be a co-responsibility on his part, right? And so design a new way to work so that we, and now I know that this part of him gets triggered, I also can have some, you know, some compassion for that and he has compassion for me. 

 

KC – I love that you brought in the perpetual problems, that 69% of our problems in relationships are perpetual, they’re not going away. So, I guess this shows up for you and it continues to but do you just interact with it differently when it does? This problem in your relationship? 

 

CD – So with perpetual problems, once they’re brought to light, oh this is the thing where we keep getting into a tangle together. This is the topic or this is the place, that awareness, if you’ve got people that have an interest in working well together which obviously people have to have an interest in order to work something out, but then there can be alignment about how do we actually want to do this rather than the way we’ve been doing it where we start, we trigger each other, we accuse each other, but we bring out the four horsemen of the apocalypse and off we go, you know. 

 

KC – Yeah, that’s such a good point. You don’t have to agree that that’s how you should drive or that’s the best time to share, but you can align at a deeper level around something important to your relationship. 

 

CD – That’s right. 

 

KC – This is such fascinating work Cynthia, and I wonder, how has it shaped your life as you start to get to know your inside team better and worked with this? 

 

CD – You know, I think, I love that question. So one is this piece that I just said with David and I, but the fact of the matter is part of what drew me to this in the first place is that I was so, I was hyper critical about myself. I was always trying to do things perfectly, perfectly, and I had a lot of, in the CTI world we would call it saboteur, in this world we would call it sort of judging, secret, like it was nasty! And I didn’t know at the time that that was gonna be my path to my work in this world, but by being coached, by getting into coaching, I started to see how these voices started to lessen. And then when we, when I actually, when inside team came into being and I started learning this stuff that we’re talking about, what I now know is there’s just been such a tremendous relief in my own internal system, that most days go by now where I’m, I’m solid in myself. Where I’m not, I might have like, you know, oh you didn’t go to the gym today, or oh there’s the ice cream, it might be something like that, but it’s not nasty. And I’m no longer interested in perfection. For me, it was so black and white before, and now my world is quite technicolor with lots of shades of grey, yeah. 

 

KC – That’s amazing World Work you’ve done, sounds like for yourself but also then sharing this. Who knows what’s good and what’d bad, right, because the fact you went through this led you to that work and then creating this model of the inside team! 

 

CD – Exactly. I think that’s why it’s been so important to me. Because I really have seen, I’ve seen moments, you know, sometimes we do some de-triggering or inside team work and it’s all very sort of nice and benign and oh isn’t that cute, and then other times I’ve done the work with someone where it was clearly, clearly life changing. And this, you can feel this release of something that had been sort of stuck in there for a long time, yeah. 

 

KC – I love that so much because it is, I think it is life changing, when it’s been with you for that long and it’s hijacked you in so many ways. And then to know that you can interact with it differently, that part. One of my mentors, he’s a Buddhist, a Buddhist monk, and he talks about the spiral effect and how it’ll probably keep tripping you up, like you don’t just evolve and go up a ladder and it disappears, you will spiral but you will spiral out if you keep going on and learning and developing, and so, I guess these triggers, we just deal with them each time a little bit differently if we keep working with them. 

 

CD – Absolutely. Absolutely. A new nuace will show up, and something else will emerge as we go. 

 

KC – So I guess you’re saying you’ve not got rid of all your triggers then? They’re not all gone? 

 

CD – Oh, lord no. 

 

KC – I wish that were true but I guess that’s part of the work, we never arrive. 

 

CD – Let me just be very forthright with you, I’m no longer dangerous to myself. I used to be, you know, I used to be so self-loathing, honestly. There were times where I was young where I considered suicide. Where I was so feeling like I was not good enough, I was not – and fortunately, because of coaching, that has gotten relieved in me and I’m no longer, if somebody doesn’t like my laugh, if somebody thinks I’m too loud, if somebody – God bless them, they have a right to their opinion! It’s fine and I’m no longer thrown by that kind of judgement. I expect that not everybody is everybody else’s cup of tea. 

 

KC – Thank you for sharing that, because I think coaching sometimes, we forget the impact this can have, and actually interacting with those internal voices in a different way, it can completely change someone’s life and the course of their life. 

 

CD – Yeah, so there you go, that’s part of why, that’s part of why this is important to me. I didn’t have access to that early on. You know, when I wrote the book Meet Your Inside Team, I wrote it, I had already been training coaches in the idea of it, I wrote meet Meet Your Inside Team because I wanted any human to be able to, I think a lot of humans, some people not so much, but I think a lot of humans want to know how to do some work with themselves. And if they don’t know about coaching, if they don’t know about, if that’s not their world, what the hell do they do? Right? And so, Meet Your Inside Team was made so that any human could grab onto it and say oh, this is a way to start, this is a way to look, this is a way to start noticing what’s going on, right? And that’s, that’s why I wrote it. 

 

KC – It’s amazing, and it really talks to that space, so I think so often we skip over that bit. Someone I know was on a training recently and the first key step was get your head together, and it’s like that’s all the work! That’s all of coaching right there, is getting your head together! And this is that work, this is very much creating that choice and that ability to responds as opposed to react in any given situation. 

 

CD – Well that’s so beautiful, like get your head together! What the hell does that mean, right! And how do you do that? Do I just get, try to muscle it… and that’s what a lot of people do, they think that means I’ve got to suck it up and muscle it through and do this thing, rather than finding out, find out what I have to work with here. 

 

KC – And knowing that it’s very human and also that that’s just one part of you. I think for me it was you are not your thoughts, I heard that quite early on in my career and well that took me down this path and, yeah, I think it sounds simple but it was so profound and it stays with me. 

 

CD – That’s so powerful. So, Katie, I’m going to ask you a question. How does that you are not your thoughts relate to your way of knowing yourself and your secret selves? 

 

KC – Yeah, I think I would identify very strongly with one of those selves and that would be me, so in those triggered moments, and I couldn’t see them as parts of me. In those moments I was that as opposed to that’s a part of me, I’ve got all these other great characteristics. And it would overwhelm me, and similar to you I had some really, really strong saboteurs and I think in some ways maybe that’s why I ended up in acting because I was trying to escape my own system or me into lots of other characters, and then you come back and you realize wow, this is the most interesting system of all and you really start to get to know it. 

 

CD – Mm. Right. 

 

KC – Complicated and complex, but understanding that yeah, we’ve got a whole system in there. And we have choice and agency over that. And I think to give that to other people, that gift of yeah, maybe you did get angry but that’s not all of who you are, I think that can be hugely awakening, actually. 

 

CD – Yeah. Yeah. It’s one aspect. It’s one part, right? 

 

KC – Cynthia, I’ve adored this conversation, thank you so much for your vulnerability and heart and joy that you bring, so thank you for brining all of your inside team to this discussion, and I’m excited to continue on next time talking about how we can use this to expand our range as a coach. 

 

CD – Fantastic, I’m excited for that conversation as well, and this is, I love doing this with you Katie, thank you so much for having me be your guest here. 

 

KC – Take care Cynthia, speak soon. 

 

[Music outro begins 38:55] 

 

KC – A huge thanks again to Cynthia for that really insightful discussion. Here are my key takeaways. A triggered state is an inappropriate or an excessive emotional response to something. When we’re triggered a part of who we are or a player on our inside team takes over without our permission. We act out of character for a short period of time when a triggered self takes over. Right relationship begins with the self, including with triggered selves. In order to create conscious and intentional relationship with triggered selves, we need to stay as our adult self, get curious about who’s trying to take over and find out what agreement did we make, and then explore what that part needs in order to not take over when that situation or event arises in future. Can we find the 2% wisdom or truth in triggered selves? How are they trying to be helpful, even if they’re behaving unskillfully? What’s the longing behind the behavior, what does it want? Our triggered selves can also trigger others too. Having a common language around triggers helps systems, in particular couples, in triggering and even re-triggering each other. Simply acknowledging that your triggered can raise awareness and help the system to see itself more objectively in that moment. If you enjoyed this episode do look out for part three which is all about using our inside team to expand our range as a coach. The Inside Team and Cynthia’s book, Meet Your Inside Team: How to Turn Internal Conflict into Clarity and Move Forward With Your Life is based on concepts from the ORSC geography curriculum. For more information about the geography module and the ORSC series please visit CRRGlobal.com. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole. 

 

[Outro 41:49 – end]