My next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real.

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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If you read the news every day like I do, you are no stranger to the signs that humanity’s future is highly unpredictable. We are living in uncertain times where anything you have today could be gone tomorrow—your money, your residence, your possessions, your voting rights, your internet access, your physical well-being, and even your life. In the coming years, we’re all going to need a stable sense of internal safety. To surf the waves of crisis, change, conflict, and decline, we need to be ready for anything. Maybe this is the gift of living in uncertain times.

The future has always been uncertain, but now with exponential change operating in so many areas of life, we hardly have time to catch our breath.

This world is suffering from so many intersecting crises. There’s the climate crisis, the homeless crisis, the refugee crisis, the mental health crisis, increasing political polarization, the out of control national debt, rampant development of AI, and war or the threat of war…. to name a few.

Just pause for a moment to notice your body sensations and breathing as you consider our present situation. Many people I talk to report a pervasive sense of anxiety always in the background of their experience---more now than ever before. Do you notice anything like this yourself? I know I do.

In my long career as a counselor, coach, and systems change agent, I have focused on helping individuals, groups, and organizations develop greater capacity for navigating change and conflict. I have named these as the two biggest challenges of our time—adapting to and managing rapid social and technological change, and learning to cooperate with people who see things very differently from ourselves.

Even though I work mostly with individuals and couples these days, I am still deeply committed to culture change. From this point of view, the world is my client. And the world is suffering.

Living in such a world extracts a big toll on us. It can be paralyzing, demoralizing, and even traumatizing. And the world’s problems are so complex. They may be above our pay grade to solve—especially when so many peoples’ nervous systems are on high alert.

The trigger work practices that I teach address this problem. I teach people how to stay present, aware, and well-resourced under stressful conditions. We may not have much control over the conditions in our world, but we can control our internal state.

In this article, I want to summarize how I see that happening in practice—how the trigger work practices I teach can help us cope with any challenge that comes our way. But first, I want to start with the big picture—starting from the premise that the world is my client.

The Diagnosis

When I look at the world as my client, or rather when I focus on American society because that’s how I know the larger world, my diagnosis is we are an avoidant culture, a culture of denial, and almost everyone is run by their fear of emotional pain. We haven’t learned how to process the anxiety and buried pain inside us. What we mostly do is try to numb or distract ourselves through various addictive behaviors—over-eating, over-consuming, over-working, compulsively using drugs, alcohol, sex, and video games, gambling, scrolling the internet….the list goes on. I’m pretty sure most of us have used at least one of these strategies.

So, that’s my diagnosis--that we are all pain phobic, and we live in a culture that reinforces and promotes this. …a culture of denial and distraction.

The Treatment

What does trigger work have to offer here? One important thing it offers is a mindfulness perspective—the perspective that teaches us how to notice and welcome whatever arises; how to meet emotional pain, including our fears and resistances to that pain, with a tender heart. Because as we know, healing does not mean you will never experience pain again, but the pain will feel less painful when you welcome it and investigate it, rather than criticizing yourself for what you’re feeling. When you learn to notice and hold space for your pain, you can work with it consciously and compassionately.

The other thing trigger work offers is the idea that inner work is a practice. A practice is a discipline you take on intentionally to expand your capacity to experience life to the fullest and to develop new capacities that don’t come easily.

Now, I would like to share how I use the mindfulness perspective and the life as a practice mindset in my work with clients. I call it trigger work. For the rest of this article, I am going to describe some of the practices I use with clients when I am teaching them how to do trigger work.

Foundational Assumptions of This Work

Trigger work is founded on several key ideas:

• To grow up healthy, children have certain basic developmental needs: physical and emotional safety, loving attention, nurturing touch, and co-regulation. Co-regulation means the child has a reliable adult caregiver who can help them regulate their nervous system when they are upset or afraid.

• Many if not most children do not get some of these basic needs met. They experience some kind of developmental trauma. Sometimes their little minds come to faulty conclusions when they are frustrated—so if someone says no to them a lot, they may come to the faulty conclusion that they are unworthy or unloved, or that the world is untrustworthy. I call this “learning the wrong thing.”

• When trauma occurs early enough—like in the first six months—this affects the infant’s brain wiring, often affecting the brain circuits between the prefrontal cortex and the brain’s emotional centers in the amygdala area. When these brain circuits are weak, it is harder for the child to become regulated after a scary or shocking event disrupts their sense of safety.

• Unmet needs, neglect, or abuse are difficult or impossible for little people to process on their own; and often there was no one to show them how. If the difficulty is intense, the child may dissociate so as not to feel anything. Or their nervous system may go on high alert and stay there. This emotional unfinished business forms a kind of unconscious, energetic complex—kind of like your life energy being stuck.

• The human personality develops around these traumas, fears, and faulty beliefs—it provides us with protection patterns designed to keep us safe and to cope in a world we don’t understand. These defensive strategies often become compulsive. They become part of a person’s character structure. They act as chronic protection patterns that operate even when nothing is happening that’s painful.

• When a core need to feel safe, loved, or good enough is threatened, this may lead a person to grow up with a tendency to be vigilant about feeling safe, loved or good enough. These tendencies show up as trigger reactions—like some version of fight, flight, or freeze—that erupt when the person believes they are unsafe, unloved, or not good enough.

• People can learn practices that help them notice and accept their trigger reactions. They can learn to investigate these reactions and uncover the core fears and needs that these reactions reveal--so they can bring self-regulation and self-compassion to the fears that have overwhelmed their nervous system.

Is It Safe to Feel Painful Feelings?

I think we can conclude that concepts like triggering and self-regulation are becoming more familiar to the general educated public. But I believe that most people still have a hard time noticing when they’re triggered, accepting themselves when they’re triggered, taking responsibility for their trigger reactions, and knowing what to do when they’re triggered. People just don’t like to admit that they’ve momentarily lost it. They especially hate to admit it when it happens in the presence of other people.

People don’t learn about how to be with difficult emotions in their families or during their school years. Or if their school does have a mental health module in the curriculum, it’s going to be pretty superficial. Because public educational institutions these days are still a reflection of the values of mainstream culture--achievement over feelings, economic development over inner development. We haven’t got time for developing the inner life. We haven’t got time for feeling our feelings. That might threaten our progress-driven economic system.

If everyone could feel “Something’s not right here,” that’s the first step toward making any needed change. But change is scary—especially for the ruling classes. If school children were taught how to notice the feeling, “Something’s not right here…something needs to change,” this might threaten our whole control-oriented social structure.

But therapists and coaches like myself are less beholden to the corporate-driven system than school teachers are. We are expected to go a little deeper, to get to the root of problems, to build the kind of trust relationship with our clients that allows us to challenge their denial and avoidance patterns. So, our work begins where public education and parental guidance has failed. And our work is vital to the health of humanity. If American society is addicted to avoiding uncomfortable feelings and denying how much this costs us, this work is humanity’s recovery program. I like to call trigger work “a 12-step program for the rest of us.” Such a program orients us toward feeling our feelings instead of denying them, and taking responsibility for our feelings instead of blaming someone else for “making” us feel that way.

A 12-Step Program for the Rest of Us

This program also shows us how much our current behavior is a function of how we were treated as children, in terms of how well our core developmental or attachment needs were met. It helps us grow beyond the conditioned thinking and behavior patterns we developed in childhood to not feel too much or not show our feelings. It shows us how the ego-mind works—and how the mind does not always tell us the truth, but rather will often see our present situation through the lens of childhood unfinished business and condition fears. Once we learn to welcome our feelings, the program helps us grieve the assaults and deprivations that we may have endured as children and offer love to our neglected parts and compassion to our pain. We learn that painful feelings can be a doorway to self-healing.

It Only Takes Five Steps, Not Twelve

Now, I’d like to describe the five steps of trigger work—only five steps, not twelve.

I’ll list them first. Then, I’ll describe what happens during each stage of this work.

Accepting and Owning Reactivity

Knowing Your Trigger Signature

Pausing to Self-Regulate

Meeting Feelings with Compassion

Repairing to Restore Safety

Acceptance

Acceptance is achieved when you’re able to notice and accept that you do sometimes get triggered, that other people also get triggered, and that sometimes others get triggered by things you do or say. You accept that a certain amount of emotional discomfort comes with the territory of relating with others. Acceptance also means you do not judge yourself as bad or wrong for getting triggered or for triggering someone else. You know it is normal. You may not like that you get triggered, but you know that it happens to almost everyone.

Acceptance is furthered when you understand how the human brain is constructed. You understand that there is a “survival alarm system” in the amygdala area of every human brain. This area is always scanning for danger and reacts instantly when any sort of danger is detected. It helped primitive humans survive actual survival threats. But nowadays, most of the dangers it registers are not survival threats, but rather perceived threats to our sense of connection to someone we care about, to our sense of competence, or to our self-image.

Acceptance generally comes more easily to people whose trigger reactions are not too debilitating…. and when you know how to do the other steps.

The inner work of this step in involves coming to terms with insecure brain wiring, childhood trauma, shame, or all of the above. As we do this work, we learn that having a hair trigger reaction does not mean there is something shamefully wrong with us.

Knowing Your Trigger Signature

Most trigger reactions have several components: you sense something in your body (such as a tightness in your throat); you feel something (like anger or frustration); you have thoughts (like “no one listens to me…..does my voice even matter?”), and you will react in some way (like blowing up or shutting down).

Most of your trigger reactions will look somewhat similar to one another and will arise from the same core fear (like fear of rejection, abandonment, being controlled, not being good enough, not being heard, and so on). Our trigger signature is an expression of our attachment style. If we have a preoccupied/anxious attachment style, we are more likely to pursue, prod, question, argue, challenge, or attack when we get triggered. If we have a more avoidant attachment style, we tend to shut down, withdraw, defend, explain, judge silently, or try to fix things when we are triggered. Knowing your unique trigger signature helps you quickly recognize the fact that you are triggered so you can slow down your reactivity and pause before doing too much damage or saying things you will later regret (such as, “I quit” or “I want a divorce”).

Pausing to Regulate Yourself

Pausing requires that you notice yourself doing some aspect of your trigger signature, like arguing or defending yourself, and you stop doing that. You can say pause to yourself or out loud. This step involves making an agreement with yourself or with someone close to you that you will make it a practice to pause at the first sign that you are triggered. You may not notice that you’re triggered right away, but as soon as you do notice it, you will say pause and stop talking or stop reacting. Then, you will turn your attention inward and begin to regulate your nervous system—slow, conscious breathing, feeling your feet on the floor or the weight of your body on the chair, going outside in nature, hugging your dog, hugging yourself—something that helps restore a sense of safety to your nervous system. Some people have to experiment a little to discover what works best to bring a sense of inner calm and safety. This step is your first aid tool for reactivity.

Meeting Feelings with Compassion

Once you have learned to consciously attend to your breath and body, you will find it easier to notice your sensations and emotions -- the tension in your throat, the ache in your heart, the heat rising in your face. This step happens right after you have paused and done your self-calming practice. It involves taking the position of the witness or noticer—noticing the breath going in and out, noticing feelings, sensations images, memories, and mind chatter ….watching these internal impressions enter and exit your awareness field, watching them move around or change in intensity. When painful feelings arise, you learn to witness these with empathy and compassion.

You start with the memory of what happened that hurt or upset you. Then, while breathing slowly and consciously, you imagine watching the upsetting event on a movie screen with you as the main character. As you witness this image, you aim to feel some empathy or compassion for yourself regarding what has just happened to you. As the compassionate witness, you imagine embracing your tender self like a good mother would embrace her much loved child. In doing this, you are offering yourself the kind of safety and reassurance you may not have gotten as a child. You are also teaching yourself that emotional pain can be consciously felt, and it only hurts for a little while when you welcome it rather than denying or defending against it. Basically, you are teaching yourself not to be so afraid of emotional pain.

Repairing to Restore Safety

If a trigger reaction occurred during an interaction with another person, it can be helpful to approach this person later to reconnect, repair the damages, apologize, or have a do-over. The step is not appropriate for some situations because it generally requires the other person’s agreement or consent. So generally, you would use it with a partner, family member, or close friend where there is a prior agreement. The way I teach repair involves admitting that you were triggered, letting the other person know that you are sorry for the way you reacted (if your reaction involved acting out in some way), letting them know the fear or insecurity that got triggered (like your fear of abandonment or not being good enough), reassuring them that you are now feeling more open and present, and then asking for or giving some kind of reassurance. This step restores safety in the relationship. So, it is important that you only approach the other person for a repair conversation after you have accepted and owned your trigger reaction and regulated your nervous system.

A brief repair might look something like this:

I’d like to repair that upsetting thing that happened between us (name the incident or refer to it.) Is this a good time?

I now see that when I ___[e.g.criticized you and called you selfish for not consulting me in the decision about your daughter’s wedding] I was triggered. It was probably my fear of ___[e.g. being unimportant] coming up.

I’m sorry for I reacted and would like to take it back.

I wish I could have revealed my fear instead of reacting the way I did.

If I could do it over, I would have admitted my fear, and I would have asked for reassurance to help me feel ______________(e.g., I matter, I am important)

Each time you make this statement, you continue to educate one another about how your triggers operate. This will result in these triggers having less and less power over you. Repeating this statement after a triggering event helps you know each others’ deeper core feelings and develop empathy for one another and a sense of safety—rather than staying stuck at the level of your stories about each other. Making this statement often (as a regular practice) will help you become more comfortable expressing your vulnerable feelings and core needs.

Becoming Less Triggerable

When you practice these five steps with someone you’re close to, trigger reactions will become familiar territory—as in, “Oh yes, I recognize that. That’s a trigger reaction.” When you know how to calm your own and someone else’s upset nervous system, you won’t be so afraid of getting triggered—because you’ll know what to do. With continued practice, you will eventually outgrow your fear of emotional pain—so you’ll be less triggerable. You will be teaching yourself that frustration, disappointment, and hurt feelings are not a threat to your survival. And you will know how to take these “normal pains of adult relationships” in stride.

When you become less triggerable, others will feel safer in your presence. I think we owe it to our fellow humans to manage our emotional reactions responsibly. As the world’s problems become increasingly complex and difficult to manage, our world needs us to cultivate a stable sense of internal safety.

I believe there is real urgency to this work of helping ourselves and others feel inwardly safe--because when we feel safe and well-regulated within ourselves, we’re better able to create safety for others. And those people, in turn, become better able to create safety for still others. This is the virtuous cycle we need to set in motion—a ripple effect of safety, compassion, and conscious connection.

A frightened world is a dangerous world. And we can all do our part to help it feel safe again.

Resources for Deeper Study

My two latest books, Five-Minute Relationship Repair and From Triggered to Tranquil, are available at Amazon The first helps with triggering between intimate partners, friends, and family. The second is for triggering in any situation—including triggering in groups.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar on Zoom

My next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real.

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

Free Web-based Conference: The Trauma-Free Childhood Summit

I have been invited to participate in a culture-changing resource that’s launching November 16–21, 2026. The sign-up link is below.

The Trauma-Free Childhood Summit brings together over 35 trauma-informed experts for a six-day, virtual series on raising and educating children — breaking the cycle of cultural norms to dominate, coerce, bribe, shame, or punish, which represent threats to a child’s nervous system.

My interview about “Truth Skills for Emotionally Safe Families” will air on November 17 in the afternoon. The exact time will be included in your welcome letter after you register.

During the summit, you’ll find:

· Actionable strategies that honor your natural loving inclinations

· Short, focused conversations about the sources of traumas, the lifelong harm that can ensue when traumas are not healed, and how to prevent and heal them

· How to co-regulate when the child is dysregulated

· Dealing with childhood aggression, depression, anxiety, and dissociation with curiosity rather than with assumptions and judgment

· How crucial to breaking the cycle it is for you to become aware of and heal your own childhood wounds

https://traumafreechildhood.com/scampbell

And if you know someone else who might benefit from this, please share this invitation and help us spread the word:https://traumafreechildhood.com/scampbell

CEU credits are available.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2027, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Subscribe now

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My next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real.

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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In my work with groups and couples, I see all varieties of communication breakdowns. Here is a scenario I witness often…. Has this ever happened to you?

You are having a conversation with someone, and all of a sudden, the other person starts repeating themselves, or their voice starts becomes louder and more forceful. You feel a little uncomfortable, but you keep trying to communicate about whatever the topic was. You try to speak as clearly and reasonably as you can, but that doesn’t help. Soon it becomes clear that the human connection between you has gotten disrupted.

Two Levels of Conversation: Content vs. Relational

Even those who understand how easily trigger reactions can derail a conversation can still miss cues that the person you’ve been conversing with just got triggered. One of the biggest mistakes people make in this situation is to keep talking about content—rather than stepping back to consider that there may be a disruption at the relational level. A trigger reaction will create disconnection at the relational level. Let me explain: In any conversation, we could say there are two levels to pay attention to. There’s the content—the facts, ideas, opinions being discussed. And there’s the relational level in which information is being exchanged more subtly that has to do with things like who has more power, who needs who more, am I being respected, am I being judged, etc.

Some Examples

If two people are discussing the rapid developments in artificial intelligence, for example, they might find themselves getting into the pros and cons of government oversight. Their opinions are the content. As they are sharing their opinions, Person A quotes an AI expert to bolster his point. Person B unconsciously associates this with “being talked down to” (as in being put down, belittled, disrespected, etc.). So now, Person B is triggered. While still seeming to be focused on content, this person may start using bigger or more abstract words, run-on sentences, or dramatic gestures. Or they may keep repeating themselves. The quality of their reasoning has just deteriorated. This happens when someone gets triggered. But Person A (not realizing there is a trigger reaction in the space) keeps hanging in there, trying to get his ideas across, while feeling more and more confused and frustrated.

Another example comes from a conversation I was having with a client the other day. She was confused about an interaction with her boss. She had expressed disappointment to her boss about how he handled a situation in a recent meeting. She thought she was giving him useful feedback (which he had said he wanted). He responded by explaining why he behaved the way he did. He then followed this by a lengthy lecture on his philosophy of management and how some of the greatest management gurus in the industry agreed with him. She thought they were just talking about this one incident from that recent meeting, but now the conversation had expanded to his philosophy and his well-known mentors. Trying to keep a connection to her boss, she added a few of her own thoughts about these experts and their ideas. But this just encouraged her boss to get more wordy and defensive. As we can see, their conversation was all about the content. No one had addressed the fact that he had been triggered by her criticism and that, on the relational level, he had felt emotionally wounded by her words. Whenever you see someone explaining, justifying, repeating themselves, or laying it on thick, they are probably triggered.

Obvious defensiveness is easy to identify as a trigger reaction. But these other types of defensiveness are harder to spot.

And I have one more scenario where you may not recognize that your conversation partner has gotten triggered. This is perhaps the most common one. When you ask someone a question (that you think is not threatening), they may still feel threatened. Your intent simply to hear more about what this person just said, or to learn something from them. But they “feel” unprepared, on the spot, or challenged. So, their response is to talk around the question and never actually address what you asked. You don’t realize they are in a reaction, so you ask your question again…or in a different way. And they keep diverting. They don’t say, “I don’t have a good answer to that,” or “I don’t feel like going into that right now.” Most people can’t reveal their true feelings when they are triggered. They don’t feel safe. Plus, their higher brain function goes off-line when they are triggered. It’s good to remember these things and not assume you did something wrong. What seems like an innocent comment to you might feel threatening to someone else.

I offer these three scenarios as reminders that: what seems like a simple difference of opinion can really push peoples’ buttons. And so can anything that could be perceived as a criticism or challenge—no matter how objectively it is delivered. The woman in the above example didn’t think she was criticizing her boss. And Person A in the first example had no way of knowing that quoting authorities to support his thesis might result in someone feeling “talked down to.”

What to Do

My point here is a simple reminder: When a conversation quickly goes from coherent to incoherent, or from connected to disconnected, your conversation partner may have gotten triggered. If you suspect this is happening, do not keep conversing about the content. Do something to stop the action.

Ask for a pause where you each take a moment to check in with yourself. Invite the other to step back with you to look at what has just happened….and to share how each of you are feeling right now.

Or ask the other person whether there was something you did or said that created distance or lack of trust. You might interrupt with, “I just need to pause us here to ask…Are we okay? Was there something I said that didn’t feel good to you?” These moves bring the conversation to the relational level. You can get back to the content once everyone feels safe, connected, and grounded in present time.

Further Inquiry

Some of my books address these common communication breakdowns in more depth. Saying What’s Real offers seven sentence stems that bring a conversation into the present moment (available at my website and Amazon).

Or if you want to use any communication problem as a starting point for deeper self-understanding and self-compassion, check out the practices of trigger work and relationship repair in my books, Five-Minute Relationship Repair (for couples) and From Triggered to Tranquil (for everyone). They are available at my website and Amazon .

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar on Zoom

My next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real.

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2027, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Subscribe now

Share

My next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real.

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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The next Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game with others on the webinar. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real. I have just created an online version of this game that can be played on a phone or laptop. Come and try it out!

I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May, 10-11amPT. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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In the talk I also offer tools and practices for learning to notice and free ourselves from these dysfunctions—both personally and collectively.

I hope you find it useful. I was surprised to see how relevant these ideas are to issues I am currently wrestling with. To view it, double click on this link (a single-click won’t work):

This was part of the Wisdom in Times of Crisis series sponsored by the wonderful Science and Nonduality nonprofit organization, www.scienceandnonduality.com

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Upcoming Events

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: Play the Getting Real Card Game

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

Subscribe now

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Twelve years ago, at the age of 73, I met my partner (who was 76) on a senior dating site. We both recognized that starting a long-term relationship at our stage of life posed some unique challenges. When you begin a relationship late in life, you know death and decline are not far down the road. And quite a bit of decline had already happened for both of us. We were not exactly in our prime. Aging changes your criteria for a partner, as well as how you go about finding someone.

For one thing, we’re going to need more medical care as we age. I wanted to ask questions early on to assess how compatible we would be in terms of physical self-care vs self-neglect. A lot of older men I know avoid seeking help and may even hide their symptoms for fear of appearing weak.

And sex can be a problem for people at this age. For some people, intercourse is no longer desired or possible. So, if I wanted to have a sex life with him, we’d need to talk about that right away.

I was not interested in relocating or moving in with anyone—quite a different picture than when I was 30. I had a home and a community of friends that I loved, so If we were going to become partners, he would have to adapt to my lifestyle. Sometimes when that happens, this creates an unequal power dynamic.

These were some of the issues that were on my mind as I set out to find someone I could love enough to want to grow old with.

Where to Begin?

Given that these things are more in the foreground for many seniors like me, what should we expect? What questions do we ask when we first meet? And what do we disclose in a dating profile or on a first date?

I want to begin with my personal story of finding love—what worked for me and some advice for older daters. Then I will share my impressions from conversations I have had with other older singles and what this says about love in later life—its potentialities and pitfalls.

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My Approach

Personally, I really like online dating as a way to meet people. I think that writing a detailed profile that covers many of the challenging topics above makes a lot of sense. I included in my profile the fact that I was very health-conscious, not willing to move, and still wanted an active sex life although I would want to take time getting to know someone before becoming sexual. That would screen out a lot of people.

I only posted current photos. And I included one of myself in a bathing suit, so men would see if I fit their preferred body type. I would rather be screened out by someone right away rather than face this kind of rejection later.

I also posted that I wanted someone who was financially secure. When I was younger, I honestly never thought about how much money the man had. That seems odd to me now. I think that was a blind spot of mine. In three of my four marriages before the age of 50 (when I swore off marriage), I was the sole breadwinner once we got married. The marriages did not start out that way, but sometime during the first year of marriage, the man decided to quit his job. It wasn’t too hard for me to take on the breadwinner role when I was young, but as I approached 50, I realized that I did not want to be supporting a man into our old age.

So, after age 50, my criteria for selecting a partner changed quite a bit. When I was young, I liked a man with a lot of free time because I needed more attention and adoration at that age. I wasn’t too concerned if he didn’t have a job.

Now I cared more about whether I would feel financially burdened. I had learned that having a man solely dependent on me for his survival needs creates too much dependency, and possibly dependency for the wrong reasons. It was not that easy for me to divorce my last husband, who truly was completely dependent on me. I felt obligated to take care of him since he wasn’t able to find employment. I stayed with him way too long, trying to help him establish his own livelihood. I learned what it feels like to be trapped in a marriage, and I never wanted to be in that situation again.

Another practice that worked well for me was moving fairly quickly from written communication to telephone conversations. I didn’t want to waste time meeting in person until I got a feel for how present, spontaneous, and self-aware he was. You can’t get all that from reading emails or texts. Or at least I can’t. And I didn’t want to get all dolled up to meet a man in person until I knew we were compatible in terms of values, lifestyle, and “mental chemistry.” Typically, men would push to meet right away. But I always resisted that.

Advantages of Online Dating

When I was younger, I easily met prospective partners at parties or conferences. After a certain age, the number of men looking for partners gets smaller. Online dating offered a larger pool of potential partners than my normal social life ever did.

Dating sites also offer another advantage: you can screen for compatibility before becoming emotionally or practically invested. So, you can take communication risks more easily—asking difficult questions or sharing important things that might cause discomfort. You haven’t even met the person yet, so it’s a fairly low-stakes relationship. As I counsel readers in my book, Truth in Dating: Finding Love by Getting Real, if you are working on being more honest in relationships, this is a good place to hone your honesty skills, practicing being transparent and taking emotional risks rather than worrying so much about whether someone will like what you say. The book is available at my website

What About Scammers Online?

I know a lot of people don’t like online dating. There really is a lot of lying and scamming going on in that space. I have clients and friends who have experienced both of these. Among these acquaintances, it is the people who have not dated very much (perhaps because of being married for a long time and recently divorced) who have been more vulnerable to scams. The big lesson they learned was, don’t get into business or get too interdependent with someone right away. And don’t give anyone money—even if it’s a loan.

One man I interviewed for this article told me he was approached by a woman online who soon suggested that they collaborate on a business venture. As he grew to like and trust her, he followed what appeared to be a friendly investment tip about buying a certain cryptocurrency. Then, a few months later when he tried to log in to his account, he got a message saying he had entered his password incorrectly, and because of that, he was locked out of his account. He was told he had to pay a large sum of money to get back into his account. He paid the large sum and only then realized he had been scammed. Be careful out there! Remember, when you’re falling in love, sometimes this affects your ability to sort out fact from fiction.

Lessons I Have Learned

My partner and I were both pretty healthy when we met. Neither of us had any chronic diseases or painful joints. But now that we are dealing with his cognitive decline, this requires a different level of dependence on his part and care on my part. If I were just meeting him now, would I choose him? Probably not. But now I have grown to love him. We are deeply bonded. And I cannot imagine life without him. So, it feels natural for me to be there for whatever he needs from me, within reason.

I have learned that it’s really important at this age to choose someone that you can keep loving for better or for worse. Things will generally get worse in some ways if we live long enough. But now that I have experienced a taste of “worse,” I realize that going through this challenge together has expanded my heart and my capacity for love. So, there are blessings as well as costs to sharing the challenges of later life love. I think it helps that we had time to create a strong bond before things started going downhill.

Another thing I have come to realize is older daters have more baggage. Not only do we carry the usual adverse childhood experiences that may make us cautious about intimacy. Many of us have also been hurt in past relationships. I remember during the first few years with my partner, he had a really hard time trusting me because of hurts and betrayals in prior marriages. I had to learn not to take this personally.

One more lesson is that sex can actually get better in later life. For me, I think it has to do with the fact that with each passing year, I have become more in touch with my body sensations, so my capacity for sensuality has gotten more refined. And I am more able to express my wants clearly. Right away in our courtship, before we had sex, I had a very intentional discussion with him about “here’s how I like to be pleasured.” That worked really well. Some men would be put off by that, but by this stage of life, that is not something I worry about. So, I guess the bottom line here is that people can become more sensual and less fearful as we age.

What Older Singles Want

In preparation for writing this blog, I have been having conversations with heterosexual friends in their 70s and 80s who are wishing for an intimate partnership. Some are frustrated. Some are resigned. And some are pretty content with their current solo life, but still hoping for love “if it happens.”

Since I had such a good experience with senior dating, I generally want to offer encouragement to my fellow seniors. Typically, I will ask the person about things they do and places they go where meeting an eligible partner could happen. Then, I’ll find out what they are looking for (in terms of lifestyle, age, values, appearance) and what they would not accept.

One thing I hear that does not surprise me is something like, “I’m telling you that I’m lonely and looking for love, but I rarely talk about this unless someone asks me directly—like you just did….. and I actually don’t go out much to places where I could meet new people. I have my routines—going to the gym, the grocery store, an occasional social event, but that’s about it.” When we dig deeper into why they say they want an intimate companion but do little to achieve it, we run into our old familiar culprits, the comfort zone and the fear of rejection. People my age seem more attached to comfort and familiarity than they used to be.

On deeper reflection some of these same people reveal that they are actually ambivalent about partnering. One woman told me, “I’m not desperate to find a partner like I was in my 30s. But if I do meet someone and everything falls easily into place for us, then I would be delighted.” In other words, she’s not willing to sacrifice much or change much about her current life. A relationship would have to add to her existing life rather than requiring major adaptations.

Designing a Relationship That Fits Your Situation

It is understandable that people at this age, who have built a pretty good solo life, would not be eager to give up their autonomy. I like to remind these people that partnering at this age does not have to look like your past associations with marriage and partnership. A lot of people my age don’t want to move from their current residence. They prefer separate homes in the same town. They want to keep their current activities and friends rather than merging too much with a partner. They don’t want to become financially interdependent. And if they do live together, they often prefer separate bedrooms. My partner and I do live together in the house that I owned for many years before we met. We have separate bedrooms but sleep together sometimes. We do not share finances and do not plan on getting married. Like many of our peers, we have created an arrangement that works for our unique situation.

Do You Want Comfort or Growth?

Some of my senior friends are very active on online dating sites or apps. These dedicated and serious daters may be the ones with more need for intimacy, more sense of adventure, more self-confidence, or less fear of rejection. Their frustration tolerance is high enough to keep them from getting discouraged. But what I hear from these more risk-tolerant daters is there’s always some lack of fit--some little thing they find annoying, or some lifestyle or values incompatibility (such as differences in political identity, sleeping habits, or cohabitation preferences). And of course, these more active daters are also more used to getting rejected—which, in my opinion, can be a good catalyst for personal growth.

This brings up the question of whether you are looking for a comfort-oriented relationship or one that welcomes a certain amount of discomfort as fodder for personal development. When I look at the general adult population of all ages, I conclude that many people pay lip service to the idea of relationship as a spiritual journey, where we have the opportunity to transcend our egocentric habits and views. But few have the commitment and discipline to live up to their ideals. Just because someone professes a certain value, or shows up on a spiritual dating site, doesn’t mean they know how to live this value.

I have always placed growth above comfort. But as I have gotten older, I have definitely become more comfort-oriented. I used to offer a lot of feedback with the aim of helping a partner grow in self-acceptance or self-knowledge. Now, I find myself easily overlooking my partner’s blind spots and unconscious patterns--just minding my own business, so to speak. Is this age or consciousness? Denial or enlightenment? I’m really not sure, but it does make for smoother relating.

Preferences Regarding Age, Body Type, and Sex

Another thing I observed among my age-mates (75+) is almost everyone is looking for someone younger than themselves. That has been true for both the men and the women I have talked to.

And generally speaking, if I specifically ask about their preferred body type, men will reveal that they prefer someone who is not overweight. Women, when asked, don’t focus so much on body type, but they are really concerned about chronic illnesses or potential disabilities. They have heard so much from other women about the burdens of taking care of a partner in old age. And some of them have already been caregivers for elderly husbands or parents and are not eager to get in this role again.

And what about sex? When asked, I found that most men and women in their 70s (and many in their 80s) say they still want an active sex life. Others would be happy to just find a good companion or someone they can be affectionate with. The dividing line seems related to age—which is not surprising—with older people caring less about intercourse and maybe even wanting to avoid it. So, if you have a strong preference one way or the other, it’s good to exchange this type of information early on.

Final Thoughts

Before I close, I want to share an observation that is probably not news to anyone…but I think a lot of people haven’t integrated it into our values and behavior—as evidenced by what people write as their preferred age range on dating sites.

After age 40, people age at very different rates. A fifty-year-old can have as much life force as many 30-year-olds. And even at 80, some people present more like 60 in terms of their aliveness and even their fitness. I know there are other reasons besides physical vitality behind some peoples’ age preferences, such as being of the same generation, but I believe most people have not gotten over our conditioned views about older people being less valued. This is a fact of later life that elders deal with—whether we’re looking for love or just wanting a social life. It probably contributes to the loneliness and social isolation that can accompany old age.

One of my goals in writing this piece is to encourage my peers to expand their sense of options for finding companionship in later life. Elders are inventing new ways for meeting their intimacy needs. It took me a long time to find a partner I wanted to grow old with. I’m so glad I didn’t give up.

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Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

(This group is full, but you can get on the waiting list.)

Beginning Wednesday, September 16, 2026 and ending November 8, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: Play the Getting Real Card Game

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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• the key to my vitality at 85

• why I never published my memoir

• my perspective on not having children

• my early books and how I view these ideas today

• my views on relationship as a spiritual journey

• shadow work and how it relates to spiritual work

• why we get triggered and how to view a partner’s trigger reaction

• group and societal polarization and how to hold this in a bigger evolutionary frame

• the evolution of human systems

• what motivates personal and systems change

• why honesty requires self-awareness

• how I am experiencing my own and my partner's aging process

If any of these themes interest you, the recording is available at the following links:

You Tube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Share

Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

Beginning Wednesday, September 16, 2026 and ending November 8, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: Play the Getting Real Card Game

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

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One of the hardest lessons I'm learning as my partner's cognitive abilities decline is that ordinary conversations no longer feel ordinary to him.

Questions I once asked without thinking can feel to him like a challenge or a test. Offers to help can feel like humiliation or lack of trust. Attempts to clarify confusion can sound like I'm proving him wrong.

Nothing about my intentions has changed. But his experience of the world has.

Losses and Lessons

Old age is a time of loss—loss of strength, beauty, independence, loved ones, and so much more. Losses like these affect one’s relationship to the world and to other people. And perhaps even more significant is how losing function or capacity affects one’s inner experience of the world. As our bodies, and perhaps our minds, let us down more frequently, the world becomes a scarier place.

Whether the decline is cognitive or physical, certain predictable challenges will come up in relationships affected by loss.

One of the biggest challenges is learning how the world looks and feels for the partner experiencing decline. Many tasks have become more difficult or frustrating. How does this affect their mood and their sense of self? Have their motivations changed in recent years? Are they more motivated to seek safety and avoid challenge, for example? Are there some conditioned patterns and trigger sensitivities that have gotten more pronounced as their capacity for self-regulation and self-control has weakened?

Understanding Peter’s world has been my conscious aim for many years. And now, since he has been experiencing noticeable loss of cognitive function, the task has become more challenging. I have to keep reminding myself that cognitive decline can make a person more rigid, less adaptable, and more fearful. This will lead to a decline in self-confidence and an increase in generalized anxiety. The person will just feel more vulnerable and less safe. So, heightened emotional reactivity is not a character flaw but a predictable consequence of living in a world that increasingly feels uncertain and unsafe.

I am learning a lot. I need to keep updating my expectations of him. I also need to get better at adapting quickly to an ever-changing reality. Sometimes he seems just fine—most of the time, actually. But other times he will get confused or erupt in anger over frustrating events that he used to take in stride.

As Control Declines, Fear Grows

As Peter's confidence in his own abilities declines, I've watched him move from secure functioning toward increasing insecurity. His world has become less reliable, less predictable. Tasks that were once effortless now require more energy.

A suggestion can feel like criticism. A disagreement can trigger the fear of not being good enough. At this stage, the nervous system becomes more likely to register danger because in a real sense, you have less control over what happens to you.

This explains why older adults experiencing decline may appear overly sensitive when from their perspective they are navigating a world that increasingly confronts them with loss of control, autonomy, capacity, and status.

Their need for care has increased while the capacity of those around them has not. In our case, he needs more listening and for longer periods. But my capacity to hold space is about the same as it’s always been. He can interpret this in a way that makes him feel less valued, insignificant, or alone.

Miscommunication and triggering are becoming more frequent. As I recognize this change, I realize I have to step up my patience and my capacity to adapt to unwanted surprises. I have to keep reminding myself that my highest value in life is to keep learning from experience—facing each challenge in the best way I can. This lifelong value on learning and personal development helps me stay committed.

Typical Communication Challenges

In this next section, I want to share some typical challenges and how I am working with them:

I might ask, “What time is your doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”

What I get back is, “Are you testing me? Why do you ask things like that?”

At this point I have a decision to make. I can respond to the content of his message and reply with something like, “It was an innocent question. I thought you might have written it down because I didn’t.” And I have done this. But on my better days, I will approach him at the level of feelings: “I see now how that might feel like a challenge to you.”

Here is another example of how I am learning to adapt to unexpected reactions:

Last night we were talking about finding him a counselor whose specialty is gerontology. I thought we had finished that conversation. Then, we moved on to talking about his plan to get an appointment with his primary care physician and how he wanted to make a list of his ailments to bring to the appointment.

Then, all of a sudden things got confusing. He started talking about the gerontology counselor again, but I thought he was talking about his physician. We kept missing each other and were both getting frustrated.

At this point, my own confusion about what he was talking about turned into a soliloquy, where I tried to summarize my memory of the last few minutes of our conversation: “Well, we did talk about you finding a gerontology person. And I think we finished with that. And then we started talking about you making a list for your doctor. And that’s where I said I liked the idea of the list.”

He got highly offended/triggered listening to that summary. He thought I was talking down to him and trying to be right. And I can see how, from his point of view, it might seem that way--from the view of someone who has a heightened fear of being seen as incapable or wrong.

It was fortunate that I honestly could get in his shoes because I have seen this trigger reaction before and have learned how things feel to him. So, I was able to let him know that I understood where he was coming from. One simple statement that showed that I am with him, and not against him, seemed to make all the difference.

When I focused on my needs to figure out our miscommunication, it felt disconnected from where he was, so he reacted from his fear of feeling separate or all alone. And I realize now that my summary was too wordy. A triggered mind can easily get overwhelmed by long explanations. I have to remember to keep things simple. Short sentences, soothing words, and reassuring touch can soothe a triggered nervous system. Long explanations can activate mistrust.

And here’s one more example where my understanding of how triggers work has helped me navigate challenging communications:

He was filling out a form on his computer screen and seemed to be having difficulty. I offered, “Let me know if you need help with that.” I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like, “You think I’m helpless? Why are you always offering help?”

If we look at his questions as a trigger reaction, it’s not so much that he’s reacting to my offer. He’s reacting to the meaning he gave it. Beneath his reaction is the fear-story that people see him as incompetent and a burden. Even deeper than this, and I know this because we have talked about it, is his fear that if he is no longer strong and competent, he will be of no value to anyone and wind up alone.

When I think about it that way, it’s pretty easy to empathize with. When I feel empathy, he feels connected and valued. If I question his reality too much, he gets frightened and disregulated.

Beyond Blame

If you’re at all familiar with the trigger work that I teach, you know that my basic premise is we are all responsible for our own emotional reactions. No one else is to blame. I’m lucky that I have integrated this so well that, even when people blame me, I do not take it on. He used to practice this no-blame attitude also, and he always took responsibility for his triggers. But lately, this level of self-inquiry has become less available to him as he struggles to just survive with a modicum of competence.

If I were a caregiver who easily got triggered by the fear-story that I am being blamed, I would have a much harder time dealing with a lot of these things. I’m not saying it’s always easy. I run into unexpected reactivity that is quite unpleasant at times. And often, I have to quickly let go of my own need to be heard or understood. Fortunately, I know that “the need to be heard” is my own trigger reaction in most cases.

Reframing Helpfulness

Some people reading my account here might think my behavior looks codependent: I am focusing on adapting to him and not demanding that he adapt to me. At an earlier stage of life, some of these same behaviors might have come from a different place inside of me. But over the years, Peter and I have become what I have called a “We-System.”

In a we-system, partners recognize and live according to the principle of interdependence. They have learned that whatever happens to one person affects us both. Therefore, it is in my interest to help my partner feel safe and loved. In a we-system, couples learn to accommodate to the other person’s weaknesses rather than trying to improve the other.

Don’t Try to Fake It

Some readers of this article might take on the idea that you should behave as a we-system. I don’t want to imply that. Each of us is on our own unique journey. It is an individual choice when to accommodate to your partner’s needs and when to assert your own needs and boundaries.

Some people who find themselves in the caregiver role have a history of ignoring their own needs while helping and pleasing others. That’s an unfortunate history if you are currently dealing with someone who is becoming more dependent. Some of the behaviors I have been recommending here may not be appropriate for you. Some may trigger your fears about being under-appreciated or unfairly treated. You may have the unconscious fear-story that your needs don’t matter or that you are not worthy of love unless you are giving, providing, or performing.

If this sounds like you, I recommend you spend some time with my newest book, From Triggered to Tranquil: How Self-Compassion and Mindful Presence Can Transform Relationship Conflicts and Heal Childhood Wounds available at Amazon This book can help you distinguish genuine current needs from trigger reactions based on past trauma. If accommodating to your partner’s weaknesses is hurting your health, for example, find a way to stop doing that.

We all arrive at the challenges of older age with different backgrounds and different resources. What is authentic for me might not be authentic for you. I think one of the messages I’m always trying to get across to readers at any stage of life is the importance of meeting life’s challenges with a growth mindset. This makes the ups and downs of love and life so much easier and more meaningful. When things go well, you enjoy them. When they don’t, there’s always something to be learned. The younger you are when you discover this, the more prepared you will be for the challenges of later life. But it's never too late to start on this path.

I’d like to close this piece by quoting Thaddeus Golas’ wonderful little book, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment: “Love as much as you can from wherever you are.”

There is so much wisdom in this simple phrase. You don’t have to act like a saint. We all have limits regarding what we can love or accommodate. And when you find your limit, see if you can love that.

My primary intent in writing this piece is to normalize the fact that physical or cognitive decline may make a person more triggerable. Maybe if you understand how this could happen, you’ll be a little more prepared if it happens to you.

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“Stay curious.”

“Curiosity fuels growth and deepens connections.”

But curiosity also has its shadow forms. Sometimes a question is not really a question. It’s a statement or a way to disguise your true motives. Sometimes what appears to be openness is actually performance, seduction, avoidance, or control. The more I work with couples and groups, the more I believe that curiosity exists on a spectrum—from genuine wonder to disguised agenda.

In this blog, I am going to focus mainly on interpersonal curiosity and the types of questions we ask when we think we are being curious about another person. I will be focusing on curiosity in couples, dating, parenting, and friendship. At the end I will include some questions and pointers to help you discover when your curiosity questions arise from an attempt to control versus a wish to relate. As you may know, the distinction between communicating to relate or to control is foundational to the Getting Real work that I teach.

Curiosity in Parenting

Parents or notorious for asking loaded questions:

When a five-year-old hears, “Did you eat all the cookies?” they feel caught. They sense there is something behind this question—even if they cannot name it. Likewise, when a 16-year-old hears, “What time did you get in last night?”

Such questions often arise from parental anxiety. It’s probably impossible for any parent to completely trust a child’s judgment. Children do make poor decisions, and parents naturally feel responsible for protecting their children. So just about everyone has reason to associate questions with hidden agendas.

But in spite of this perhaps unfortunate association, most of us still appreciate a sincere and honest question about ourselves. At the end of this blog, I’ll offer some tips for cleaning up your curiosity questions so they don’t create suspicion or resistance.

Curiosity in Couple Relationships

If you have been in a long-term relationship, you have probably noticed you and your partner getting less and less curious about each other over the years. In the beginning, you were fascinated to hear your partner’s inner thoughts. You asked, “Tell me more,” or “How did you feel when that happened?” You were genuinely open to learning who this other person is. But after 5 or 10 or 20 years, when your partner shares their inner musings, you think you know where the conversation is going. You have put them in a comfortable box. You have stopped seeking to know more.

You may even experience their bids for contact as a distraction from what you were doing and become slightly annoyed. I confess that I often find myself listening to Peter’s sincere personal disclosures with an attitude that I would describe as, “trying to be patient.” And, when I’m in that frame of mind, I will consciously avoid asking questions so that he will get finished with what he’s saying sooner….so I can get back to what I was doing. Of course, this is not the way to nurture vitality and aliveness in a relationship. Fortunately, I don’t fall into this habit very often.

Am I Showing Love or Being Intrusive?

In my couples counseling practice, the desire for curiosity by one partner and the reluctance to offer curiosity by the other is a frequent source of conflict.

Mary wants Tony to show curiosity about her experience. When she shares a story or a feeling, she expects him to draw her out by asking questions like, “How did you feel when that happened? or “Was that difficult for you? How are you doing with that?” To her, questions help her feel valued and important.

Tony has unconscious resistance to asking these sorts of questions. He grew up with a mother who seemed overly interested in his private thoughts. When she asked questions like the ones Mary wants, he felt invaded.

Mary can’t understand why Tony can’t just ask her a question after she tells him something personal. Tony wants to please his wife, but he isn’t able to come up with any questions. His habit pattern to “avoid being intrusive” is not under his conscious control.

So, we see here that curiosity is not always natural or welcome. The act of showing curiosity has different meanings to different people. And the meanings we give to this seemingly simple act may have roots in our unconscious minds.

Curiosity as Surveillance

It is common for romantic partners to ask, “Who else was there?” or “Who was that on the phone?” Even when you have nothing to hide, you may feel uncomfortable with questions like these. The line between intimacy and intrusion is not always obvious. And, once again, old associations from childhood may get activated.

Curiosity as a Fishing Expedition

We all know the question, “Do I look fat in this dress?” And many partners feel uncomfortable when they receive such a query. When you hear this, you may wonder, “What’s she really after here?” And that’s a fair question because many of us have learned that this sort of question is a trap: If your honest answer is yes and you say this, she might get upset. But if you say, “No, that dress looks great,” she may not trust you’re telling the truth.

More often, however, a question like this indicates, “I’m feeling insecure and wanting reassurance.” But if you grew up in a home where a parent’s questioning was experienced as invasive, then you might freeze up and not be able to connect with your partner’s true need. You might not be able to give her the reassurance she desires, or to reveal that you are uncomfortable with the question. Sincere reassurances (“You’re beautiful”) or an honest self-disclosure (“I’m uncomfortable”) are the more healthy responses—even if your partner’s question was a bit manipulative.

Is the Question a Want in Disguise?

Some people have trouble directly expressing their wants due to their fear of rejection or being vulnerable. So, they will say things like, “Would you like to go out for dinner tonight?”—meaning, “I want to go out to dinner tonight, but it’s safer to get you to say it first.”

Or they may express their question as a complaint: “Why don’t we ever take walks together anymore?” A complaint like this is almost always a want in disguise. When I hear something like this, I like to help my partner out by asking, “So are you saying you’d like us to take more walks together?”

When the question seems more like a want, I think it’s a safe bet to offer a guess about the want underneath the question, and then check it out to see if that’s true.

Curiosity as Advice

Parents, spouses, and even friends are notorious for using questions to mask advice:

A worried parent asks his unemployed 30-year-old child, “Have you checked your bank balance lately?”

A wife asks her overweight husband, “Did you notice how many calories are in that fruit juice?”

A woman asks her friend, “Are you sure you want to wear that?”

These questions are disguised statements. Instead of, “I think you ought to wear something else,” we try to soften or tone down our true message.

Curiosity in Dating: Questions That Have a Control Agenda

One of my single clients, Barbara, told me in one of our sessions, “My curiosity gets me into trouble.” When I responded, “Can you tell me about a time where your curiosity got you into trouble,” she described being on a date and asking the man a few personal questions. Then she revealed, “I asked all these questions, and he responded to most of them…. But then he never asked anything about me!”

When Barbara and I unpacked this interaction, she came to realize that what she thought were simple indications of interest had a hidden agenda behind them. She asked him questions hoping he would then do the same for her. That was her control agenda. If she were relating instead of controlling, she might have said, “I’d like to get to the part where we ask each other questions about ourselves. Are you up for that? (pause) Do you want me to go first or would you rather?” A preamble that states your intent in an honest, transparent way can help the other person relax and trust you.

Another thing that happens a lot in dating interactions is the desire to impress or appear emotionally intelligent. But we usually don’t want to be too blatant, so we ask questions like, “What’s the biggest lesson your past relationship taught you about yourself?” The question may sound thoughtful and psychologically informed, but underneath it can be a subtle attempt to signal, “I’m the kind of person who has deep conversations.”

So, once again we see that what looks like curiosity on the surface may have other layers to it.

The Performance Version of Curiosity

Sometimes questions are subtle performances. A person asks, “What do you think about quantum physics?” not because they truly want to know your thoughts, but because they want an opportunity to display their own sophistication. The question becomes a stage. The focus appears to be on the other person, but psychologically the spotlight remains on them. This can happen in intellectual circles, therapy culture, spiritual communities, and even every day conversation. When people ask “deep questions,” these may be less about connection and more about advertising one’s identity.

Authentic Curiosity

Authentic curiosity is a meaningful form of contact between you and the other—a real separate other who is not just an extension of your ideas about this person. It honors the other person’s sovereignty—even when you’re talking to a child. You are sincerely trying to get an experience of the other person’s world. You ask questions that you are really interested in, that you don’t already know the answer to.

The moment we act as if we already know who the other person is, relationship vitality begins to shrink. But let’s admit it. Once we’ve known someone for a while, we do think we can predict their behavior. So how can we guard against this natural human bias toward certainty?

I have put together a few tips for nurturing genuine curiosity and the humility required for this.

1. Pay attention to your desire for certainty. Notice your tendency to assume that you know what another person means rather than checking out your assumptions. And when you do remember to check out an assumption, and the other person tells you that you’re right, notice how much you like being right.

2. Notice if you have a tendency to make generalizations about people—generalizations like: Women want to be led; Men like to get their own way; Children are resilient. Thinking in generalizations clouds your ability to notice variations and individual differences. This tendency to generalize reinforces the idea that you know how people are when you really don’t.

3. When you catch yourself making assumptions, speaking in generalities, or making predictions about people you know, or think you know, pause to see if you can spot in yourself the need to be right or the need to know. There may be body sensations, feelings, and thoughts associated with this need. Get curious about how the need to be right feels inside and how it manifests in your behavior. Curiosity requires a willingness to be surprised.

4. If you identify as someone who dislikes being surprised, ask yourself, what’s that about? What painful or uncomfortable thing might you be avoiding? Do you have any past associations with being surprised--with thinking something was one way and then finding out it was a different way? If you do remember something painful along these lines, pause now to feel what you feel as you remember this, and offer yourself some tenderness and compassion.

5. Curiosity questions often arise—not from the genuine wish to know and be known (or what I call, communicating to relate)--but from an unconscious desire to be right, safe, certain, or impressive (what I call communicating to control). To evaluate whether the intent of your curiosity is to relate vs. to control, notice if your question has a preferred outcome attached to it. For example, is there any response that you’re hoping to generate, or one that you’d rather avoid? If this is the case, try changing your question to a statement about your own feelings or wants.

6. If you have a background where questions felt invasive or were used against you, you may tend to become triggered or lose your agentic power when you hear certain types of questions. Recall some of these situations and how you felt at the time. Make space for those feelings. Make it your practice to notice when feelings like this recur in your current relationships. If you do notice yourself reacting automatically, reflect afterwards on what would have been a more authentic or empowering way to respond. (This is Truth Skill #7, Revising, described in my book Getting Real: 10 Truth Skills You Need to Live an Authentic Life, available at Amazon

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Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

Beginning Wednesday, September 16, 2026 and ending November 8, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 15-16, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the truth skills and trigger repair skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• learn to quickly spot and recover from your own and others’ trigger reactions

• get free of unconscious reactive patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: Play the Getting Real Card Game

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10-11am PT. In this one, I will facilitate playing the Getting Real Card Game. In this game, we respond to self-disclosure questions and receive feedback about the impact of our responses. This will be an opportunity to practice some of the truth skills from my books, Getting Real and Saying What’s Real. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month—September through May. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2026 through May 2027: Zoom link

Subscribe now

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My next free monthly call is Tuesday, May 5, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. The topic for this one is, The Five Stages of Relationship: Intimacy as a Spiritual Path. This presentation will be based on the research findings reported in my best selling book, The Couples Journey. I interviewed or surveyed over 100 couples in this research—asking them to describe how their relationship had changed over time from when they first got together to the present. From that, I gleaned the five stages that I will be describing. As part of my presentation, I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the issues that are up for you. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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This week my partner and I had a meeting with his brain doctor. After a recent series of cognitive tests, her assessment is that he should not be driving on the freeway anymore. We knew this would come someday. But I am having trouble accepting it. Usually, it is the person who has lost capacity who has trouble accepting a new limitation. But Peter is pretty accepting of this one. I am the one who is having trouble.

Peter has typically done all the driving whenever we go out together. And I have really enjoyed being the passenger. In some primal way, this role division has given me a sense of being taken care of. Now, I am going to have to assume this new responsibility. As I think about this change, I have a lot of resistance coming up.

I am saying to myself, “He’s a great driver. There’s nothing wrong with his reflexes. I don’t agree with this doctor. Just because he didn’t perform so well on a test….. that doesn’t mean anything. He has special abilities when it comes to driving. He’s always been a car guy. He loves to drive.”

Denial

If we apply Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dying model to our situation, this would be the first stage: Denial. I have actually been in denial about this issue for a long time. For the past year at least, I have had the thought, “I wonder if Peter should be driving.” And then, when we go for a drive, I will collect evidence that he is a good driver and that I have nothing to worry about. I suppress those concerns I had about his driving. I have not taken seriously the possibility that we could get into a serious accident if he should experience a moment of confusion or delayed reaction time.

Denial is a real force to be reckoned with. Even now, as I recognize how easily I can enter a state of denial, I wonder, “What’s the problem with that? Isn’t that better than worrying and being vigilant all the time about something bad happening?

Witnessing this internal dialogue, I feel a mixture of humor, compassion, and shame. I can laugh at myself for my self-serving logic. I feel tender and compassionate about how painful this loss is. And I have shame as I notice the judgment that I am not being very grown-up about this…. that it’s not really that big a responsibility, and I’m making too big a deal out of it.

Anger

Just as I begin to come to terms with the depth and power of my denial, a deeper feeling comes up, “I just don’t want this new responsibility. I don’t like driving long distances. So now, we will take fewer vacations and won’t visit friends as much.” This feels like stubbornness—which could be mapped onto Kubler-Ross’s second stage of dying: Anger. I believe stubbornness is a form of anger. It’s kind of like what’s usually thought of as being passive-aggressive.

I can feel how my stubbornness is a reaction to feeling powerless. I have no power to control the situation, but I can at least refuse to cooperate. This is a weird feeling for me, which I don’t think I have ever experienced before (since becoming an adult). And I generally avoid being close to people who rely on stubbornness for their sense of power.

Bargaining

The third stage of dying is bargaining. As I imagine how we will navigate this change in the coming months, I think we will do our share of bargaining: “We don’t need to call an Uber. It’s only 15 miles….. As long as I (Susan) drive some of the time, that’s okay. I don’t need to drive every time….Maybe I only need to do the driving on days he hasn’t slept well.”

The next two stages in Kubler-Ross’s model are Depression and Acceptance.

Depression

Looking ahead, I can imagine a form of depression setting in after a month or two of me doing most of the driving. I will miss the luxury of being the passenger. I will perhaps be in some grief about that. I hope I can let myself feel sad without being dramatic about it.

Acceptance

In a case like this, it is inevitable that acceptance will come. I will get accustomed to it. I will get more comfortable driving his SUV, which I have rarely driven, but which we will probably still take on trips. Maybe I will even realize that I prefer my driving to his. I will be able to pick the first parking spot we see when we arrive at our destination---rather than sitting there trying to be patient while he looks for the perfect spot. And I’ll never have to wonder if we are safe with him at the wheel. Yes, it will probably all be fine. I’m just not quite there yet.

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Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

Beginning Wednesday, September 16, 2026 and ending November 8, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: The Five Stages of Relationship

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, May 5, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. The topic for this one is, The Five Stages of Relationship: Intimacy as a Spiritual Path. As part of my presentation, I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the issues that are up for you. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

Subscribe now

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Since my book, Five-Minute Relationship Repair, was published in 2015, I have offered many workshops on this topic. Of course, participants have a lot of questions that are not covered in the book because of the wide variety of situations that require repair. Today, I am going to share four questions that tend to come up often, along with my responses. At the end of this blog, I will also post the You Tube link to a webinar I conducted recently on this topic.

Question #1 My Partner is Not Ready to Repair

Sometimes when my partner and I meet to do a repair after a triggering episode, I can tell he’s not really calm yet -- even though he says he’s ready. What do I do in that situation?

My reply: If you see signs that your partner is not really ready yet, then I think you would not feel ready either …. in the sense that now you are not trusting that the space will be safe enough for repair (even though you were ready a minute ago before you looked at your partner).

So, you might suggest, “Before we begin, I’d like to sit here quietly for a few minutes and just breathe together… would that be OK with you?”

Then, if you see signs that he is still distressed, you could say something like, “I know I said I was ready, but I’m not sure now that I am. Could we come back to it in about 20 minutes and see how things feel then?”

Question #2 My Partner Resists the Repair Practice

My partner has resistance to doing this repair process. He thinks that getting into these sorts of details and feelings just magnifies the issue. How can I approach him or motivate him to want to do this with me?

My reply:
Basically, you’re saying that your partner does not want to do trigger work in the way I am suggesting. You can’t force somebody to want to do that. But you can request that you get one of my books (Five- Minute Relationship Repair or From Triggered to Tranquil), read it together, and discuss the ideas. (Available at My Website). Through that discussion, you may be able to get on the same page. Maybe you can work together to revise some of the suggested scripts so they work better for your individual situation.

If disagreement persists, you may want to try active listening—the listening practice where you take turns being talker and listener, reflecting back to the other, as carefully as possible, what you heard them say, and asking if this is correct. This will help you understand his objections. If you can understand and perhaps empathize with what he says (even if you don’t agree), some of his resistance may melt. Some people initially resist instructions or being told what to do, but when they are encouraged to express their thoughts, they feel less controlled and more open to change.

In other instances, a person’s resistance to this sort of practice may come from a cognitive style that has difficulty following directions due to a deficit in reading or verbal comprehension. There are many intelligent people in our world who have that cognitive deficit and are ashamed to admit it. This may have caused anxiety or stress during their early school years. They may carry a traumatic memory about being the slow kid in the back of the class who never understood what the teacher was trying to say.

Sometimes this sort of childhood trauma will reveal itself during an active listening session if you stay with it long enough.

Unilateral Repair

If those ideas don’t work, you could start doing repairs, revisions, and confessing your trigger reactions without requiring anything from him. You can just do unilateral repairs and revisions as you see fit. There is a good section in the book, From Triggered to Tranquil, that shows how to do this.

Maybe, as he sees you doing this and notices that it helps him feel safer and more connected to you, he will realize the benefit of it. Or maybe if his resistance has been based more on performance anxiety due to his fear of not doing it right, he will start to get the hang of it after seeing you doing it a few times.

Question #3 Repair After a Betrayal of Trust

Several years ago, I betrayed my wife by lying about an affair I was having. We have reconciled and are getting on with our lives, but I need to find a way to rebuild trust with her. How can we ever repair that rupture?

My response: That’s a tough one. Regaining trust can take time and patience. But first, can you take a moment right now and feel all the feelings that come up in you when you think about this? You may be feeling sorrow for her and for yourself. You may feel guilt or regret for the damage that has been done. There may be a defensive response that tells you that you are not the only one responsible for what happened…. that she had a part in this, too. Or you may wish that this rupture would just hurry up and go away. See if you can stay with your feelings and let them all be there.

Often, when we intentionally sit with painful feelings long enough, feelings of tenderness and compassion arise—in this case, both for yourself and for your wife. Revisit this “sitting with feelings” practice often. It will help you stay soft and open-hearted whenever the topic comes up.

Hurts Take Time to Heal

Sometimes, you will wish you didn’t need to keep going over this old hurtful event. That’s normal in these situations—but it probably will need to be addressed over and over, sometimes for many years. So, try to accept that fact.

Once you accept this, be alert for cues from your wife that she is thinking about the betrayal, or for signs that she isn’t trusting you regarding what you do when the two of you are not together. This is probably going to be a vulnerable area for her for quite a while. When you see signs that she may ruminating about this, or when she brings it up directly or indirectly, let her know that you want to be there with her and that you can hold her feelings. You might say something like, “I’m here with you… I get why you’re feeling_____(insecure, wary, unsure about me, etc.)”

On other occasions, it will be helpful to express regret and sorrow for your behavior—even though you have done this many times before. When you do this, be careful not to make your guilt the main story. If she feels even a hint that she has to take care of you while expressing her hurt, repair will be stalled.

Show Empathy, Not Just Remorse

Remorse would be: “I feel terrible about what I did.” Empathy says: “I can feel what it was like for you, and I’m willing to stay with that.” She needs the experience of being felt, not just apologized to.

By doing this, you are helping her regulate her feelings around that hurtful event. You become a source of safety in the very place where safety was lost.

Question #4 We Get Re-Triggered During Repair

We often get triggered again in the middle of trying to repair a co-triggering episode. What should we do when that happens?

My reply: This is the question I hear most frequently—because it happens so often. And I know how frustrating that can be.

Learn to accept that this may happen, and be willing to pause and calm your nervous system right then and there. Whoever notices signs of triggering first will say “Pause,” or “Can we pause? I think I’m getting triggered again.” Then, since you haven’t been activated for very long, you can probably just sit quietly together in the same space and take each some time to regulate your nervous system until you feel safe and until you have let go of your reactive or blaming stories. Take a little more time than you think you should need. And even then, you may need to get up and walk around, or go get something to eat—to give your nervous system time to reset. You’ll want to go out of the room and come back in again to give you the feeling of starting over, starting fresh.

Once you both feel calm and ready to try again, do something that will ground you in your bodies—like making eye contact, sharing a hug, or holding hands. This type of gesture can offer an additional measure of safety to help you stay calm.

Reminders

Before closing, I want to remind you that the purpose of repair is to restore safety to both people’s nervous systems, not to be heard or be understood. And it’s definitely not to get from dysregulated to calm. You need to be pretty calm before attempting a repair. Some people believe they need to feel heard or understood in order to feel calm and safe. That belief may persist until you realize that there is a core fear underneath what you call your “need to feel understood.” It is that core fear (like the fear of being rejected, the fear of not being loved or valued, or the fear of being bad or wrong) that you need to befriend and bring compassion to.

If you still want to have a conversation to help you feel understood, the best time to do that would be after taking responsibility for your reactive behavior and the core fear that triggered it. Once you reassure your partner that you are no longer blaming them or holding a reactive story about them, then they will feel safe enough to really listen.

Here is the You Tube link to my recent one-hour webinar titled, Repairing Relationship Ruptures:

Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

Beginning Wednesday, September 16, 2026 and ending November 8, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: The Five Stages of Relationship

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, May 5, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. The topic this month is, The Five Stages of Relationship: Intimacy as a Spiritual Path. As part of my presentation, I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the issues that are up for you. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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My next free monthly call is Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. The topic this month is, “Repairing Relationship Ruptures.” Most people don’t know how to do an effective repair. Often, they insert explanations or requests in their repairs. These things are generally NOT reparative. In this webinar, I will teach what works and what doesn’t when you really want to get back to feeling safe and trusting with someone — in love, work, family, and friend relationships. Then, I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the issues that are up for you. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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I wonder how the things I write today will seem if I live to 95. If I get there, you’ll probably hear about it!

So, now that I’ve brought you a little bit up to date, here’s how things looked 10 years ago:

Reflections on Turning 75

My 75^th birthday is coming up in a few days, so it seems natural to use this passage to reflect on my life—how I experience life at this age and what I’d like to pass on to others.

Looking Back…..How Did I Do?

When I look back on this life, I feel happy with the choices I made along the way, pleased that I made the most of what I was given—taking good care of my health, getting my Ph.D. at 25, marrying good men, living in good places, writing books that help people, accepting just about any challenging opportunity that came my way, taking time to develop my inner life, and actualizing my life purpose as a teacher.

It’s Not Over Yet….So What’s Next?

Even though I’m 75, I could have another 30 years of life ahead of me. I’m having fun playing with this thought. Wow….thirty years seems like a long time. What do I want these next 30 (more or less) years to be like? Is there anything unfinished for me? Is there more for me to learn or develop? What are the developmental tasks of this final stage of life? If I want to die well, what can I do to be fully open to the lessons of death?

How About Now?

I don’t spend much time looking forward or backward. My life in each moment feels rich and full. I live from moment-to-moment without any sense that time is running out or speeding up. I pretty much enjoy the same things I have always enjoyed—having creative exchanges with my intimate partner, being in nature, meditating, relaxing, teaching and mentoring, seeing clients, dancing, hiking, going to parties, cracking jokes. I don’t have a bucket list of things to do and places to see. My story is I’ve done and seen enough. I feel “complete” (Is that a feeling?) I could die any time. But I don’t think that’s going to happening anytime soon.

That said, I know everything can change in a person’s life in one second—a car accident, a stroke, a life-threatening diagnosis. I see things like this happening all around me every day---people getting sick and dying, or working very hard to stay alive.

My Death Has Already Begun

I do sense an increasingly intimate connection with my own death. I’ll do my best to put into words what I mean here. Ten years ago, I rarely thought about death. But in the past few years, I have begun to experience my life in this physical body as less material, less solid, and more spiritual, luminous, or fractal. As I write these words, I wonder if readers are thinking, “What the hell is she talking about?” At the risk of being misunderstood, I’d like to elaborate. At this point in life I care little about whether I am understood or approved of. My “attachment needs” (like the needs to be loved or accepted) don’t have much of a hold on me. I am finding the ego and the physical body less limiting. I sense more “space” in here—in my awareness. I am more identified with awareness itself and less with my body or my personality. Still, I do enjoy compliments about my appearance and my wit.

I seem to be experiencing what Roberto Assagioli (Psychosynthesis) used to call dis-identification. I have fun with my body and my personality, but I feel a little bit removed from these things. I imagine that this development has something to do with growing closer to my own death. I am assuming that these developments, if they continue, will make letting go into the Great Unknown easier.

Don’t Succumb to Stereotyped Thinking About Age

Another message I want to convey by writing this is that each of us ages in our own unique way. What you hear about and read about regarding aging may or may not be or become true for you. Some of us go down hill gradually, some pretty quickly, and some just fall off the cliff. Some of us, like me, start to go downhill and then come back….even a few times. I lost my sex drive, and then it came back. I injured my back and had to walk with a cane for a while, and then I recovered. Some of the ways I imagine my older years may be different than some others, or at least different from the stereotypes are things like: the fact that I am enjoying the best sex of my life; in my ecstatic dance practice, my movements keep getting more original, varied, and daring; I am not worried about my health; I have no aches and pains; and I generally feel strong and confident in my body.

Getting Real About Getting Older

Okay, all that could change tomorrow, and I believe I’m ready to face what comes. I have experienced intense physical pain (and disability) in my recent past (due to different injuries), and I know how this narrows the focus of one’s attention. I became quite self-focused when I was in pain—but my happiness and overall positive outlook was not affected by the pain. I found those episodes of pain and disability interesting—seeing it as “training for old age.” This attitude…. “Life is a School, and we’re here to learn”……this philosophy has served me well. It gives me an openness to whatever happens. When challenges happen, my aim is to respond with the most creative, authentic, mutually beneficial response I can offer. In Getting Real terms, I have called this: surfing life rather than trying to control life. Practicing the 10 Getting Real truth skills and viewing life as an awareness practice seems to help. This keeps my life energy flowing and connected to the big energies of the universe vs. getting stuck in an identity that needs protecting.

If I am destined to die sooner rather than later, the only real concern I have is that I don’t leave a mess for my partner and family. I am busily getting rid of stuff (shoes, clothes, books)—but I still have a ways to go. I have made a trust, appointed medical and fiduciary powers of attorney, and finished my end-of-life wishes and medical directive. So, that stuff feels pretty complete.

If I do live another 30 years, I look forward to an unpredictable future. I imagine this final stage will hold more challenges than I have previously faced. But that’s just a guess. Maybe I will experience even more flow and grace in the future than I have thus far. Either way, I feel pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

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Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Beginning Wednesday, March 25, 2026 and ending May 13, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar: Repairing Relationship Ruptures

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. The topic this month is, “Repairing Relationship Ruptures.” Most people don’t know how to do an effective repair. Often, they insert explanations or requests in their repairs. These things are generally NOT reparative. In this webinar, I will teach what works and what doesn’t when you really want to get back to feeling safe and trusting with someone — in love, work, family, and friend relationships. Then, I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the issues that are up for you. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

About a week ago, when I showed up to be interviewed by Bill Tierney and Martin Kettelhut on their True You Podcast, their first question was, “Can you coach us live on our show?” I thought that was a great idea. Here’s the recording of what happened next: You Tube

Subscribe now

Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Beginning Wednesday, March 25, 2026 and ending May 13, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. In this one, I will offer a brief overview of how I work with emotional triggering. Then I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the types of issues, concerns, fears, and pains that are up for you. I plan to make a lot of time for addressing questions, so please bring some. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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Subscribe now

Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Beginning Wednesday, March 25, 2026 and ending May 13, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. In this one, I will offer a brief overview of how I work with emotional triggering. Then I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the types of issues, concerns, fears, and pains that are up for you. I plan to make a lot of time for addressing questions, so please bring some. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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In the article below, I propose that the emotional integration work we do in trigger work (re-owning the disowned, projected, or rejected parts of ourselves) gives us an internal felt-sense, a kind of map, for understanding in our bones the systemic work that lies ahead for humanity as a whole at a societal level. As individuals, we have a tendency to reject or abandon the aspects of ourselves that we judge as insecure, weak, or atypical. These aspects threaten our ego’s preference for confidence and social acceptability.

So, too, does our egoic socio-political system reject, scapegoat, or ostracize the weak, the defenseless, the poor, and the foreign. The article suggests that when we deeply understand what I call trigger work, this prepares us to create more adaptive, healthy, and resilient social systems. Such inner development may be an important step in bringing forth a new paradigm regarding what humans value most and how we organize ourselves to bring forth these values.

The article was written in 2020 toward the end of Trump’s first presidency. I included it as the last chapter in my 2021 book, From Triggered to Tranquil (available at Amazon) The book also offers a detailed understanding of trigger reactions and how to do trigger work, either by yourself or with a partner.

Here is the article (and the last chapter of my book):

Triggered by the World Situation

True strength and wisdom, the kind that enables us to cope with the complexity of today’s world situation, requires integrated input from all parts of the system, including the vulnerable parts.

Our world is suffering from so many intersecting crises. We are acutely aware of the climate crisis, the unemployment crisis, the culture wars, the mental health crisis, the opioid epidemic, the refugee crisis, the hunger crisis, the suicide crisis, and homelessness in our cities. Then there is the huge wealth gap, the national debt, wars or the threat of war, racism, climate migration, and the rise of fascism in many countries. In the United States, we see increasing polarization between political parties who advocate very different policies regarding the role of government in civil rights, public health, healthcare, birth control, race and gender equality, corporate power, food safety, environmental protection, education, and poverty. Just writing this paragraph, trying to use language that is as objective as possible, I can sense some agitation in my nervous system. The collective soup we all swim in is reaching the boiling point. And it is affecting everyone — some more than others, of course.

How often do you look at a news article or turn on the TV news and feel anger, frustration, helplessness, overwhelm, outrage, panic, depression, or fear? As the litany of seemingly unsolvable problems grows, more and more people are feeling stressed out. In 2020, the Washington Post reported that one-third of Americans experience frequent or chronic anxiety or depression. In that same year Forbes magazine printed a letter from an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles that stated, “Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600 percent in the past six months.” The more stressed out we feel, the more triggerable we are. And the more easily we can be manipulated by special interest groups who seek to hijack our amygdala or take advantage of our dysregulated state to push their agendas. If we want to maintain a sense of equanimity and inner sovereignty in this chaotic world, we need good self-regulation habits.

Psychologists and many activists have found that effective action is the best antidote to anxiety and depression. But how can anyone act effectively when they are triggered? When we’re triggered, we are disconnected from our higher brain’s problem-solving capacities. We are unable to think clearly.

If we want to become part of the solution, instead of projecting our personal problems onto the collective heap, we need to learn how to separate our personal trigger reactions from what is actually going on. Once we get good at doing this, then we can use our personal feelings to fuel our genuine outrage, effective action, or sacred grief. That’s what this chapter is about: how to use our emotional sensitivities as fuel for an effective and heartfelt response to any world problem, while at the same time having a well-regulated nervous system and differentiating our reactive behaviors and stories from what actually needs to change. To do good in the world, or just to sort out fact from fiction, we need to have sovereignty over our own inner state.

Using the World as a Doorway to Self-Knowledge

In my work, I spend a lot of time hearing about people’s private fears and triggers. One coaching client, Rita, revealed how she got triggered whenever she read stories about political polarization in the United States. She reacted when she heard newscasters, neighbors, and relatives using demeaning labels toward people on the other side of the political divide.

When Rita and I explored her reactive feelings, she connected emotionally to several early school experiences with peers when she was around ten or eleven. As a Mexican American, she was part of a minority group in her school. Kids that age can be cruel as they navigate the developmental task of discovering their personal power. Rita was teased and put down for being Mexican. As she remembered some childhood scenes, what hurt her most was the name-calling, the racial slurs. Through her inner work with me, she was able to use this as a doorway to deeper self-empathy and self-support. When she allowed herself to weep and feel the impact of these old hurts, with her inner witness engaged, she connected with a new resource within herself. Instead of judging her reactive feelings, she learned to listen to these feelings, to really attend to them, and to embrace them with the sort of compassion she would offer a much-loved child.

Before learning to do this, she would get totally overwhelmed, causing her to shut down and withdraw. Now she was willing to face the pain rather than hide from it. She gradually found herself taking on this issue as a cause among her community of friends and neighbors. Whenever someone used demeaning or snarky language toward people they disagreed with, she would speak up and share how this felt to her. She would say things like: “You know, I have been on the receiving end of a lot of insulting labels in my childhood, being Mexican in a mostly Anglo community, so it pains me when you talk this way. I’d rather hear something specific about your experience with this person — something they actually did or said and how that affected you. I really want to know what you think and feel. I just have trouble when I hear labels like ‘crazy’ or ‘ignorant,’ and I don’t know what they did that you’re referring to … or why this bothers you.”

I think Rita’s story illustrates how helpful it can be to get to the bottom of our trigger reaction, so we can use what’s happening in the world around us as a doorway to deeper self-knowledge, self-compassion, and community action. Perhaps even more important is how, after she learned to feel her hurt rather than deny it, Rita became less self-righteous toward friends and neighbors who triggered her. Instead of shutting down and gossiping to others, she felt empowered and emboldened to speak up. In her own way and in her own social circles, she became a leader and a champion for constructive political discourse — for a way of conversing that relies on sharing real data about what really happened and does not resort to name-calling, innuendos, and put-downs. Through doing her trigger work, Rita connected with the source of her own passion for this issue — which made her leadership efforts all the more compelling and effective.

Civil Disobedience

When deep structural change is needed in a society, and those in power deny basic human rights to certain segments of the population, civil disobedience, or taking it to the streets, may be the only remaining option. The type of trauma response that occurs when a person is without food, shelter, and physical safety is quite different from the attachment traumas I discuss in this book. But a person’s ability to sort out unproductive responses to unjust authority from more clear-headed responses is still worth attending to.

Rita’s story illustrates how we need to be mindful of how we can sabotage our own credibility when we throw around inflammatory verbiage, negative labels, and vague generalizations. I believe we can speak with passion without sacrificing critical thinking. We can make a righteous point without being self-righteous. We can use anger to assert that something needs to stop without becoming so angry that we become wrong-headed or trigger others into dangerous behavior. If we do the inner work suggested in this book, we will notice when we are becoming wrong-headed, inflammatory, self-righteous, or needlessly repetitive. If we are called to lead or organize any sort of civil disobedience action, then we must use the tools of any good leader. Much of our power is in the legitimacy of our words, the sincerity in our call to action, our ability to paint a clear picture with our words, and to point out realistic options (rather than speaking from reactivity and fomenting chaos). We must use our voice wisely.

Remember, a good leader’s actions promote “the good of the whole.” We may be advocating a change to rebalance power or resources. But our ultimate aim is to have the whole system work more effectively — for everyone. The ability to hold this whole-systems perspective will be challenged by people who do not understand the holistic interrelatedness of all parts of the system — that we’re all in this together. These parties may advocate for division — divide and conquer, characterizing issues as us against them. They may try to keep our amygdala activated as a power play — because they know this makes people less effective. Such divisive tactics are never an effective long-term strategy.

If we have done our inner trigger work, we will be less susceptible to this sort of manipulation and mind control. When we have sovereignty over our own nervous system, devious characters cannot hijack our brain for their agendas. And we will understand in our bones this whole-making process because we have learned to balance our own internal system of subparts, allowing our neglected parts to be seen, heard, accepted, and loved. When we embody this level of whole-system awareness, our actions are more likely to be aligned with the laws of how the universe actually works. We know that when a system takes everyone’s needs into account, there is less reason to fear one another. Fearing one another can lead to mistrust, conflict, and chaos. We come to understand this by seeing what fear does inside our nervous system. The mark of a healthy human system — whether it be a person, a couple, or a country — is good, well-regulated communication between subparts. This allows us to make good decisions. Our parts cannot hear one another when our survival alarms are ringing.

How Inner Work Supports Outer Work

Another story from a client, Jim, illustrates how inner work can help us cope with being triggered by tragic world news, political turmoil, economic downturns, social injustice, and other difficult events.

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Jim became overwhelmed by both his family’s circumstances and the US government’s response to the economic downturn. Jim’s adult kids were out of work, and he was not even sure about the security of his own employment. When he read about federal contracts and economic aid being disproportionately awarded to large companies with political connections, while small businesses like his were being overlooked, he became angry. This felt deeply unfair to Jim, who always proudly stood up for fairness and justice. In fact, he sometimes expressed his outrage over social injustices so aggressively that his friends would tell him, “I can’t discuss this with you anymore.” This time, Jim’s trigger reaction was so strong he could not find words to express himself. He felt overwhelmed and helpless, nearly paralyzed. When he was not at his job, all he wanted to do was distract himself with food and screen time.

Jim decided to do the Compassionate Self-Inquiry practice, beginning with the very heavy feeling he sensed in his chest and torso when he thought of this recent injustice. He started by closing his eyes and paying attention to his breathing. When relaxed, he was able to activate the innate curiosity of his witnessing self, allowing a bifurcation in his way of experiencing all this — so he experienced himself as both the witness and the one being witnessed. Then he came back to noticing the body sensation of heaviness, allowing this to be there, as he breathed fully and deeply to open up inner space for what might arise. From this more spacious inner presence, he observed the heaviness becoming more contracted, tighter. He remained curious and welcoming. Soon, he noticed that the sensations were starting to feel overwhelming, so he opened his eyes and looked around the room for a minute. He stood up and shook his arms a few times before closing his eyes again and resuming the inquiry. As he watched his feelings and sensations move and change, he suddenly felt very afraid. He remembered to keep breathing slowly and fully as a childhood memory emerged. In the memory, Jim was about seven years old. Something was happening in the next room that felt violent and out of control. He heard loud voices. He opened the door and saw his father throwing a chair at his mother as his older sister tried to intervene. His little boy body seemed paralyzed, like he couldn’t move. His voice was so constricted that no sound came out when he tried to speak. Little Jim retreated to his bedroom and hid under the covers, feeling helpless and numb.

Holding Space for Oneself

As Jim connected on a feeling level with the terror of this traumatic memory, he was also witnessing it with tenderness. His witnessing self was able to hold space for the terror with compassion. He remembered to keep breathing fully. Tears came, and he sobbed for a little while, allowing his body to shake and tremble. Pretty soon, as the tears subsided, he realized these were tears of grief — grief over what that little boy had to deal with at such a young age, grief over how his conditioning had taught him to fear conflict rather than how to deal with it in a balanced way. His approach to conflict had always been to either dominate or submit — nothing in between. When people approach interpersonal conflicts in this way, it means they are triggered.

Jim sat with his sadness, grief, and tenderness, allowing the different pieces of this experience to fall together, until he felt, at once, both relaxed and somewhat energized. He noticed his breathing became calm and steady. His chest and torso area felt light and expanded. It was as if a weight had lifted and he could move and breathe more freely.

After going through this process, Jim told me he experienced more self-trust and inner calmness. He was pretty sure he would get triggered again by incidents of injustice, and he was open to continuing his self-examination around the issue. When he reflected on his adult reaction to issues of fairness and justice, he recognized that he had a pattern of “either seeing red or shutting down.” His reactions to the injustices around him exhibited either too much or not enough force. But when he heard himself using the word “force,” this caught his attention. He began to pay more attention to how he dealt with conflicts around fairness in his daily life, asking himself: Do I trust myself only when I feel “forceful” and sure of myself, when I know I have the upper hand? Am I so overwhelmed by the complexity of today’s world predicament that I can’t feel forceful anymore? Is this why I hold back, and why I feel so passive and lethargic? Have I lost my ability to speak up?

Balancing Power and Vulnerability

As he reflected on his relationship to the unjust authority in his own family of origin (represented by his father), he realized how powerless he had always felt as a child. His dad would often blow up at him when Jim had no idea what he had done or what his dad wanted him to do differently. This left him feeling frozen, not knowing what to do or say. As an adult, Jim thought he had overcome that childhood sense of “I’m not enough.” He thought he had grown up into a man with “force” — a man who was bigger, more sure of himself, and more authoritative than his father. He could see now that this need to appear forceful had come at a price. He had developed a rigid, inflexible personality structure, what psychologists call an authoritarian personality. He had denied the part of himself that felt terrified by his dad’s harsh criticism and aggression as well as the part that didn’t know what to do. He had completely turned his back on that seven-year-old boy cowering under the bedcovers. When that part of him got triggered by an intense and complex world situation, one that was controlled by forceful, unyielding, and unfair authorities, he collapsed into lethargy.

Jim is still working to integrate these parts of his own psyche. Doing inner inquiry into his trigger reactions to injustice has opened him up to fruitful self-questioning. He has found real value in pausing to be with his trigger reactions and connecting with a long-denied part of himself that fears feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Going forward, Jim’s ability to temper his forcefulness with an awareness of this fearful aspect will help him learn to communicate his needs and values in a more balanced way — blending confidence with humility. He decided to join a men’s group that focuses on sharing hidden feelings and shadow parts, and he is learning to admit when he needs help or guidance. His rigidities are relaxing as he feels safer not knowing. The men’s group has been a good place to explore how the world situation is putting him in touch with previously denied fears and insecurities. He knows he is on a journey that never ends.

Triggering as a Wake-Up Call

Sometimes what we think is a bad thing turns out to be good for us. Sometimes we need something unpleasant to shock us into paying better attention to things we were not aware of. In my work with couples, I often see one or both partners recognizing that they needed to get whacked on the side of the head by some circumstance in their relational life (in this case, a difficult marriage) in order to pay attention to the need for inner change.

One client, Rachel, described having this realization as she explored her frustrations in her marriage. She reflected: “When I first started counseling, I thought I was with the wrong person. Like, why would I want to be with someone who upsets me so much, where I often feel so unloved and unprotected? But now I see that blaming him was not the answer. I am seeing that so many of my personality defense mechanisms and fear-stories were connected to unprocessed hurtful childhood experiences. I was going around so bound up, so defended, and not really feeling much of anything. There was this pain inside that I was completely unaware of, but my fear of feeling that pain was running me.

“Being married to Bob forced me to see how insecure I am, how I am always watching and waiting for someone to let me down. It would start with some careless action on his part, and I would think, I don’t matter to him, I’m invisible. Then I would sense a tightening and clenching sensation in my chest. Through counseling, I learned to be with this sensation, to feel it, to be curious and see where this led me. It led me to uncover a part of myself that felt so alone as a kid, the ten-year-old kid my parents didn’t have time for. They had show dogs, and the dogs got all their attention. Plus, by the time I got home from school, my mom would be drunk. I have recently learned to love and care for this lonely, hurting part of me. I am still grieving for what the younger me didn’t get. But I feel stronger and better about myself. I am mostly happy with Bob now. I ask for what I want, so that helps. I used to just complain or go away.”

In Rachel’s case, her reaction to her husband woke her up to denied or neglected parts of herself, but the same thing can happen with our reaction to any external or world event. In my coaching practice, I see more and more situations where “what’s going on” — from a corporation’s tax evasion to a biased ruling from a judicial body — triggers people to become aware of their disowned shadow and their hidden pain.

Bringing What’s Unconscious Into Consciousness

What used to be hidden (unconscious) is becoming conscious. Consider these three examples:

One woman found herself getting triggered by President Donald Trump whenever he would make demeaning public comments to reporters and officials who challenged him. When she went deeply into the feelings and memories that this triggered, she recalled forgotten events from her childhood, when she was abused and ridiculed by a narcissistic mother. As she was bringing compassion to the child part of her that carried a fear of being unlovable and worthless, a feeling of anger came up. As she explored this angry part, allowing this part to speak out against the abuse she had suffered, she realized that this anger represented her inner protector. This long-denied resource was the inner voice that says, “The way you are treating me is not okay, and it must stop.” This part knew what she really needed and had the courage to express this. It was the voice inside that had been muffled by her fear of speaking up to her mother. After doing this inner work, she experienced a change in her relationships with men. As an adult, she had often been drawn to abusive relationships, but now she felt empowered to express her current needs and boundaries effectively, instead of being a doormat. She found her authentic voice rather than thinking she always had to adapt to others.

One man found himself getting triggered when he saw TV news depicting police brutality. Exploring his trigger reaction, he was able to own his grief about growing up with a sometimes violent father. As a child, he never felt safe, and much of his energy and focus had been on protecting himself from physical harm. Doing compassionate self-inquiry, he learned to use his reactions to seeing violence on TV as a chance to offer empathy to himself, reassuring his fearful part, the part he judged as weak, that fear is a normal, healthy reaction to threats of physical violence — especially if you are small and the other person is big. Accepting his fear allowed him to develop a more realistic assessment of which events in his life were actually dangerous, and which were not. Then he could take action as needed or let it go when there was no real threat.

One man found himself getting triggered during the Trump administration whenever Republican politicians would repeat or defend falsehoods being spread by the president. When he explored his trigger reaction, he recalled childhood incidents where his alcoholic father would berate and belittle him while his mother, the enabler in this instance, quietly watched. After he worked with these painful memories — embracing, owning, and integrating both his fearful part and his inner protector — he was eventually able to clear the air with both of his parents before they died.

In all three cases, as the individuals continued the inner work that began with seeing themselves getting triggered by the world situation, they developed the ability to speak up more effectively with others to assert their needs and values, call out wrong behavior, or defend their beliefs.

Life Wants Us to Heal and Become Whole

As these stories show, sometimes we need to get our buttons pushed so we can see where we still have some inner healing to do, so we can learn to offer acceptance and love to our neglected parts. Emotional pain can open the door to healing and effective action. When we learn to be curious and openhearted about our trigger reactions, allowing our attention to follow the painful or upset feelings wherever this takes us, we come into a new, more compassionate relationship to our lost, rejected, hurting parts, and our suppressed self-expression or power. By engaging in this self-healing practice, we feel empowered to confront painful realities in the world around us rather than avoiding these out of our generalized fear of discomfort. We learn to embody the whole-making process that is our natural evolutionary destiny.

Wholeness is where a life well and consciously lived will take us. When we live in harmony with the laws of life — whether we call this God, the Tao, the Divine, Great Spirit, True Nature, Designing Intelligence, or something else — our personal power gets amplified by joining forces with life’s natural laws. This may be the paradigm shift that life is nudging us toward. What first appears as a cascade of unsolvable problems, problems that threaten to overwhelm our capacity to cope, upon further examination can be the gateway to hidden potentials that naturally emerge when we fully face and inquire into the painful reality we thought would overwhelm us.

The Hero’s Journey

One lesson from ancient myths about the hero’s journey is that every human life, your life, has a contribution to make to the whole. In this life, slings and arrows will come at you. How you live your life affects the whole. The hero’s job is to use whatever challenges life serves up to refine the inner and outer seeing and way of being, so that eventually each of us reaches the mountaintop and sees how our one life is inseparable from life itself — how I am part of all, and all is in me. The hero achieves this by going into the underworld of the unconscious mind and learning how to make the unconscious conscious.

If your outer life gets too disconnected from the inner, or from the wholeness that you are part of, life will do what it does to get your attention — often by creating painful circumstances in your outer world. Any time you get out of balance, life will only allow this for so long before it finds a way to restore balance. If you get too grandiose and self-centered (as industrialized nations have gotten with respect to the natural world), life will bring you down to size. If, like Jim, you try to be too forceful and cocky, and deny your frightened, needy, vulnerable side, life will present you with challenges that bring you to your knees. The idea is that true strength and wisdom, the kind that enables us to cope with the complexity of today’s world situation, requires integrated input from all parts of the system, including the vulnerable parts. If some parts are offline, repressed, suppressed, or denied, the resulting action will be less effective.

Trigger reactions are one way life has for getting us to pay attention to what we have been denying. So, also, are world crises. It takes a crisis to get our attention. It is also true that today’s problems seem so vast and complex that we instinctively want to look the other way. This is true whether we are talking about world problems, like the climate crisis and poverty, or inner problems, like unhealed personal trauma and emotional stress.

Using Upsetting Events as a Doorway to What’s Deeper

Many people are paralyzed to one degree or another by the fear of emotional pain — the pain of the disowned, neglected, frightened child inside. In my life’s work, I have seen real transformation happen in people after they do the inner work of healing their fear of pain (which includes the fear of feeling powerless or not in control). When the outer world situation upsets us, now life has our attention. And when we develop the habit of using such upsets to explore our inner world, embracing and therefore accepting whatever unpleasant realities we find, now we have more internal resilience. We can bounce back quicker from disappointments and upsets. We don’t get stuck in paralysis, inaction, or reaction. We know how to stay engaged and curious in the face of painful realities (both inner and outer). Armed with a set of skills for doing inner work, we know how to work with the slings and arrows of life. In these chaotic times, too many humans cannot accept what is. They waste too much energy focusing on what should or should not be happening versus what is happening. This sets them against seeing and dealing with what is and working with their actual reality. Trigger work teaches us to put our attention and energy where they can do some good. We learn to have an I-thou dialogue with unfamiliar or scary parts of ourselves and the world. Instead of building protective walls or aggressive arsenals, we open our attention, get curious, and inquire.

People who once avoided inconvenient truths get really interested in knowing more and learning more. People who once tended to oversimplify problems, seeing things in either-or terms, are able to step outside and above “the level of the problem,” get a wide-angle view on things, see how all the parts of a complex system can work together, and create solutions from a both-and or many-sided perspective. Many of us do not realize how complex or many-sided we are — until we begin the work of discovering the many sides or layers of our own beingness hidden away in the shadows of our psyches. Trigger work is the path to owning our many-sidedness and the inner and outer power that comes with this. What we thought would overwhelm us becomes our superpower. This is the work of managing complexity — creating systems (including our internal self-system) where all our parts see one another, communicate with one another, know one another, and care about one another.

We live in stressful times. World problems are more complex than the human mind can comprehend (at our current level of consciousness). But life has given us what we need to address this complexity. It is hidden within our own subconscious minds. Those who have the courage to explore there will hold the key to humanity’s future.

Conclusion

In this book, I hope I have opened your eyes to the profound benefits of trigger work. I hope you have seen how you can become inwardly stronger and more resilient by owning that you sometimes feel small and bewildered; how denying any part of yourself ultimately weakens you because when you try to avoid or deny a painful reality, that is when you lose your power to effectively deal with it.

I hope you have seen that a good life is not necessarily a pain-free life and how the pain is so much easier to bear when you attend to it rather than turning your back on it.

I hope you recognize how blaming someone for your upset feelings prevents you from taking responsibility for your wounds and deficits. These wounds are a part of your personal hero’s journey. They are not your fault, but since they have shown up in your life, they are yours to deal with. A blaming attitude will prevent you from learning what you need to learn to heal your wounds.

I hope you have a better understanding of how the ego-mind operates to protect you from things you don’t need protection from — things like uncertainty, discomfort, and appearing weak, needy, or imperfect — and how this part of the mind tries to control things you really have little or no control over. I hope you are learning to step back from your automatic thinking habits and to remind yourself that this part of the mind comes from how you learned to cope with unmet childhood needs. It is what we might call “the conditioned mind” or “your conditioning.” The aim of the hero’s journey is to get free of your childhood conditioning so you can make adult choices based on what is actually happening — instead of what you fear will happen because it happened when you were a child.

I hope you are convinced that pausing frequently to be aware of your inner state is a good practice. Mindfulness breaks like this are beneficial even when you are not triggered, and they could help reduce triggering episodes. When you make pausing a part of your daily life, you give your nervous system time to become calm and your senses time to become open. The result is a more spacious and perceptive field of awareness — you can see more of current reality at once, and you can better “see things coming.” Thus, you will experience fewer unwanted surprises.

Pausing also strengthens your capacity for self-witnessing. As you take the position of the witness, you become less identified with the conditioned mind that tends to think something is wrong with you if you feel upset. You “become” a spacious field of awareness where any feeling can be welcomed and held. This allows you to tenderly hold your pain while at the same time knowing that this pain is not your essential self. This witnessing field allows you to experience and hold emotional pain while not being identified with the pain.

We live in uncertain, complex, and often overwhelming times. To cope well with the challenges we face, humans need to develop and use more of our potential. The main thing holding us back from such development is our normal, but unnecessary, fear of discomfort (aka resistance to change). Development takes effort. It is uncomfortable. Doing trigger work teaches us not to avoid uncomfortable feelings. We learn that when we lovingly embrace our tender pains and fears, a natural healing process is set in motion. This expands the size of the world we can comfortably and competently deal with. We discover a new relationship with the parts of ourselves that we had believed were the cause of our distress. As it turns out, denying them was the cause of our distress. These are the kinds of lessons that come from doing trigger work. We learn that we really do have what it takes to cope with inconvenient truths and unwanted surprises. The world needs more of us who can help lead the way.

Upcoming Events

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Beginning Wednesday, March 25, 2026 and ending May 13, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

(This group is full, but I can put you on the waiting list.)

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. In this one, I will offer a brief overview of how I work with emotional triggering. Then I will invite questions and help you apply my insights to the types of issues, concerns, fears, and pains that are up for you. I plan to make a lot of time for addressing questions, so please bring some. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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Many people understand this to some degree, but the violent, hurtful, or disrespectful words said by a triggered partner can still get lodged in our minds. Maybe this has been true of you. In a triggered state, your partner may have said, “You’re so cold,” or “I’ve never felt safe with you,” or even, “You’re only out for yourself.”

Most of us, if we hear something like this from someone we love, will not be able to let it go. Maybe we should be able to just view our triggered partner with compassion, but that’s not so easy. Much of the time we will take their words personally. Even if we do understand that all this is coming from a triggered brain, it is hard to feel comforted by this understanding. We may still have the sneaking suspicion that this is how our partner really feels about us deep down.

Taking It Personally

We have probably all heard the phrase, “Don’t take anything personally.” But what if we do? I maintain that when you get triggered by something your partner says, i.e., if you take it personally, then that is your business to deal with. It’s an opportunity for you to investigate the feelings, sensations, thoughts, and memories that arise when you hear these hurtful or upsetting words. Many people have taken this on as a practice. These people, and you may be one of them, are able to regulate their nervous system, inquire within, soothe their tender feelings, and get back to being present.

But your partner may not be doing this same inner practice. They may be too proud or too defended or simply uninterested. So, your partner is not able to come back afterwards to address the incident in a reparative way. If they knew how to repair, they’d be saying something like, “I’m sorry I blew up at you …..I was triggered when I said that….I am no longer holding that judgmental story about you.”

When partners don’t repair ruptures like this, fears and paranoid beliefs about each other and the relationship get lodged in what psychologists call, “long-term memory.” These memories are largely unconscious, but they are always in the background, influencing our perceptions and behavior—often creating defensive patterns that become standard operating procedure in the relationship.

If any of this resonates with you personally, you may be the partner who understands the need for emotional literacy about this whole triggering process--the need for each person to take responsibility for their trigger reactions and to look within for the fears underneath these reactions. You may understand this, but your partner may not.

What to Do

What do you do in such a situation? You love this person (most of the time). You are not ready to end the relationship. But your partner keeps blaming you for their reactions. You want this to stop. You want them to stop projecting their childhood unfinished business onto you, or at least to take responsibility for their reactivity soon afterwards.

There are many relationships, and you may be in one of them, where one partner (e.g. you) really does find it easier to take responsibility for your reactions—to own that you have unhealed emotional wounds that can get triggered in your adult relationships. You are able to admit this out loud to your partner and humbly apologize when you act out your trigger. You do not expect that you or your partner will never get triggered. But you do expect that you will both be able to admit to being triggered fairly soon and then: regulate yourself; bring your prefrontal cortex back online; empathize with one another; and reassure your partner that you have let go of your negative projections and your need to assign blame.

It may be true that most people don’t take responsibility for their emotional reactivity. And I don’t think most partners expect this of each other. If you expect this of yourself, but not of the other person, why not? Are you afraid they can’t do it? Do you realize you’re not perfect yourself so it’s unfair to ask this of them? Or did it just never occur to you that this was a reasonable expectation in an adult relationship?

Of course, what you “expect” or ask for in a relationship is a function of what you are willing to tolerate. In my view, it is very acceptable to make a strong request to a partner that they learn about the emotional, brain-based triggering mechanism in humans with the aim of taking responsibility for their trigger reactions rather than projecting blame onto me. If I am in a dating relationship where we are considering whether to be committed partners, now would be the time to ask this of a dating partner.

If I am already in a committed relationship, like a marriage, and my partner is acting out their trigger reactions with no regard for repair, I would suggest we do couples counseling. And if they refused after repeated discussions of the matter, I would go ahead and make an appointment with a counselor, anyway—either for us as a couple or just for myself. Sometimes a couple counselor can help one member of a couple make a good case for couples counseling to your partner. But before hiring a counselor, be sure to interview a number of people to be sure the counselor knows how to work with triggering in the way I have described. The world needs more of us to be versed in this work if we want to (eventually) create a scapegoat-free, conflict-literate society. I think it is time to lovingly call each other out to a higher standard of relating.

Upcoming Events—including a new honesty salon series

To register or get more information for any of these, send me an email expressing your interest to susancampbell99@gmail.com

Honesty Salon on Zoom

Beginning Wednesday, March 25, 2026 and ending May 13, noon-1:30pm PT, I’ll offer an 8-session Honesty Salon Series ($260 per person). An Honesty Salon is a small group experience (8 participants) where we communicate in a way that encourages us to notice and reveal our internal experience (feelings, body sensations, thoughts) as we communicate and listen to others. A prerequisite is having read and digested my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil.

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, 2026, 10am-5pm both days.

Cost: $395 per person

Location: Sebastopol, CA (50 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge).

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the ten truth skills (from my books, Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil). You will learn how to:

• communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

• notice all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate and listen

• get free of these unconscious control patterns

• be aware of how you impact others

• repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

• ask for what you want without being controlling

• heal past trauma and unprocessed pain

• communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

……and much more.

To register or get more information: send me an email at susancampbell99@gmail.com

To see my bio and the scope of my work, visit my website

Free Monthly Group Coaching Webinar

The next free monthly call is Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 10-11am PT. I offer these free one-hour webinars every first-Tuesday of the month. In this one, I will offer my insights in response to the types of issues, concerns, fears, and pains I have been hearing lately from friends and clients. Then, I will open it up to your questions. I plan to make a lot of time for addressing questions, so please bring some. These webinars always involve deep sharing and emotional insight. Here is the recurring Zoom link that I will be using from September 2025 through May 2026: Zoom link

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