3-Pillar Path To Emotional Fitness: Pillar 1 - Learn to Untrigger Yourself
Imagine you’re finally ready to commit to a workout routine. You want to build strength, boost your health, and feel good in your body. You’re motivated, and you’re willing to do the work, but there’s one problem: you’re carrying an old hamstring injury that never fully healed.
It doesn’t always hurt, but it limits what you can do. You can’t run without discomfort. Squats are risky. Jumping, lunging, and dynamic movement feel unstable. And if you push too hard, you know it could flare up and take you out completely.
So you adapt. You avoid lower-body exercises. You focus on what feels safe. You stretch. Ice. Take anti-inflammatories. You’ve built a routine around managing the injury, not healing it.
You tell yourself you’re doing the right thing, and in some ways you are. But no matter how disciplined or consistent you are with the rest of your training, you’re still working around a core limitation. And until that injury is healed, you’re never going to be able to build the kind of full-body fitness you’re aiming for.
You’re not weak. You’re not failing. You’re just stuck — not because you’re not trying hard enough, but because you’re compensating instead of recovering.
This is exactly what it’s like to try to build emotional fitness without knowing how to deal with your emotional triggers.
Most of us carry emotional “injuries” that have created unresolved responses shaped by painful past experiences. These responses get activated automatically in certain situations. They make us feel unsafe, overwhelmed, ashamed, afraid. So we adapt. We avoid what sets them off. We cope through the fallout. We brace ourselves in anticipation of the next flare-up.
We may be working on ourselves. We may even be making real progress. But if we haven’t addressed the emotional injuries we’re carrying, we’re still working around the pain, not healing it.
If we want to build true emotional fitness, not just get by, but grow, connect, and live fully, we need to learn how to untrigger ourselves.
It’s not about powering through. It’s not about managing the symptoms. It’s about resolving the issue at the root so it no longer activates, no longer limits us, and no longer shapes how we move through life.
Once we know how to untrigger ourselves, we stop organizing our lives around our emotional pain and start building from our full strength.
Emotional Fitness Requires the Ability to Confront Reality
At its core, emotional fitness is about being able to confront reality as it is and respond to it in the most positive, constructive, and empowered way possible. It doesn’t mean being unaffected by difficulty. It means remaining in contact with what’s actually happening, staying oriented to what matters, and choosing to engage productively even in the presence of discomfort, uncertainty, or challenge.
At Vivir, we approach emotional fitness as a lifelong capability built on three essential pillars:
Developing the core skill to untrigger ourselves from our past trauma
Maintaining a consistent habitual practice of confronting reality and responding positively
Cultivating self-empowerment in our emotional fitness journey
This section focuses on the first pillar: the ability to untrigger yourself. It is foundational to emotional fitness because we cannot respond clearly or constructively to reality if we are not perceiving reality accurately. And when we’re triggered, that’s exactly what happens. Our perception becomes distorted by emotional responses that no longer fit with our present day reality.
Triggered responses are automatic emotional reactions that activate in the present, but are shaped by unresolved traumas from our past. These responses are often rooted in early experiences of distress, fear, helplessness, or emotional neglect. At the time they were formed, they served a protective function by allowing us to survive in situations in which we lacked the necessary resources to fully handle what was happening. But over time, these responses become disconnected from our current reality. They no longer serve their original purpose, but continue to activate under similar conditions.
In practical terms, this means we may find ourselves reacting to ordinary situations — conversations, conflicts, moments of uncertainty — with disproportionate emotional intensity. The distress we experience is not coming from the present, but from the activation of an emotional association created in the past. It is not a choice. It is a learned, automatic reaction.
This has several immediate consequences:
Perceptual distortion: the current situation is filtered through an outdated emotional lens
Behavioral constraint: actions are driven by emotional reactivity, not deliberate intention
Functional limitation: entire domains of life become difficult to engage with, leading to avoidance, coping, or ongoing distress
In these states, we lose access to perspective. The emotional system overrides reflection and self-direction. This is why unresolved responses are so limiting. They block the core requirement of emotional fitness: the ability to confront reality and respond to it in a calm, productive, and intentional way.
And because these reactions are automatic and emotionally charged, they cannot be resolved through insight alone. Trying harder to stay calm does not change the response. Recognizing that we are triggered does not stop it from activating. If the emotional response has not been updated, it will continue to distort our internal experience and external behavior regardless of how much progress we’ve made in other areas.
This is why the ability to untrigger ourselves is essential. Without it, emotional reactivity continues to interfere with our ability to think clearly, choose freely, and act with intention. And it will continue to do so, even in the presence of daily practices or empowered goals, unless the underlying response is changed.
What It Means to Untrigger Yourself
To untrigger yourself means to update the response so that it no longer activates in the present. This is not a theoretical aspiration; it is a tangible, learnable skill.
At Vivir, we teach a method we’ve developed called Emotional Updating, which is specifically designed to make this transformation possible. The process involves:
Identifying the trigger and the current emotional pattern that activates in response
Using the unconscious mind to trace the emotional response to their origin to understand the situational context in which they were first formed
Reprocessing the responses using internal resources the individual has now, but did not have at the time of the original trauma
Establishing a new response that reflects present-day capacity, perspective, and reality
The result is that the emotional response is updated so your unconscious mind no longer categorizes the situation as dangerous or overwhelming. As a result, the response is no longer activated, not because it’s being managed, but because it’s no longer needed.
The emotional weight that was being carried, sometimes for decades, is gone and we no longer treat the previously triggering situation as threatening, and behavior adapts accordingly. Conversations that once felt impossible become comfortable. Decisions that used to provoke paralysis begin to feel straightforward. The need to avoid or cope disappears.
The ability to untrigger oneself in this way is a structural upgrade in how our emotional system functions.
It enables us to:
Respond to reality as it is, not through the lens of our past trauma
Engage with previously inaccessible areas of life, from conflict and failure to intimacy and uncertainty
Discontinue the use of costly coping mechanisms, because the original pain is no longer present
Untriggering gives us the ability to bring our responses into alignment with present reality. It allows us to treat distress as information: a sign that something in our system is outdated and can be resolved. This is not about managing symptoms. It is about ending the need for management by addressing the emotional distress at its source.
It is also what makes emotional fitness sustainable. Because as we change, and as life continues to change, our emotional system will continue to encounter situations that require adjustment. If we do not have the ability to update our responses, we will remain vulnerable to outdated reactions and will be forced to work around them indefinitely.
Untriggering removes that limitation. It restores our ability to see clearly, choose deliberately, and engage with life from the full range of who we are, not from the residue of who we used to be.
This is the foundation of emotional fitness. Untriggering is not a workaround. It is the work. It is what allows us to stop compensating for our pain and begin actually moving forward.
What Happens When Emotional Responses Aren’t Updated
When unresolved emotional responses remain in place, we begin to adapt around them. These adaptations often appear functional, but underneath, they are built on avoidance, suppression, and unaddressed pain.
We refer to this as the Avoid–Cope–Suffer cycle.
1. Avoidance
Avoidance begins as a way to reduce exposure to distress. When certain situations consistently trigger distress we begin to withdraw from them. We stop engaging. We keep things safe, predictable, and under control.
Over time, this becomes a pattern. We shape our lives around minimizing exposure to triggering situations. Certain conversations don’t happen. Certain opportunities aren’t pursued. Certain parts of ourselves stay hidden.
In the short term, this can feel stabilizing. But the cost is high. Our world gets smaller. We trade growth, connection, and possibility for safety and self-protection. And all the while, the original emotional response remains unchanged, waiting to be reactivated the moment avoidance fails.
2. Coping
When avoidance fails, most people move to coping strategies to manage distress without resolving its cause.
Coping can take many forms: substance use/abuse, eating disorders, perfectionism, distraction, overworking, compulsive behavior, even achievement. These mechanisms often pass as personality traits. But they share a common structure: internal discomfort is numbed, redirected, or suppressed by external behavior.
Over time, coping becomes exhausting. It requires constant effort. And the deeper the unresolved pain, the more intense and often destructive the coping strategies tend to be.
Crucially, coping doesn’t reduce the emotional response. It only manages its effects. People may come to believe that these strategies are part of who they are, when in reality, they are adaptations to unhealed emotional wounds.
3. Suffering
When neither avoidance nor coping can contain the response, suffering becomes the default. Each time the response is triggered, we re-experiences the same distress we felt when it first formed. Even years later, it comes back with the same intensity, because the emotional response hasn’t changed.
Unfortunately this suffering isn’t limited to the triggered moments. It also includes the ongoing tension of waiting for the next activation. Many people live in a state of quiet vigilance managing their environments, their choices, and even their self-expression to minimize the risk of being triggered. Over time, this constant bracing erodes our quality of life.
The pain becomes part of the background. It’s not just something that happens, it becomes something we live with.
The Avoid–Cope–Suffer cycle persists for a simple reason: most people do not know they can update their emotional responses. They know how to manage symptoms. They know how to avoid. They may have years of experience with various forms of therapy, reflection, or personal growth work. But few are ever taught how to change the emotional response itself.
This is the gap that the Emotional Updating technique addresses.
By directly transforming the original response, we are no longer subject to the painful triggers that drive the cycle. Breaking this cycle is not easy, but it is possible. And it doesn’t happen by doubling down on coping or mastering new avoidance techniques. It happens by going to the root and resolving what’s there.
Empowerment through skill development
The ability to respond constructively to reality depends on the quality of our emotional responses. When those responses are current — meaning they reflect present-day context, capacity, and perspective — they support clarity, agency, and adaptability. They help us interpret situations accurately and take action in ways that align with our goals and values.
But when those responses are shaped by unresolved pain, they distort perception, restrict choice, and initiate patterns of behavior that are not chosen, but triggered. In these moments, we are not confronting what is happening. We are reacting to something that already happened, and doing so as if it is still ongoing.
This is what makes the ability to untrigger oneself foundational. It is not just one technique among many. It is the core skill that determines whether we are responding to reality, or being governed by emotional residues of the past.
Without this capability in place:
We’re not engaging with the present — we are responding to historical emotional patterns.
The behavior is not deliberate — it is being driven by associations that were formed under earlier conditions.
We may appear functional — but unresolved distress continues to shape our experience and responses beneath the surface.
When an emotional response is updated, the shift is immediate and complete:
The emotional distress that previously activated is no longer present.
The need for avoidance or coping strategies is eliminated.
The specific pattern of distress does not return in future exposures.
This is not a temporary improvement or an act of self-regulation. It is a structural change, a permanent update to the emotional response itself. The internal conditions that once generated suffering no longer do so. What had to be managed is no longer active. What once felt unmanageable becomes unremarkable.
The ability to untrigger ourselves is not abstract. It’s a skill that can be learned, practiced, and applied across a lifetime. Once we understand how to do it, we can use the same process to update any emotional response that no longer reflects who we are or the reality we’re living in.
This matters because our emotional responses are not fixed. They are shaped by experience. And as we change, and as the world around us changes, our responses will sometimes fall out of sync. That’s not a personal failure, it’s part of being human. But it means we need a way to keep those responses current. Untriggering gives us that ability.
This is why it’s foundational. Emotional fitness isn’t about reaching a final state. It’s about having the ability to adapt and stay clear, grounded, and aligned as life continues to evolve. Without a way to update our responses, we stay locked in patterns that no longer fit, no matter how much other work we’re doing.
Just as importantly, this skill gives us a way to work with emotional distress instead of just suffering through it. When we notice a reaction that feels out of proportion we don’t have to ignore it, manage it, or spiral into it. We can use it as a signal: this response is outdated. And that means we can do something about it.
There’s no need for a separate strategy for each emotion. The tool to address it is the same. Once we recognize that a response is no longer serving its original purpose, we can update it. And once it’s updated, it no longer activates.
This process can be learned and used independently. We don’t need to be defined by the emotional patterns we developed under earlier conditions of stress, pain, or fear. If a response doesn’t reflect our present-day reality, we can change it.
This is the core of the first pillar for developing emotional fitness. And it’s what makes emotional fitness a sustainable, lifelong practice.
