Implicit Triggers and the Dynamics of Unconscious Coping in Intimate Relations, Corporate Settings and Therapeutic Spaces

"An examination of how unrecognised emotional activations shape interpersonal decision-making, and the subtle behavioural adaptations that sustain performance while concealing underlying states."

by Anil Kurian Thomas | NLP Trainer & Gestalt Practitioner

Framing the Unseen

In Friends, there is a recurring scene where Ross insists, “I’m fine,” while clearly being anything but fine. The humour works because the audience perceives the dissonance, the smile slightly too wide, the voice pitched just a little too high, the wine being poured with unnecessary enthusiasm. Ross is not lying, he is performing a version of himself that feels acceptable to present. Beneath the comedic rhythm lies a recognisable reality, maintaining an appearance of steadiness while something internal is tightening, shifting, or threatening to break apart. Understanding psychotherapy’s concept and practices through high-stakes conversations in intimate spaces and corporate settings, this is not a punchline but an ongoing, lived negotiation. It is the process of sustaining an image of composure while internal processes quietly determine what is said, avoided, or revealed. These pivotal decisions are often made before conscious awareness engages. From a neurobiological perspective, the body’s appraisal of safety or threat precedes verbal thought by milliseconds (LeDoux, 1996), meaning that by the time language emerges, the autonomic nervous system has frequently already committed to a stance, to lean in, hold back, divert, or defend.While much literature on emotional triggers examines conscious recognition and overt behavioural responses, emerging interdisciplinary research highlights the importance of implicit, covert activation patterns that shape interaction before awareness is available. Affective neuroscience has shown that the amygdala and associated limbic structures can initiate defensive responses faster than cortical regulation can intervene (LeDoux, 1996; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010). In psychotherapy, transference is well documented as the unconscious redirection of earlier relational patterns into current contexts (Gelso & Hayes, 2007), yet its micro-level expressions, in tone, pacing, or micro-expressions, remain under-analysed. Polyvagal theory adds a physiological dimension, demonstrating how shifts in autonomic state can occur without conscious detection, shaping the quality and safety of social engagement (Porges, 2011). This article advances that discourse by integrating NLP’s CRASH model of state collapse with these established theoretical frameworks, examining how professionals across clinical and organisational contexts may unknowingly operate from contaminated states while outwardly appearing composed. It seeks to connect empirical research with applied relational practice, offering both a conceptual lens and practical strategies for recognising and recalibrating these micro-moments of implicit reactivity.

The Unseen Mechanics of Being TriggeredIt begins quietly, often without visible disruption. A meeting runs on schedule, the business partner asks an ordinary question, a client pauses mid-sentence. On the surface everything appears coherent, even professional. Yet beneath that surface, an implicit activation has already begun. The neuroception of threat described in polyvagal theory is not always accompanied by raised voices or visible agitation. Sometimes it is a tightening in the chest, a narrowing of peripheral vision, or a barely perceptible shift in posture. What appears to others as composure, in this case, could be, in fact, a CRASH state, a cluster of contracted physiology, reactive thinking, anxiety, shame, and hostility, maintained behind the mask of functional performance (Delozier & Grinder, 1987; Porges, 2011). This is the paradox of being triggered, the event is rarely proportionate to the inner experience. A harmless question about a project timeline can feel like an interrogation or in another case, a moment of silence in a therapy session could feel like abandonment. These responses do not arise from the present moment alone; they are anachronistic presence from earlier experiences. As one of my teacher, Steve shared, “almost eight out of ten behaviours we enact are responses to something implicit inside of us and not to what is actually happening in front of us.” These behaviours are often shaped by transference, where unresolved emotional patterns from earlier relationships are projected onto current interactions (Gelso & Hayes, 2007).

Consider the client who feels instantly defensive when his partner asks, “Where were you?” From her perspective, the question is an anchor, her way to establish communication and safety, and from his perspective, the words carry trails from childhood experiences, when his competence was questioned by teachers and his trustworthiness was doubted by a mother who deferred to an elder sibling. In his nerology, the partner’s present-day curiosity fuses with the past authority’s suspicion, producing what feels like a competence wound or a trust issue. This is not a matter of conscious choice. The trigger is a time collapse, past and present overlaid into a single reaction. Similar dynamics unfold when a senior executive interprets a team member’s clarifying question as a challenge to their authority. The words may be neutral, yet past experiences of being second-guessed by former boards or mentors unconsciously colour the response. When these overlays occur, the strategies we deploy to manage them are often invisible to us. We might criticise, moralise, rescue, or reward as if we are acting in the service of the other person, while actually working to soothe or defend something in ourselves. An interpersonal neurobiology perspective would suggest that these patterns emerge because implicit memory operates without temporal markers; the brain does not automatically distinguish between “then” and “now” when similar emotional cues are present (Siegel, 2020). This is why the same set of questions from a team member can feel like collaboration one week and like surveillance the next, depending on the state of our own nervous system. A deeper challenge lies in the fact that much of professional culture, including corporate leadership and even therapeutic practices sometimes, rewards the outward appearance of control. It is possible to be in a CRASH state while delivering a flawless presentation or facilitating a therapy session with calm, modulated tones. The external performance hides the internal fragmentation, and without reflective practice, the fragmentation begins to shape the session, the meeting, or the relationship.

“Implicit relational knowing refers to a form of procedural knowledge that is not accessible to conscious verbal recall, yet is expressed in patterns of being with others.”(Stern et al., 1998, p. 905)In other words, the way we sit, breathe, gesture, and respond in micro-moments carries the sediment of earlier experiences into present relationships. These patterns do not require conscious intention to operate; they emerge automatically, like reflexes shaped over years of repeated encounters. Such knowing can preserve trust and connection when attuned, but it can also perpetuate cycles of misattunement when left unexamined. This is why the same phrase can land as warmth or as threat depending not only on the words but on the state from which they are spoken.

The beginning of any transformation in this terrain is not in suppressing the trigger but in learning to recognise the moment of shift, the subtle pivot where presence gives way to defence. For some, it is the internal tightening when a colleague challenges a decision. For others, it is the flood of ideas to “fix” a client’s discomfort before they have finished speaking. In both cases, the reaction is less about the person in front of us and more about the relationship we have with our own unprocessed affect.

What follows the moment of being triggered is rarely neutral. The nervous system, seeking equilibrium, reaches for whatever has worked before, whether or not it serves the present relationship. These coping strategies often masquerade as professional skill or personal discernment. Yet beneath the polished delivery lies the same implicit, unacknowledged transaction, “I am managing you so I do not have to feel what is moving inside me”. One of the most enduring strategies is the subtle mirroring-avoidance loop. When a client’s grief or rage starts to swell, we may interpret it as “too much.” In truth, it is not their emotion that overwhelms us, but the recognition that it is the very emotion we have kept under lock within ourselves. A therapist may call it “holding space” while every muscle in the body is bracing. In leadership contexts, the same occurs when a team member’s frustration awakens our own buried anger at former superiors. The professional mask remains, but the hands grip the edges of the chair as if to keep the room from tilting. In other moments, the strategy takes the form of over-identifying with transformation. The quiet integration phase of a client’s process can be intolerable if our sense of worth is tethered to visible breakthroughs. When nothing dramatic happens, we may panic, not because the client is stuck, but because the saviour complex is gasping for air. In corporate teams, this shows up as relentless “value-adding” even when the best contribution would be to step back and let a process unfold without intervention.

A related manoeuvre is the weaponisation of language to displace conflict. Spiritual or psychological vocabulary becomes a shield rather than a bridge: “I’m sensing heaviness in your energy” may sound empathic, yet it can be the therapist’s own tension, refracted through the lens of authority. In workplaces, team-leaders sometimes invoke cultural buzzwords, “Let’s stay positive”, “This is about alignment”, as a way to silence dissent rather than face the discomfort of divergent views. The bypass is elegant, but its cost is intimacy. Avoidance can also disguise itself as gentleness. Choosing a “softer track” in a session can be an act of genuine care, or it can be an unconscious detour away from emotions we ourselves cannot tolerate. We tell ourselves we are protecting the other person, when in truth we are protecting our own nervous system from the charge of contact. In corporate life, this manifests as consistently sidestepping difficult conversations under the banner of “maintaining morale,” slowly eroding trust by never naming the unsaid. At the other extreme lies addiction to catharsis. In therapy, the visible drama of tears, tremors, or heated exchanges can feel like proof of transformation. Yet as trauma literature cautions, unintegrated catharsis may simply re-enact the wound without resolving it (van der Kolk, 2014). In boardrooms, this same fixation on intensity can look like crisis-chasing, a preference for high-stakes interventions that create visible shifts but neglect the slower work of systemic repair. Perhaps the most insidious strategy is when personal triggers steer the direction of the interaction under the guise of “intuition.” An idea surfaces to shift the conversation, and we follow it unquestioningly, unaware that what we are truly following is the gravitational pull of our own history. Attachment research reminds us that such unconscious enactments are inevitable unless brought into awareness, because early relational patterns are encoded as procedural knowledge, not explicit memory (Hughes et al., 2012). Silence, too, can become a mirror of our unprocessed states. If our own nervous system cannot rest in stillness, a quiet session may feel empty, even threatening. We rush to fill the space with activity or words, equating movement with progress. Yet in both therapy and leadership, the ability to inhabit the void without urgency is often where the deepest integrations occur. The discomfort is not that “nothing is happening”, it is that what is happening does not feed the ego’s hunger for visible evidence. There are also the pre-emptive selections we make, gravitating toward “safe” clients, collaborators, or team members who will not challenge us, and calling it “energetic compatibility.” While discernment is valuable, the line between discernment and avoidance is drawn at the point where growth requires friction. Choosing safety every time is a way of keeping the psyche’s unexamined corners undisturbed. Finally, there is the bypass hidden in absolute truth-telling. Declaring “I’m just being honest” when another is hurt allows us to dissolve accountability for our words under the banner of authenticity. In practice, this is less about truth and more about preserving the self-image of “speaking openly” without engaging in the vulnerability of repair. As philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) notes in her work on epistemic injustice, speech carries ethical weight; to speak truth without considering its relational impact is to privilege expression over connection.

“Countertransference is not merely an obstacle to be eliminated, but a potential source of information about the patient’s world. The therapist’s feelings, when recognised and understood, can guide the therapeutic process in ways that purely technical interventions cannot.”(Gelso & Hayes, 2007, p. 45)This understanding reframes our covert strategies, they are not flaws to eradicate, instead they are signposts pointing to where our own histories are pressing into the present. In the corporate arena, this parallels the idea that the leader’s discomfort in certain conversations is not a sign of incompetence, but an indicator of where organisational history and personal history intersect. When unexamined, these strategies create a closed loop, the trigger prompts a coping behaviour, the behaviour reinforces the avoidance of the trigger, and the underlying pattern remains untouched. The task, then, is not to strip away all defences, but to develop the capacity to notice when the steering wheel is no longer in the hands of the present self.

Advancing Awareness Toward Relational Choice

The first shift is not behavioural but somatic. Before the impulse to correct, explain, or protect, there is a half-second of physiological data, a quickened breath, the jaw’s subtle tightening, a micro-withdrawal of the eyes. In interpersonal neurobiology, this is the body’s early warning system, a non-verbal marker that the past is leaning in on the present (Siegel, 2020). Noticing it is not a passive act. It is a reorientation toward what is happening inside before deciding what to do outside. Awareness at this level interrupts the time collapse between past and present. When a colleague’s tone sparks the memory of a critical parent, the nervous system no longer has to choose between overreaction and suppression. Instead, it can move into co-regulation, finding ground in breath, posture, and the actual relational cues of the moment. This requires what somatic psychotherapists describe as “dual awareness”, the capacity to hold the current interaction and the internal echo side by side without fusing them (Ogden et al., 2006).

The practice of naming without collapsing can anchor these moments. Naming is not the same as explaining; it is neither defensive justification nor a prelude to control. It is a statement of shared reality, grounded in verbal empathy, the act of both seeing and saying what you see. A therapist might say, “I notice I’m feeling a pull to change direction right now, I want to check what’s happening for you,” or, “I noticed your breath just became a little slower and deeper; I imagine this might be an important topic for you.” A manager might say, “I sense I’m bracing a little in this conversation, let’s slow down so I can really hear you,” or, “I can see this subject matters to you; let’s make space for it.” Such acknowledgements combine observation with recognition, creating a bridge between internal awareness and shared dialogue. They model transparency, validate the other’s experience, and disrupt the autopilot of reactive coping, allowing both parties to remain present enough to work with what is actually unfolding. Where this practice deepens is in recalibrating what safety means. If safety is only the absence of discomfort, we will continually arrange relationships to avoid stretch. But when safety includes the capacity to remain in contact during discomfort, the relational field expands. Here, the therapeutic stance aligns with systems leadership: both require building an emotional window of tolerance wide enough to hold tension without forcing premature resolution. This is where stillness takes on a new role. In the earlier patterning, stillness felt like absence, emptiness, even threat. In relational presence, stillness becomes fertile ground. Silence in a session is no longer a void to fill but a medium in which the other’s meaning can emerge without intrusion. In offices or high stake situations, this stillness could be the pause before responding to a provocative question, a pause that signals not hesitation but depth of consideration.

“In moments of shared stillness, what is communicated is not information but the willingness to be with what is, without the immediate imposition of change. This creates a space in which transformation can occur without force.”

(Schmid, 2008, p. 152)

This movement from reaction to presence is not linear. The same triggers return, but the structure of response changes. Instead of automatic coping strategies, there is a widening repertoire: pausing before rescue, staying open in the face of conflict, choosing to hear what challenges without needing to win. The nervous system learns that it can survive discomfort without collapsing into old roles. The long-term effect is cumulative. Interactions once shaped by implicit reenactments become sites of conscious choice. A partner’s question is no longer conflated with a parent’s suspicion. A colleague’s disagreement is not a referendum on competence. Each trigger becomes an opportunity to metabolise rather than recycle. Over time, this integration strengthens both professional capacity and relational depth.

The work is not to banish the parts of us that still want to criticise, rescue, or moralise. It is to recognise them as signals, as reminders of the histories they carry. As Gelso and Hayes (2007) remind us, countertransference, when understood, is a map, not a detour, to the territory of the other. And in this shared territory, the aim is no longer to control the outcome but to remain in contact with the process, trusting that the relationship can bear the weight of what emerges.

In Closing

The movement from unconscious reactivity into conscious relational presence is not achieved by dismantling every defence at once. It begins with awareness, a calibration so subtle it feels less like a decision and more like an attunement. Step one is recognising, in real time, that your state is becoming contaminated by history or implicit bias. This is not about diagnosing pathology; it is about feeling the shift from grounded responsiveness into the contracted urgency of a CRASH state, noticing the micro-tells in breath, muscle tone, or inner narrative. Without this calibration, everything that follows is guesswork. Step two is entering the choice point: the small interval between trigger and action where slowing down, pausing, breathing, and connecting inward become possible. Here, the work is not to retreat from the world, but to re-enter it with the nervous system regulated enough to discern reality from reenactment. This is also where inquiry begins, does the client, colleague, or partner in front of you actually have choice points of their own, or are they caught in a behavioural loop that offers no alternatives? Step three is the deployment of behavioural flexibility. If awareness and choice have opened, this is where you act differently, testing the possibility that a new response might reshape the context itself. The supports are many, therapy, reading, physical exercise, meditation, movement, dance, but these are means, not ends. The real question is not what might help, but whether you are conscious enough to notice the spiral before it completes. If the answer is yes, the next is whether you can generate alternative ways of meeting the same stimulus. And if that too is yes, the final one is this, when the moment arrives, do you reach for the new response, or do you let the old one speak for you again?

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