25 Common Emotional Triggers in Relationships — and How to Manage Them

Relationship triggers are common, even if your attachment style is generally secure. This is because only some people are 100% secure and often have secondary attachment styles that can be triggered.

That's the focus of today's blog - emotional triggers: what they are, the most common ones in relationships, and how you can manage them.

What are Emotional Triggers?

Emotional triggers (also known as mental health triggers) are when things, including everything from memories to people, activate negative emotions that rise to the surface.

The emotional change can be swift and out of nowhere. Hence, why it's "triggered" by the thing.

In regards to relationships, we often have an intense emotional reaction to something our partner says or does.

According to Integrated Attachment Theory™, the things that trigger us in relationships are based on core wounds.

Once you identify your triggers based on the list below, it’s important to do the work and dig deeper to better understand why it triggers you and how you can heal.

With all that in mind, here are the top 25 emotional triggers and relationships—and what you can do to relieve yourself of them.

25 Emotional Triggers in Relationships

1. Jealousy, or feelings of insecurity or envy in response to perceived threats to the relationship.
2. Insecurity, or doubts about one's self-worth or the relationship's stability.
3. Lack of communication, or an inability to emotionally express oneself.
4. Infidelity, or discovering or suspecting that a partner has been unfaithful. In many cases, this is a deal breaker.
5. Dishonesty, or eroded trust, is when one partner is not truthful with the other.
6. Neglect, or feeling ignored or neglected by a partner.
7. Control issues, or one partner’s attempt to control or manipulate the other person
8. Past trauma, or unresolved trauma from past relationships and experiences that resurface and affect the current relationship.
9. Financial stress, money problems, and financial disagreements create tension and anxiety.
10. Family interference or issues with in-laws or extended family.
11. Different values or clashes in fundamental values and beliefs.
12. Criticism, or constant negative feedback.
13. Lack of intimacy, or a lack of physical or emotional closeness.
14. Incompatibility, or feeling you have fundamental differences in interests or life goals.
15. Work-life balance, or struggles to balance our job responsibilities and our personal lives.
16. Inequality, or feeling that the relationship is unequal in terms of effort or contribution.
17. Fear of abandonment, anxiety, or worry about being left by our partner.
18. Anger management, or difficulty managing anger and frequent outbursts that strain a relationship.
19. Emotional baggage, or carrying unresolved emotional issues from the past.
20. Lack of appreciation, or feeling unappreciated or taken for granted by a partner.
21. Different expectations or misaligned expectations for the relationship's future.
22. Personal space, or feeling smothered or not having enough personal space (you need boundaries for yourself).
23. Betrayal, or discovering that a trust has been broken.
24. Inflexibility, or an unwillingness to compromise or adapt to changing circumstances.
25. Stress, or high levels of relationship or life-related stress.

What to Do About Emotional Triggers

Here’s what you can do if you find that emotional triggers consistently impact your relationship.

Address your core wounds. The absolute best thing you can do to deal with emotional triggers is to identify your core wounds and begin to heal from them. Core wounds are ideas we have about ourselves that formed in childhood as a result of trauma. It can include beliefs like “I’m not good enough” or “I will be rejected.”

Once your core wounds are healed, emotional triggers will be a lot less likely to surface in your relationship. You can begin that journey with The Personal Development School’s course, Guided Processes to Reprogram Core Wounds.

Open the lines of communication about emotional triggers. Honesty in relationships is incredibly important, and this is certainly true when it comes to managing emotional triggers.

Open up the lines of communication with your partner about past traumas that may be triggering for you: If a parent constantly criticized you, for example, you may feel very triggered by the slightest hint of criticism or lack of appreciation from your partner.

If that’s the case, let them know—that will help them do their best to avoid this particular trigger or understand why you might react in certain ways.

Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is crucial when it comes to managing triggers. While meditation can be a part of mindfulness, that’s not all there is to it.

Mindfulness also means gaining a greater understanding of why certain things are triggering for you (often, they’re rooted in childhood traumas) and working to stay in the present moment.

Work toward changing your attachment style.

One of the absolute best ways to manage relationship triggers is to work toward changing your attachment style. Often, these triggers are based on an insecure attachment style. Maybe you have a fearful avoidant attachment style, an anxious preoccupied attachment style, or a dismissive attachment style.

Each attachment style deals with different triggers, but developing a more secure attachment style can help tremendously. You just have to know what your attachment style is, so take our free quiz to find out.

Hit the pause button. Sometimes, managing an emotional trigger in a relationship is as simple as pausing to take a breath. When you do this, it becomes easier to step back and understand why you’re so triggered—is it actually the person’s behavior, or is it a past trauma bringing something up for you?

Taking a beat instead of immediately reacting can be positive for both your own mental health and the health of your relationship.

Let yourself laugh. Don’t forget to laugh at yourself once in a while, too. While trauma is certainly nothing to ignore, if you find yourself having an outsize reaction (either internally or externally) to something your partner does, stepping back, taking a deep breath and even allowing yourself to laugh can bring so much lightness to a difficult situation. Your partner will probably appreciate it, too!

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