Triggered? Absorbing Other People’s Energy? Here’s What You Need to Know
Have you ever walked into a room feeling totally fine and then when you left, you felt tense, irritated, or emotionally “off,” without knowing why?
Or maybe you’ve been around someone who was anxious, reactive, or just generally charged and even though they didn’t do anything dramatic, your body felt like it absorbed the whole interaction.
Suddenly you’re overthinking. Your shoulders are tight. Your patience is thin. You feel like your nervous system is buzzing. And the worst part is, you can’t always explain it logically.
That kind of experience is called co-regulation.
Co-regulation is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want emotional freedom, because it explains why you can be doing everything “right,” and still feel like the people around you are pulling you out of yourself.
But it also reveals a deeper truth around why your growth work matters not just for you, but for every relationship you touch.
What Nervous System Dysregulation Actually Means
When your nervous system is regulated, you can still feel emotions, but you’re not being controlled by them. You can think clearly. You can communicate with nuance. You can stay connected to yourself, even when something is uncomfortable.
When you become dysregulated, your nervous system shifts into protection mode. Your body starts responding as if there’s danger, whether the danger is real, imagined, or emotional. It’s physiological, automatic, and it happens faster than your conscious mind can catch up.
Dysregulation typically shows up in two broad categories: your system goes into high activation (fight/flight) or shutdown (freeze/collapse). In either case, your body is trying to keep you safe, even if the threat is relational, subtle, or entirely internal.
Once you understand that, it becomes much easier to stop judging yourself for what your system does under stress, and start getting curious about what it’s responding to.
How Dysregulation Feels in Daily Life
Sometimes dysregulation is obvious like panic, rage, or spiraling thoughts. But other times it’s subtle and you don’t always notice the trigger itself. What you notice is the wave that hits afterward.
You might experience symptoms like:
racing heart, tight chest, shallow breathing
a rush of adrenaline or internal agitation
sudden irritability or anger that feels bigger than the moment
numbness, heaviness, disconnection
brain fog, blankness, difficulty speaking
a strong urge to flee, avoid, or shut down
sudden catastrophizing (“this is going to ruin everything”)
people-pleasing or over-explaining as a reflex
impulsive coping behaviors that soothe short-term but hurt long-term (doom scrolling, binge eating, etc.)
These symptoms aren’t evidence of weakness or a personality flaw, it’s just your nervous system responding exactly the way it was conditioned to respond. In a world where you’re constantly interacting with other people’s emotional states, it makes sense that your system might get pulled off center more easily than you realize. Which brings us to the real heart of the topic.
The Power of Nervous System Co-Regulation
Co-regulation means that human nervous systems naturally influence each other. We subconsciously track facial expression, tone of voice, micro-shifts in mood, body language, emotional tension, and even pacing. Then our nervous system adjusts in response.
This starts in infancy. Babies literally rely on a caregiver’s nervous system to learn how to regulate. A calm, steady caregiver becomes the baby’s anchor through voice, eye contact, touch, rhythm, and presence. But if the caregiver is chronically dysregulated, the baby has to adapt to that emotional environment. Over time, this shapes how the child learns to feel safe, soothe themselves, and relate to others.
This is part of why early relational experiences matter so much. Not because we need to endlessly blame our parents, but because nervous system conditioning is relational at its root.
This doesn’t stop when we grow up. Adults co-regulate constantly at work, in friendships, within families, and especially in romantic relationships.
Once you understand co-regulation, you start noticing it everywhere. You’ll suddenly see how emotional charge moves through a room. How one person’s stress becomes everyone’s stress. How tension spreads and how calm spreads too.
Romantic relationships are where this becomes impossible to ignore.
Co-Regulation in Romantic Relationships
In romantic relationships, co-regulation becomes unavoidable. You’re close. You’re emotionally invested. You’re exposed to each other’s rhythms, stress responses, attachment patterns, emotional history, and fear responses.
That’s why you can be in one relationship and feel surprisingly calm and grounded because the dynamic doesn’t activate you the same way. Then you can enter another relationship and feel like you’ve suddenly lost your progress because you feel more anxious, more reactive, or more unsure of yourself.
But the reality is, you didn’t lose your progress. You entered a relational dynamic that activates different parts of your unconscious wiring.
This is where people misinterpret what’s happening and assume the answer must be something extreme and either “this person is the problem” or “I’m the problem.”
But co-regulation offers the more accurate lens that your nervous system is responding to a relational dynamic within an emotional ecosystem, and that ecosystem is revealing what still has charge inside you.
To really understand that, we have to talk about triggers.
Triggers: How the Past Gets Re-Activated in the Present
A trigger is essentially your system saying, “This feels like that.”
Something happened in your past that was emotionally overwhelming, unsafe, confusing, destabilizing and your unconscious mind recorded it, not just as a memory, but as a reference point not unlike a blueprint. It creates a template for what danger looks like, what safety costs, and what you need to do to protect yourself and it doesn’t stop with one moment.
The unconscious mind stores the root cause event and every moment afterward that reinforces it. It keeps track of patterns, emotional outcomes, power dynamics, and survival strategies. In a way, it builds a personal “rulebook” based on what you’ve lived through, especially the experiences that carried the most emotional charge.
So when a present moment contains a similar cue such as a particular tone, energy, facial expression, silence, tension, or even general unpredictability, your body responds as if the original event is happening again. Stress hormones surge. Your survival response activates. Suddenly, the moment isn’t just the moment anymore, it’s history replaying itself through your physiology.
That’s why triggers can feel irrational. You might know the current situation doesn’t warrant that level of reaction, but your body isn’t responding to logic, it’s responding to unconscious programming.
And once survival mode is activated, it becomes incredibly difficult to access the part of you that thinks clearly, speaks wisely, or chooses intentionally.
Which is exactly why trying to logic your way out of dysregulation doesn’t work.
Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Dysregulation
When you’re dysregulated, you lose access to your full cognitive capacity. This is why you can “know better” and still not “do better.”
You might intellectually understand what the healthy response is, but in survival mode, your brain prioritizes protection instead of logic or wisdom. It’s not focused on connection, nuance, emotional intelligence, or higher-level decision making. It’s focused on one thing, which is getting you out of perceived danger.
That’s why dysregulation can make you:
say things you don’t mean
shut down mid-conversation
push someone away to feel safer
cling or over-explain to regain security
numb out to avoid discomfort
reach for short-term soothing that creates long-term consequences
This is also why someone can look back later and say, “Why did I react like that?” Because the part of you responding wasn’t your grounded self. It was your survival system, and if you’ve ever been caught in the loop of reacting and regretting, you already know how exhausting that becomes. So the real question is, what do we do about it?
The Real Goal: Becoming Unshakeable (Not Avoiding Triggers Forever)
The goal isn’t to live in some fantasy where you’re never affected by anything. You’re human. Life will always bring stress. People will always have moods. Conflict, disappointment, and grief happens.
The goal is in building the capacity to stay regulated enough to remain centered within yourself, even inside hard moments.
That’s what emotional freedom actually is. Without that capacity, you end up unconsciously matching the emotional state around you. But with it, you become steady. You stop being pulled out of your center so easily.
This is how you can be around someone who’s anxious or reactive without becoming anxious or reactive.
This is how you can maintain clarity even in a chaotic emotional environment, because your system isn’t depending on the outside world to decide whether you’re safe.
And that’s the kind of inner power that changes everything. But to get there, it’s important to understand that nervous system work alone is not the full picture.
Why Nervous System Work Alone Isn’t Enough
Co-regulation explains the physiology, but it doesn’t explain the entire pattern.
Because under dysregulation, there’s usually something deeper such as repressed emotions, inherited conditioning, attachment wounds, and unconscious default programming.
Nervous system tools can absolutely help you calm down in the moment. They can help your body come back online. They can interrupt spirals and create relief.
But if you want lasting change, you also have to resolve what’s underneath the trigger so that the trigger doesn’t keep activating the same response over and over again.
This is where deep unconscious work becomes essential. You’re not just trying to “manage” yourself better, you’re updating the internal programming that decides what feels threatening in the first place. Once that internal coding starts shifting, your whole experience of life changes too.
What Changes When You Do the Work
When you do the deeper work like unconscious reprogramming, conscious reframing, and nervous system regulation, something starts to shift that clients always describe in the same way:
They don’t feel like they’re forcing themselves to respond better. They feel like the trigger has less emotional charge and power.
The same situations still happen, but they land differently. They don’t hijack you. They don’t send you into spirals. You can feel your feelings without being dragged around by them.
Now, you become the one setting the tone in your internal world, regardless of what’s happening externally. When enough people do this work, the energy in families, friendships, relationships, and communities shifts. Not because everyone is perfect, but because fewer people are unconsciously leaking pain onto each other.
If This Resonates, Here’s What to Do Next
Start paying attention to the moments where you feel pulled out of yourself. Not with judgment or self-criticism, but with awareness.
Notice what dysregulation feels like in your body. What kinds of environments, people, or dynamics tend to activate you and what your system does to protect you when it feels unsafe. Those patterns are invitations to go deeper.
The more you understand how your nervous system responds, how your unconscious mind stores emotional blueprints, and how co-regulation affects your relationships, the more power you reclaim in your everyday life.
If you’re ready to create lasting behavioral change and actually shift the programming underneath your triggers, I’d love to support you.
Book a Discovery Call, and we’ll explore what your nervous system has been responding to, what your unconscious mind has been protecting you from, and what it would look like to become steady enough inside yourself that no external environment gets to decide who you are.