It’s Not Just the Trigger: Understanding What Really Raises Relapse Risk
We talk about triggers a lot in recovery. We identify the people, places, situations, emotions and memories that might make us think about drinking, using or returning to an old behaviour. We are encouraged to know our triggers, avoid the obvious one where possible and have a plan for what we will do when they appear.
And that is useful. Understanding your triggers matters. But I think there is another part of the conversation that we sometimes miss: the same trigger does not always affect us in the same way.
You might have a difficult conversation with someone one week and manage it reasonably well. The following week, a similar conversation leaves you furious, overwhelmed, obsessing about what was said and suddenly thinking about drinking or using. The external event may be almost identical, but your response is completely different. So what changed?
Very often, it is not only the trigger we need to understand. We also need to look at how under-resourced we were before the trigger happened.
That distinction can make relapse prevention much more practical, because it moves us away from trying to create a life in which nothing difficult ever happens and towards learning how to recognise when our capacity to deal with difficult things is becoming compromised.
What Is a Trigger?
A trigger is essentially something that activates a reaction. It may be external, such as a person, place, conversation, smell, sound or situation, or internal, such as a thought, emotion, memory or physical sensation.
In my Working with Triggers in Recovery workbook, I explore how triggering can happen incredibly quickly. Something happens, our brain recognises it as significant, dangerous or risky, and before our rational thinking has fully caught up, our body and emotional system may already be responding.
You might notice your jaw tightening, your stomach turning, your breathing becoming shallow or your heart beating faster. You may suddenly become defensive, angry or anxious. Your thoughts might start racing. You may want to escape, attack, shut down, prove yourself, numb what you are feeling or do something immediately to make the discomfort stop.
For someone in recovery, old behaviours can become part of that automatic response. Drinking, using substances, gambling, overeating, acting out or another addictive behaviour may once have provided relief, escape, reward or emotional anaesthetic. When we become highly activated, those old associations can reappear very quickly.
But this is important: being triggered does not mean you are going to relapse.
A trigger is information. It tells you that something has been activated.
What happens next matters.
A Trigger is Only Part of the Picture
I find it helpful to think of a trigger as the event or cue, while vulnerability describes the condition you are in when that event arrives.
Imagine someone criticises something you have done. That criticism may be the trigger. But perhaps you are also exhausted because you slept badly for three nights. You skipped lunch. You have been worrying about money. You have not been to a recovery meeting or spoken honestly with anyone for several days. There has been tension at home, you feel disconnected and your usual routines have started slipping.
Now the criticism lands. The trigger has not arrived on neutral ground. It has landed on top of an already overloaded system. That is very different from receiving the same criticism after a good night's sleep, a decent meal, a supportive conversation, some exercise and a relatively settled day.
This is why focusing only on triggers can sometimes give us an incomplete picture of relapse risk. We can become so busy asking, What triggered me? that we forget to ask, What condition was I in when I got triggered?
Becoming Under-Resourced Often Happens Quietly
Triggers are usually easier to notice because something happens. Feeling under-resourced can be much quieter. It may build gradually through a series of seemingly ordinary things: poor sleep, work pressure, arguments, loneliness, financial stress, not eating properly, boredom, physical illness, resentment, overcommitting yourself, withdrawing from support or simply trying to carry too much for too long.
None of these things automatically causes relapse. But they can reduce the resources you have available when something difficult happens.
The HALTS check-in is particularly useful here. HALTS asks us to stop and consider whether we are:
Hungry
Angry
Lonely
Tired
Sick or Stressed
These are states that can be detrimental to continued recovery and wellness when we become under-resourced in them. I like HALTS because it brings recovery back to something wonderfully practical. Sometimes the situation genuinely is complicated and requires deeper work. At other times, you are trying to solve your entire life at 11 o'clock at night when you are exhausted, hungry, angry and have not spoken to another human being properly all day.
Those are not the same problem.
Before analysing everything, it may be worth eating something, sleeping, connecting with someone, taking a walk, slowing your breathing or giving yourself a little time to settle.
How Triggers and Relapse Risk are Connected
In my experience, relapse risk is rarely as simple as: Trigger → Relapse
There are usually more moving parts.
It may look more like:
Stress + poor sleep + isolation + unresolved resentment + a trigger + an urge + no pause + no support = significantly increased risk.
This is why somebody can encounter something they have previously identified as a major trigger and manage it well on one occasion, yet find themselves struggling badly with something seemingly minor on another. It does not necessarily mean their recovery has suddenly become weaker. It may mean their capacity has changed.
And that gives us somewhere useful to work.
Instead of trying to eliminate every difficult person, uncomfortable emotion or unpredictable event from your life, you can begin strengthening the conditions that make it easier for you to respond well when life inevitably happens.
Sometimes the Obvious Trigger is Only the Top Floor
One of the tools I use is trigger mapping, represented as an elevator shaft.
The idea is that the first reaction we notice is often only the top floor.
Someone criticises you and your immediate reaction might be anger or defensiveness. But when you slow the process down and move through the different "floors", you may discover anxiety underneath the anger, followed by feelings of not being good enough, unworthy, rejected or unlovable.
The external event matters, but the intensity of the reaction may be connected to something deeper.
This does not mean that every irritating conversation requires an excavation of your entire childhood. Sometimes somebody has simply behaved badly and you are understandably annoyed. But when your reaction feels enormously bigger than the event, when you keep replaying it for hours or days, or when it creates a powerful urge to escape or numb yourself, curiosity can be useful.
Instead of asking only, What did that person do to me?, you might ask:
What happened immediately before I became triggered?
What did I feel in my body?
What was my first automatic thought?
What feeling was underneath my anger, defensiveness or urge to escape?
What did the situation seem to mean about me?
Have I experienced this pattern before?
What did I actually need in that moment?
That is very different from blaming yourself for being triggered. It is about understanding your own patterns well enough to create more choice.
Social Situations Can Trigger Us Too
Not every trigger is an obvious cue connected with substance use. Sometimes what activates us is feeling ignored, excluded, controlled, criticised, dismissed or treated unfairly. The workbook introduces the SCARF model, developed by David Rock, as another way of looking at social triggers.
It encourages us to consider whether a situation has threatened our sense of:
Status: Do I feel that my role, competence or value is being questioned?
Certainty: Am I struggling because I do not know what is going to happen?
Autonomy: Do I feel controlled or excluded from decisions affecting me?
Relatedness: Do I feel disconnected, unheard, rejected or left out?
Fairness: Do I believe that I am being treated unfairly?
These questions can be incredibly useful because sometimes we know that we are upset but cannot quite identify why.
Once we understand what feels threatened, it becomes easier to decide what the situation actually requires. Perhaps you need to communicate more clearly, set a boundary, tolerate uncertainty, ask for information, reconnect with somebody or accept that something is outside your control.
Awareness gives you more options than reaction does.
The Most Important Skill may be the Pause
When we are heavily triggered, solving the problem immediately is not always the best first move.
The state-shifting process uses four steps:
Name It – recognise what is happening: I am triggered.
Take the Space Appropriately – pause rather than continuing to react impulsively.
Shift Your State – use tools that help your body and mind return towards balance.
Deal With the Situation – return to the issue when you have greater access to rational thinking and choice.
I particularly like the distinction between reacting and responding.
Taking space does not mean storming out, punishing somebody with silence or avoiding a problem indefinitely. It means recognising that continuing a conversation while you are highly activated may create consequences you later have to repair.
Sometimes a healthy response sounds like, I care about this conversation, but I can feel myself becoming overwhelmed. I need twenty minutes to settle myself and then I would like to come back to it.
That is recovery in action. You are not pretending that you are unaffected. You are learning how to experience difficult emotions without handing them the steering wheel.
Staying Well-Resourced Is Also Relapse Prevention
We understandably put a lot of effort into planning for high-risk situations. We think about what we will do at parties, around alcohol, during conflict, on difficult anniversaries or when cravings appear. But relapse prevention also happens much earlier and in much less dramatic ways.
It happens when you recognise that you are becoming depleted and do something about it before the next trigger arrives.
It may mean:
eating regularly rather than running on caffeine and adrenaline;
protecting your sleep instead of repeatedly pushing yourself beyond exhaustion;
speaking about resentment before it grows;
reaching out when isolation begins creeping in;
maintaining recovery meetings, coaching, therapy or peer support when things are going well, not only when they are falling apart;
creating boundaries around work, relationships and commitments;
moving your body and finding ways to release accumulated stress;
making time for activities that give you connection, pleasure, meaning and rest;
noticing when you have started withdrawing, hiding or telling people that you are "fine" when you are not.
None of these things guarantees that you will never feel triggered. They simply make it more likely that when a trigger arrives, you will have enough internal and external resources available to deal with it.
What if the Urge has Already Arrived?
Sometimes we only recognise our vulnerability once an urge or craving is already present. That does not mean the opportunity to respond has disappeared.
The R.A.I.N. practice is a way of staying with an uncomfortable experience without automatically acting on it:
Recognise and Relax – notice that you are experiencing an urge or craving.
Allow and Accept – acknowledge that the feeling is here rather than fighting with the fact that you are having it.
Investigate – become curious about what is happening in your body, thoughts and emotions.
Note – observe and name the experience so that you can remain present rather than becoming completely caught up in it.
An urge can feel incredibly urgent without actually being an instruction. Recovery involves learning that we can experience discomfort, craving, anger, fear or sadness without immediately needing to make it disappear. The feeling can be real without the old behaviour being necessary.
Ask Two Questions, Not One
The next time you find yourself strongly triggered, I would encourage you not to stop at: What triggered me?
Ask another question: What left me less resourced to deal with that trigger today?
Maybe the answer genuinely is that the situation touched something deeply painful. Maybe there has been a significant loss, rejection or trauma reminder. But perhaps you also discover that you have been working too much, sleeping badly, missing meals, disconnected from support and quietly carrying a resentment for two weeks.
That second question creates opportunities for intervention.
Because while you cannot control every trigger that will cross your path, there are often things you can do to reduce unnecessary vulnerability and increase your ability to cope.
Your Triggers are Information, not Evidence that You are Failing
One of the things I want people to understand about recovery is that becoming well does not mean becoming impossible to upset. You are still going to encounter difficult people. You will still experience disappointment, uncertainty, rejection, grief, frustration and days when life simply feels like too much.
You may still think about drinking or using sometimes. You may experience urges. You may occasionally react in ways you are not particularly proud of.
The measure of recovery is not whether you can prevent yourself from ever being triggered again.
What changes is your ability to recognise what is happening earlier, understand what you need, use the resources available to you and make a different choice before an uncomfortable experience becomes a destructive one.
The goal is not a trigger-free life. It is a life in which triggers have progressively less power to decide what happens next.
Building a More Useful Relapse-Prevention Plan
If your relapse-prevention plan currently contains only a list of triggers, consider expanding it.
Alongside What puts me at risk?, ask yourself:
What are the signs that I am becoming under-resourced?
What happens to my sleep, eating, routines and relationships before I begin struggling?
What are the first signs that I am becoming emotionally overloaded?
When do I start isolating?
What resentments or unresolved situations am I carrying?
Which HALTS states tend to affect me most strongly?
What does my body do when I become triggered?
What helps me shift my state?
Who can I contact before things become a crisis?
What recovery practices tend to disappear first when I am becoming vulnerable?
What can I put back in place now rather than waiting until I am in trouble?
These questions help us move relapse prevention further upstream. We are no longer only asking how to survive the moment when an urge becomes overwhelming. We are learning to notice the conditions that make that overwhelming moment more likely in the first place.
And that is where a great deal of recovery work happens.
Understanding Yourself Gives You More Choice
My Working with Triggers in Recovery workbook explores many of these ideas in more depth, including identifying your individual triggers, mapping the emotions beneath your immediate reactions, recognising the physical signs of being triggered, using HALTS and SCARF to understand vulnerability and social threat, practising state-shifting and using R.A.I.N. to work with urges and cravings.
The purpose of these tools is not to make you endlessly analyse yourself. It is to help you recognise your patterns sooner. Because awareness creates a pause, and that pause creates choice.
The more you understand both what triggers you and what can leave you under-resourced when those triggers arise, the less you have to rely on willpower when things become difficult. Recovery becomes something you actively support rather than something you simply hope will hold.
And perhaps that is one of the most useful changes we can make in relapse prevention: instead of asking only, How do I avoid my triggers?, we begin asking, How do I build a life in which I am better resourced to meet them?
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