THE COMBAT MANUAL

Rehearsing Away Your Triggers

Taught by John Lenhart  |  flowcess.com

There are two almond-shaped neurostructures in your brain called the amygdalae. One is an amygdala. Two or more are amygdalae. And the single best way to understand what they actually are is this: imagine a person sitting in a room with no doors and no windows, holding a computer, receiving constant updates from the outside world. “It’s June. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. You smell smoke. You’re in Wisconsin.” That person in the windowless room is your amygdala. It cannot see reality directly. It can only check the data it is given against a library of every emotional experience you have ever had — including experiences from the womb.

WHY THIS BELONGS IN A SPIRITUAL WARFARE COURSE Section 3 of the War Journal established that the battlefield of the mind is the most dangerous battlefield, and that fear is the enemy’s primary weapon there. This lesson gives you the precise neurological mechanism behind that battlefield. The enemy does not need to manufacture new attacks against you — he simply needs to locate your existing triggers and detonate them at the right moment. Understanding how triggers work is understanding exactly how that weapon operates, and exactly how to disarm it.

How the Amygdala Actually Works

Picture the data arriving: time, place, smell, location, who is present, tone of voice. The amygdala checks all of it against its library, searching for a past distressing situation that matches. If nothing matches, the information passes through without incident — your unconscious brain continues running the show, and you experience nothing unusual.

But if a match is found — full or partial — the amygdala can override everything. It does not wait for permission from your conscious brain. It sends signals straight to the body: increase heart rate, release adrenaline, prepare for action. Then it checks whether the body is already responding to whatever the unconscious brain initiated. If it is not responding fast enough, the amygdala pushes the button itself and makes it happen immediately.

Think of the unconscious brain as the big picture, long-term planner. Think of the amygdala as the small picture, split-second responder. Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the time, the amygdala checks the data, finds nothing distressing, and lets the moment pass. The other small fraction of the time, you trigger.

THE FOUR F’S

There are four possible amygdala responses, though only one of them is actually a distinct fourth category. Here they are in full:

RESPONSE	WHAT HAPPENS	WHY THE AMYGDALA CHOSE IT	WHAT IT FEELS LIKE
FITTING	99.999% of the time. Information matches no distressing memory. Passed along without incident.	No match found in the library. Nothing to defend against.	Nothing. This is the normal, unnoticed background process running constantly.
FIGHT	A match is found where the past response was to attack. The amygdala takes over the body to fight.	The remembered trauma was survived by fighting back, so fighting is filed as the solution.	Sudden, complete rage. Zero to 100% in an instant. The person becomes unreachable.
FLIGHT	A match is found where the past response was to escape. The amygdala takes over the body to flee.	The remembered trauma was survived by escaping, so flight is filed as the solution.	Sudden urge to leave with no clear memory of the decision to do so. Found yourself already gone.
FREEZE	Not a true fourth response — it is fight and flight occurring simultaneously, canceling movement.	The amygdala cannot decide between the two competing survival responses.	Total paralysis. Dangerous — if you relax near a frozen person, one of the two responses may suddenly resolve.

The amygdala does not know the difference between a real tiger and a paper tiger. It treats both exactly the same way.

THE TEACHER STORY

A tall, blonde-haired woman took over as a teacher mid-year in a group home for teenagers. One boy, sitting three rows back, suddenly began jumping over tables to get to her — trying to physically attack her. Why? His mother, who had abused him, was also a tall, blonde-haired woman in a position of authority. His amygdala matched the data — tall, blonde, in authority — found the old trauma, and concluded: she’s going to abuse you, fight her. It did not matter that this teacher had never harmed him. It did not matter that she was not his mother. The amygdala does not check for accuracy. It checks for pattern matches.

THE SPORTING GOODS STORE STORY

A man in his late fifties told John about an experience that had confused him for weeks. He was walking into a sporting goods store. A cigar sat smoldering on a trash can outside. He saw a fishing vest just past the entrance. A man walked by him — five o’clock shadow, sweaty, wearing a particular cologne. The next thing he knew, he was standing at his car in the parking lot, out of breath, with no memory of leaving the store.

What happened? As a teenager, his Uncle Ted — a family friend — used to take him fishing every year. Fishing vest. Cigar. Five o’clock shadow. Sweat. That same cologne. And during those trips, Uncle Ted had molested him. Forty-some years later, none of that mattered to his amygdala. The combination of sensory data matched the old library entry, and the amygdala issued one instruction: run. He had no say in the matter.

The Rule: You Cannot Trigger From 80

Here is a critical structural fact about how triggering works, connecting directly back to the thought process model from Combat Manual Lesson 5: you can only reach 320 by passing through 160 first. If you are at 80 — focused, conscious, present — an external event cannot trigger you. You have to already be distracted, already running on habit, already at 160, for the amygdala to seize control and take you the rest of the way to 320.

This produces a strange and useful diagnostic. If you and a friend are sitting together and the same external event happens to both of you, only the one who was already at 160 will trigger. The one who was at 80 will not — not because they are stronger or more spiritual, but because the structural precondition for triggering simply was not present in them at that moment.

CONNECTING TO THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE MIND Ed’s War Journal teaches that fear and irrational reaction are most dangerous when you are spiritually unfocused — drifting, distracted, operating on autopilot. This is the exact mechanism. A believer walking in 80 — alert, present, engaged with God — is structurally protected from triggering in a way that a believer drifting at 160 is not. Staying at 80 is not just good mental discipline. It is a spiritual defense position. The enemy needs you at 160 before he can pull the trigger he has been planning.

Why People Trigger: Three Reasons

A kindergartner in a particular classroom had eighty-eight seclusions and restraints in the first three months of school — meaning more than once a day on average, this child was either locked alone in a room or physically restrained because of triggering. The child was then placed with a teacher trained in the principles of this course. Over the following six months: zero seclusions and restraints. Zero.

What changed? Three things — and all three are reasons any of us trigger:

REASON	WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE	THE FIX
Bad communication causes	Statements made on you, projections, accusations — bad and worst causes from Combat Manual Lesson 2	Apply the healthy communication guidelines from Lesson 2. Recast statements back to the speaker’s mind.
Talked to against your uniqueness	Being asked to operate against your Intangible Driver, Picture Perspective, or Processing Perspective	Know your own uniqueness. Communicate it to others so they know how to approach you correctly.
Unresolved trauma	The first time you experience something negative, a negative emotion is permanently filed with it	Trauma-informed care: identify the trigger and rehearse a new response, as covered in this lesson.

THE BOY WHO WAS RAISED AS A DOG

The third reason — trauma — deserves special attention, and the clearest illustration of it comes from a book called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. The book describes a four-year-old girl who weighed twenty-six pounds and could not gain weight no matter what was tried — feeding tubes, medical intervention, nothing worked. Her mother was emotionally dissociated and largely absent from her care. The author held this child and simply spoke to her with calming, positive words, tone, and touch. The girl began gaining weight.

Here is the principle behind that story: humans, unlike animals, biologically require positive words, tone, and touch in order for our bodies to function and grow correctly. This is measurable. Pediatricians now track infant weight percentile specifically because a baby falling off their established growth curve is one of the most reliable indicators of inadequate nurturing — inadequate words, tone, and touch.

And this does not stop applying to us after childhood. Adults who are not regularly receiving positive words, tone, and touch get sick more often, and their illnesses last longer. This is precisely why the healthy communication guidelines from Lesson 2 are not just relational nice-to-haves — they are physiologically protective. Teaching the people around you to communicate with you in a healthy way is, quite literally, an act of physical health maintenance — for you and for them.

What a Trigger Actually Looks Like — and What to Do

A true trigger is instantaneous: zero to one hundred percent, with nothing in between. You do not escalate gradually toward it. You are simply there, completely, for roughly sixty to ninety seconds, and during that window you are unreachable. Nothing anyone says or does in that window will help — and in many cases, any attempt to engage will only restart the adrenaline cycle.

Here is what is happening biologically: your amygdala has sent chemicals that slow down your conscious brain and simultaneously flooded it with far more electrical signal than it can process. Your conscious brain becomes overwhelmed and effectively goes offline. This is also why people who trigger often have no memory of what happened during the episode — their conscious brain, where memories are formed, was not functioning during that window.

HOW TO RESPOND WHEN SOMEONE TRIGGERS First, ensure everyone nearby is safe. Second, ensure the triggered person cannot harm themselves or others. Third, wait sixty to ninety seconds without engaging — if anyone speaks to them during this window and they respond, restart your count. Once the body has had time to reabsorb the adrenaline, the conscious brain comes back online and rational engagement becomes possible again. There is nothing productive to do in the moment itself. The repair work happens later, through rehearsal.

This is also worth distinguishing from a related but different phenomenon: conscious brain ramp-up, where a person gradually becomes more and more upset over an extended interaction. That is a different mechanism, covered in a future lesson. What we are describing here — true triggering — is sudden, total, and amygdala-driven, not a gradual escalation of conscious frustration.

The Solution: Rehearsal

Since you cannot do anything productive in the moment of triggering, the entire solution has to happen beforehand — and it works because of a specific weakness in how the amygdala operates. Remember: the amygdala cannot distinguish a real tiger from a paper tiger. It does not know the difference between something that actually happened and something it has been told happened. We can use that.

If you tell your amygdala — through deliberate, repeated rehearsal — that you faced a particular trigger and responded to it well, your amygdala begins to believe that is simply what happens in that situation. The stimulus-response loop that currently runs straight from trigger to explosion gets a new entry inserted into the library: trigger, then this calm response. Once that entry exists, when the real trigger occurs, the amygdala pauses and essentially asks, “How do you want to handle this?” instead of detonating automatically.

Rehearsal does not eliminate the trigger. It builds a space between the trigger and your response — and in that space, your free will lives again.

REHEARSE THE PRINCIPLE, NOT THE INSTANCE

This distinction matters enormously. If you only rehearse a response to one specific instance — say, someone cutting you off in traffic — you have only solved that one scenario. The next time a different situation produces the same underlying feeling, you are right back to square one.

Instead, identify the principle behind the trigger. Why does someone cutting you off in traffic actually bother you? If the honest answer is “I feel disrespected,” then rehearse a new response to feeling disrespected — broadly. That single rehearsal now covers every future situation where disrespect is the underlying trigger, regardless of the specific circumstances.

PAIR THE RESPONSE WITH A PHYSICAL ACTION

People who pair their chosen response with a small physical action find it dramatically easier to follow through in the actual moment. The physical motion becomes a trigger of its own — a positive one — that helps initiate the new response. A deep breath. Closing your eyes briefly. A slow head shake. Rubbing your hands together. Choose something simple and repeatable, and pair it consistently with your rehearsed response.

CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE

There are four possible responses to rehearse toward. The fourth — forgiveness — requires a fuller understanding of what forgiveness actually is, which will be covered in a future lesson. For now, choose from the first three for each of your triggers. You do not need to use the same one for every trigger.

RESPONSE	WHAT IT IS	EXAMPLE
1. Walk Away	Physically or emotionally remove yourself from the trigger. Fully permitted — protects you and everyone else.	Leaving the room when a conversation starts heading toward a known trigger topic.
2. Ask for Help	Reach out to someone trained to help you process the moment — a sponsor, mentor, counselor, or trusted friend.	The AA model: call your sponsor the moment the urge or trigger arises.
3. Ask a Question	Redirect the moment by asking a clarifying question instead of reacting. Often the most powerful option.	John’s trigger is not being heard. His response: “What do you think I said?” — defuses instantly and corrects the actual problem.
4. Forgiveness	The deepest response — but requires real understanding of what forgiveness actually is. Covered in a later lesson.	Not yet — save this one. Choose from the first three for now.

John’s own trigger is not being heard — particularly with his wife, who is Small Picture and sometimes becomes overwhelmed and stops processing what he is saying. He used to trigger in that moment. Now, the instant he feels the amygdala beginning to rise, he takes a breath and asks: “What do you think I said?” That single close-ended-adjacent question accomplishes two things simultaneously — it interrupts the trigger response, and it surfaces the actual communication breakdown so it can be corrected. He has rehearsed this so thoroughly that it is now automatic.

How to Rehearse

#	STEP	WHAT TO DO
1	Identify your triggers	Track every triggering moment for one full week. If you think you have none, ask your closest friends — they already know the topics to avoid.
2	Pick your three biggest	From your full list, circle the three triggers causing the most disruption in your life right now.
3	Find the principle behind each	Don’t rehearse away one instance (someone cutting you off in traffic). Find the underlying principle (feeling disrespected) so the rehearsal covers every instance of that principle.
4	Pair a physical action with your response	Choose a small physical motion — a breath, closing your eyes, a head shake — that you do at the exact moment you give your new response. This anchors the new response into the body.
5	Rehearse out loud, three times	Close your eyes. Speak the scenario out loud so your unconscious hears it: the trigger happening, you feeling the amygdala start to rise, then the physical action, then your chosen response. Repeat three times per trigger.

The rehearsal itself should be spoken out loud, with your eyes closed, so that your unconscious actually processes it as an event. Walk through the full scenario: the trigger occurring, the rising sensation of the amygdala beginning to take over, then your physical action, then your chosen response playing out completely. Do this three times per trigger.

A DAILY PRACTICE Some people add one rehearsal to their daily routine — a single trigger scenario, walked through out loud, once a day. Do this for a year and you will have given your amygdala three hundred and sixty-five experiences of handling situations well that you never actually had to live through in crisis. The amygdala does not know the difference. That is the advantage.

Rehearsal Is Permanent Repair — Not Permanent Numbness

An important clarification: rehearsal does not eliminate the feeling of the trigger. It builds the space that allows your response to change. John illustrates this with his own ongoing experience.

Years ago, at a Christian radio station, a manager sat down at John’s table and asked him a question that triggered him completely — he counted down in his head, lost his ability to speak, and blacked out for roughly sixty seconds while a friend filled the silence. A decade later, working with that same man on a writing project, the man asked him the identical question again. This time, John took a breath and answered it cleanly. The man said, “Well, you’re healed.” John’s response: “No, I’m not. My heart is racing and my palms are sweaty.”

Years after that, telling this exact story to a care team and accidentally saying the actual trigger question out loud mid-story, John noticed his hands beginning to move involuntarily on the table — the amygdala responding to the words themselves, even inside a story about the trigger. The trauma response will likely never fully disappear. What rehearsal gives you is not numbness. It gives you control. You will feel it. You will not be controlled by it.

Rehearsing Other People

There is also a method for helping someone else pre-load a positive response — and it is remarkably effective, especially with children, though it works with adults too. The technique: pose the future scenario to them directly and get explicit, verbal agreement.

A police officer in one of John’s classes shared an example. He and his partner were called to a house where gunshots were being fired inside. As they approached, his partner suddenly asked, “What do we do if that door flies open and the guy comes out with a gun?” The officer answered immediately: “You draw and get behind the car. I’ll draw and get behind the woodpile.” His partner said, “Yeah. Okay.” They took one step onto the property. The door flew open. A shotgun pointed directly at them. Both men, to this day, argue about who drew their weapon faster — neither has any conscious memory of actually drawing. The plan they had verbally agreed to seconds earlier executed itself perfectly, without either of their conscious brains being involved at all.

That is rehearsal compressed into real time. The proposal — and the explicit “okay” in response — told both of their amygdalae that this was the agreed plan. When the trigger hit, the amygdalae simply executed what had already been agreed.

USE CLOSE-ENDED QUESTIONS, NOT OPEN-ENDED ONES When helping a child or another person pre-rehearse a response, the agreement must be explicit and closed: “The next time that happens, will you come ask me for help instead?” requires a yes or no. An open-ended question like “What do you want to do next time that happens?” risks the person rehearsing exactly the wrong response out loud — and now their amygdala has agreed to that instead.

Building Positive Memories Before They’re Needed

The same principle that explains how trauma gets filed can be used proactively, before a difficult situation even arrives. When John’s wife was offered a job in Milwaukee — a large city she was anxious about, having grown up disliking big cities — he made sure her very first exposure to the city was wrapped entirely in positive experience. They extended a vacation by one night, stayed in a hotel still “on vacation,” took her to her favorite coffee shop the next morning, drove straight to Milwaukee while she napped and listened to music, went immediately to her favorite restaurant for her favorite salad, and only then looked at apartments. Every part of that day was filed by her amygdala as a positive entry tied to Milwaukee — not because the city itself was inherently good or bad to her amygdala, but because the first filed experience became the reference point for everything after.

Contrast that with a father’s story of a red balloon falling out of a closet and startling his toddler, with everyone in the room laughing at the child’s fear. That child now cries every time he sees a red balloon — the first experience filed, and the amygdala has no interest in correcting course on its own. As Ed’s War Journal teaches regarding the enemy’s tactics: he does not need to manufacture new wounds when old, mismanaged ones are still fully operational and unaddressed.

WHY THIS LESSON BELONGS IN YOUR SPIRITUAL ARSENAL Recall Section 5 of the War Journal: the enemy runs counterintelligence operations designed to make you defeat yourself while believing you are acting on your own. Triggers are one of his most effective and least visible tools for doing exactly that. A trigger bypasses your conscious brain entirely — the very faculty you use to recognize deception, apply the WHAT/HOW/WHY test, and discern the voice of God from the voices of the world, the flesh, and the enemy. While you are triggered, none of that discernment is available to you. This is precisely why rehearsing away your triggers is spiritual warfare in the most literal sense: you are closing one of the enemy’s most reliable points of access to override your discernment and your free will.

THIS WEEK’S ASSIGNMENT Track every trigger you experience over the next seven days, no matter how small. If you believe you have none, ask three close friends what topics they avoid with you, or what they bring up specifically to provoke a reaction from you. Write down everything — this list is the raw material for your rehearsal worksheet. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

COMPLETE THE 320 REHEARSAL WORKSHEET Using the worksheet provided with this lesson: identify all your triggers, circle your three biggest, and for each one identify the underlying principle (not just the specific instance), a paired physical action, and your chosen response (Walk Away, Ask for Help, or Ask a Question). Then complete the spoken rehearsal — eyes closed, out loud, three times per trigger. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

You will always feel the trigger. You no longer have to be destroyed by it.

Next month: beginning to hear from God in your specific uniqueness — building directly on the discernment you are protecting through this lesson.