Do You Feel 'Triggered?' You Probably Activated a Complex
How complexes form and how to recognize the signs in your own life.
Posted May 26, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
It was recently Mother’s Day in the U.S., and it can be a complicated holiday for many people. Nurturance, care, and closeness are rarely neutral topics, making them magnets for complexes.
In my last post , I covered complexes—emotionally charged clusters of lived experiences, linked to archetypes —that influence how we feel and react. Complexes are mainly outside our awareness, shaped through early and ongoing personal, relational, and cultural experiences, and influence how we think, feel, and respond. They can congeal into a variety of enduring patterns.
How Do Complexes Form From Past Experiences?
The terms “getting triggered” and “being dysregulated” are used frequently in our modern culture, but the underlying dynamics are not widely understood. When we “feel triggered,” or our “ nervous system gets dysregulated,” it often means that an external stimulus is activating one of our complexes.
Complexes develop for a variety of reasons. Because the psyche is dissociable, it can fragment in the face of pain, with the split-off experience continuing to “live a life of its own” as a complex. The pain wasn’t registered or processed, and the psyche groups together memories, bodily sensations, emotional responses, and core beliefs related to that pain. Complexes can form at the individual, cultural, and universal levels.
Jung noted that a caregiver’s unconscious and the cultural unconscious influence the child’s unconscious. Children absorb unspoken fears, conflicts, values, and relational patterns before they consciously understand or symbolize them. For example, physical, psychological, emotional, or cultural deprivation or indulgence can contribute to how a complex forms.
On a related note, we may either identify with or be reactionary toward our caregiving experiences, making inner vows such as, “I’ll be just like my mom,” or “I’ll never be like my mom.” Our response is polarized and can lead to a complex. Complex theory also posits how complexes form without active effort on the part of the caregiver. In other words, it is not always something the parent did or didn't do, nor solely the particular attachment style that developed between parent and child.
Where and When Do We See a Complex?
Complexes show up in multiple arenas:
What’s interesting about a complex is that it’s not “healed” or “gotten rid of.” Jung’s complex theory was radically and presciently relational in asserting that we must learn to relate to our complexes. By developing a more conscious and different relationship with them, we discover ways to integrate and manage their influence in our lives.
Identifying Emotional Triggers and Complexes
It’s important to identify and understand the characteristics of a complex because that informs interventions. Briefly, as with much of psychoanalysis , material must first be made conscious because emotional triggers are often rooted in the unconscious. Below are 10 salient characteristics of complexes:
So, what does this look like in a person? In a previous post , I discussed a patient who struggled with his romantic relationship because his partner wasn’t “who he pictured marrying.”
His mother was a homemaker, while his partner was career -oriented and joked she was “allergic” to housekeeping. The tension he felt around his image of “wife” versus the reality of his partner pointed to an unconscious image he carried, a “ Representation of Interactions that have been Generalized ” as well as a mother complex.
He described his mother as “perfect. She did everything right.” He would speak of her in such glowing terms that she felt inhuman to me. When I asked him to elaborate, his mind went blank, he became irritated, and asserted, “I’m not sure what to say if you don’t get it. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother.”
His reactiveness, strong feelings, inability to hold nuance, and the change in his posture, tone of voice, and facial expression were indications that we were in a complex. I was now “imperfect” for not automatically knowing and for trying to understand his mind. I could not address this relational exchange then, but we could when his complex was not so activated. As with much of psychoanalysis, material must first be made conscious through a relational process.
I held and contained my patient’s mother complex, and we became curious about his mother complex, exploring his associations at a pace that respected his defenses. What were his images and associations with “mother”? By becoming conscious of his mother complex, my patient created more moments of pause. Instead of reacting reflexively, he acted from an empowered place when his complex made an appearance. He began to choose how he wanted to show up in his romantic relationship and define what mattered to him in a partner beyond his childhood “ideal.”
Representation, interaction, and intersubjectivity . Cogn Sci. 2007 Sept. R. Alterman.
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Helen Marlo, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Psychology at Notre Dame de Namur University, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a certified psychoanalyst (C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco).
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.