Everybody's got a number. Not a personality type, not a trauma response. But there is a number. The precise degree at which they stop being okay and we call it crash out these days. Just like how different liquids boil at different degrees, so is it with us.
As I keep writing, when I say temperature I mean our personality threshold for how much shit we can take till we flip. How much life pressure we can take till we call it quits.
The problem is you don't ever see it. You can't look at someone and see their temperature. So you may say something totally not mean, and have no clue that they've already reached 208. Two degrees from gone.
To the outside observer, the reaction of the person who conditions or triggered the other person may appear to be an overreaction, but it is never an overreaction.
What no one talks about is the level of solitude that exists for both parties. The person who snaps thinks they're misunderstood. The person who dispositively or let me say triggered the snap reaction is completely blindsided. And neither party is wrong, that's what makes it extremely difficult to come to resolution, because in this moment there is no villain, only two people without access to one another's internal weather meter.
Self awareness is so much deeper than it appears to be on the surface. Being self aware of your very own boiling point requires a level of honesty that can be legitimately discomforting, it means accepting that you are absolutely not as steady at your boiling point as you wished you were, that you have a number too, and that an inappropriate combination of sleep deprivation plus one unintentional unmilitarized comment could produce boiling. And it leads to people lashing out and looking like they have no self control.
That's not a fault, I subjectively think of it as physics, as in, the law of physics for human being behavior.
You may not always be able to decrease the amount of heat. At the very least you can stop being surprised when the water boils. This is not an excuse to overact the second someone pushes a wrong button but it's to tell you don't be too hard on yourself.