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“A healthy person hates no one, dislikes no thing.” –Satchidananda
It’s common for people to say they are triggered. Most people get to the point of understanding triggers because they’re working hard to get over a conflict in relationships or long-lasting anxiety and depression because they feel triggered a lot. Too much.
Emotional discomfort is part of our inherent intelligence like balance or pulling away from too much heat or cold. The term ‘triggered’ has become acceptable to describe what happened when we felt emotional discomfort with another person or as the result of a situation.
The word ‘triggered’ is accurate insofar as it describes an activity that is not reversible. When we experience powerlessness that reverts to anger or isolation, it’s because we have just experienced something overwhelming. Something or someone pulled my trigger and “made me angry, afraid, sad”. Very often, I’d say 95% of the time, these sudden, automatic “triggered” responses emerge from stored experiences which were traumatic and haven’t healed. This understanding is not common and so I’ll repeat it:
Sudden, automatic “triggered” responses emerge from stored experiences which were traumatic and haven’t healed.
The argument you’ve had so many times in a close relationship keep happening because there’s a part of you that has been hunkered down waiting to finish a trauma that started but never stopped. Traumas that heal become strengths. Traumas that don’t get healed become patterns of conflict and self-protection. These sudden emotional jolts which we use to assault or retreat, were ‘triggered’ long ago when something really dangerous happened, which we haven’t yet integrated in a healthy way.
The initial trauma reaction is to protect (your shoulders go up, you curl into the fetal position to protect your organs and cover your brain) or attack (you strike out to stop whatever it is that is hurting you).
After the trauma has passed, we return to a more normal physical state, less self-protective or aggressive. The trauma experience remains in the system until balance returns. If we are exposed to the same trauma again, or something which resembles it, we naturally regress to the first trauma reaction. We close down or come out fighting. This is the moment of ‘triggering’ which I suggest be converted to ‘regressed’. After all, what has happened is that something in the present moment has appeared so similar to a previous sense of overwhelm, that we go back—-regress—to the original moment of trauma.
In regression, we have the skills we possessed during the first moment of shock and threat. If we were ten or twenty when it happened, then we will suddenly have the emotional and mental skills of a ten- or twenty-year-old. The helpless feeling of trauma regressions makes things much simpler in a way……shut down or assault.
Would you like to test this method? If so, here’s the process.
1. remember a time you were recently ‘triggered’
2. remember the emotion as fully as possible in your body
3. let go of the recent person or situation
4. focus again on the feeling and drift backward in memory to another time this feeling arose
5. notice where and when, and what is happening
6. come back to the present moment and let yourself feel the similarity between the ‘triggered’ moment and the ‘regressed’ moment.
This inquiry can be a step in bringing healing to a regressed, traumatized part of you. As a male, you’ve been taught that you are not supposed to be overwhelmed or powerless. But you have. Part of you is still trapped. Will you be courageous enough to touch, speak to, and embrace it?
More at Angry-Man.com, SpeakingofFeelings.com, Thefatherconnection.com
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Photo credit: Pixabay