We all have emotional triggers. As my friend, David Kessler once told me, when it comes to emotional triggers…
“It’s not what pushes your buttons , it’s what programmed you.”
What is an emotional trigger?
When we feel that someone has taken something from us that we rely on for emotional survival, or if we feel that we are in any way at risk of this loss, our emotions take off.
It is clear that we want to get out of this active state immediately. It feels impossible to stay afloat, so we go into fight or flight mode and react because what other option do we have? We have to. We are aroused.
Related : 10 Things That Happen When You Raise Your Standards
Once we get aroused, fear and anger spread through every vein of our emotional bodies. And because we are so charged by this particular trigger that is activated, we are able to rationalize our interaction.
If your emotions are turned on and your self-esteem is low, the only life raft you will be able to see at that moment is the reaction.
Feeling all kinds of different emotions is normal. I think it’s the most beautiful, painful, joyful, liberating, heartbreaking, evolutionary, and incredible franchise we have. For years, I tried to control my emotions (in the sense that I tried to control the feelings I felt). I thought that if I could control my emotions, all my emotional triggers would be deactivated. It was impossible. No matter what, I was never able to control my emotions – feelings that it was completely normal to feel. Because of this, I sabotaged myself and became a sitting duck due to my emotional unavailability, as well as toxic relationships and friendships that ended up dominating every emotion I had.
My life changed the moment I stopped trying to control the weather. I resigned myself to the fact that the weather always ebbs, flows and happens naturally.
If I didn’t like the weather, I didn’t have to stay. I can change locations.
I realized that in order to” control ” the weather the way I had always wished, I first had to control exactly what I was in control of.
All I had complete control over was how I reacted to the weather. Imagine what the weather looks like.
I either have to go outside and cry and scream and argue with a thunderstorm or I could get myself inside and into a place of power to figure out my next step.
My emotions were the weather and my reaction to emotional rainstorms, thunderclouds, and even rainbows were my emotional triggers.
Emotional stimuli can be anything. It can be a person, a place, a smell, a song, a gesture, a joke, a comment, a compliment or criticism.
For me personally, whether it’s a lover, a friend, a family member, or someone I barely know…
All it takes is for someone to make a passive-aggressive comment, a mean joke, or even praise me for something I was insecure about, I took it as a jab and provoked (although it was a real compliment). In relationships, if I didn’t hear back from anyone who was unlucky enough to date me, I would immediately think that either he was cheating on me (my trust issues) or he died (abandonment issues). Therefore, I would like to text many times and interact in other ways that were born exclusively from my emotional triggers.
It was especially difficult because whenever I tried to express my feelings to others, I was always told that I “couldn’t take a joke,” was “too sensitive,” and needed to “get a life.”
The truth is, I was motivated.
So, why do we have emotional triggers?
What are emotional triggers in relationships?
Where did they come from and how can we dismantle them before dismantling our mental health?
We all have emotional triggers because we were all children and we all experienced childhood. None of us is alone in this. Emotional stimuli are natural. What dictates our emotional health is how we not only choose to respond to those stimuli, but to what extent we allow those stimuli to absorb and paralyze us.
Growing up, we have all experienced pain, shame, trauma, abuse, heartbreak, and feeling neglected. These traumas were too much for us to process and leave at the time because we were just kids and still developing.
Our only option was to assimilate, absorb, and create a story that still, to this day, we choose not only to subscribe to but end up unconsciously attracting relationships and experiences that validate this story.
This story is the basis of what triggers our emotional triggers.
The triggers come from not being traumatized, usually in our childhood. When I was a child, my trigger was the rejection or displeasure of any person. I never felt like I could satisfy anyone completely and I was always paranoid because everyone hated me.
As an adult, whenever I was rejected or disliked by someone, I did anything in my power to avoid the feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and heartbreak associated with their behavior. This requires me to get off my white horse at the expense of my dignity, reputation, and Destiny.
Related : How To Forgive Yourself For Falling Off Your White Horse
The only thing that helped me was identifying my emotional triggers, feeling my way through them (instead of just feeling it at the moment), and being the person I needed when I was younger and I didn’t have it.
I had to calm down that anxious, abandoned, emotionally orphaned, little girl “afraid of never being enough” inside me whose emotional growth was arrested when she experienced pain that was not digested properly and left.
No matter how old you are, if you suffer from childhood trauma, you will always regress to the emotional paralysis of the age when the trauma happened.
Each of these situations used to move me on a large scale.
Determining what specifically triggered me was the first step in separating my emotional triggers from their source of strength.
They are being abandoned.
They are being rejected.
Someone is threatening to leave me.
Someone who acts like he knows something about me that I didn’t know yet.
I am being ignored.
Being cheated on.
Not being prioritized by people for whom I have done nothing but prioritize.
Gossip is being talked about.
People talk about money, politics, or religion.
Disagreements.
Someone was lying to me and when I called them on the lie, it made me feel crazy (Gaslight).
Being criticized or judged.
He is not chosen over someone else.
Being made to feel dumb, hideous, and incompetent.
The list goes on but I’ll stop here. As soon as I identified my triggers, I was able to get to their root.
Through this, I realized that I was the only person on the planet who could not let my emotional triggers get the best of me. No one else. I was the only person who knew all my secrets and who was with me through it all.
Contrary to what my insecurities wanted me to believe, I was the only person who hadn’t let me down yet. I was still here. And even if it was barely, I was still standing. I survived.
Once I identified my specific emotional triggers, I was able to focus on how I would react.
I would like to do either…
Become a mop” Please validate me please don’t abandon me”. Put my emotional needs in the hands of everyone else except my own. I embarrass myself even more by replying. Avoid, shut down, pull. React obnoxiously and dramatically as a way to promote interest/empathy. Back to my narcissistic addiction reversal of feeling like everything was about me. Be the victim and act like a spoiled brat.
The best way to deal with emotional triggers is to stop avoiding them and start recognizing them and feeling your way through them. Once you feel it, you can treat it because you will no longer feel it” for the first time”, every time you are turned on.
Wash off what you need and understand that being an adult is not about carrying the pain of an untreated past and using toxic relationships to revisit the emotional crime scene.
Being an adult means committing to your orphaned young self emotionally and exposing the harmful beliefs you adopted as a child through coordinated action (as opposed to a disturbed reaction).
I never felt like I was in control of my life until a few years ago. Because of my illness growing up as a child, she became an adult who was always either reacting to her parents or trying to please them.
Except for…
Although it was rooted in my parental relationships, “mom” and “dad” since childhood have become friends and lovers.
Be very mindful of this pattern and fully realize what you are most hungry for when it comes to the relationship you had/did not have with your parents as a child.
Once you have mastered your emotional triggers, your emotions will not be anything that needs to be tamed because you will act from a place of power rather than a place of dependence. The emotionally impulsive reaction generated from being triggered is the single biggest barrier to having the kind of power you’ve always wanted.
My reactions to my emotional triggers cost me. They cost me much more than the temporary satisfaction I gained from grabbing this life raft.
Choosing this life raft meant that I was choosing to ignore the fact that I knew how to swim all the time.
