Hi,
I'm John.
What do you actually do when you realize you've been triggered?
We use that word a lot now.
Someone says something,
A relationship changes,
Or you receive an email,
Or you have an uncomfortable interaction.
And suddenly you're feeling anxious or angry,
Afraid,
Ashamed,
Or overwhelmed.
But triggers aren't always that obvious.
Sometimes the first thing you notice is that you're not sleeping,
Or your thoughts are racing,
Or your body feels restless or activated.
Maybe there's tightness in your chest and not in your stomach or tension in your jaw.
Or maybe you simply know something feels different.
I've had triggers in my own healing that I recognized almost immediately.
And I've had others where it took days or even a couple of weeks before I understood what my body was trying to show me.
And so one of the first things I've learned is you don't necessarily have to figure it out.
You can begin by noticing.
What am I feeling?
What changed?
And where am I experiencing it in my body?
Because when we're triggered,
It's very easy to immediately go into the story.
Why did they do that?
Why is this happening?
How do I make this stop?
And before we know it,
We're entirely in the mind.
And instead I want to invite you to try something different.
Come to the body.
Maybe you notice fear in your stomach or anger in your chest,
Grief in your throat.
And you don't have to know why it's there yet,
Just notice it.
And if you can name the emotion,
Name it.
I'm feeling fear.
I'm feeling anger.
I'm feeling shame.
I'm feeling humiliation.
And then something that became part,
An important part of my own practice,
Acceptance.
I accept that I'm feeling this.
Not I like this,
Not I want this.
Simply,
This is what I'm experiencing right now and I'm willing to be here with it.
And then we stay.
And I want to be careful with that word.
Because staying with a feeling does not mean overwhelming yourself.
Doesn't mean forcing yourself into the deepest pain you can find.
And it certainly doesn't mean trying to make yourself have some enormous emotional release.
Trauma was overwhelming when it happened and we don't need to recreate that overwhelm in order to heal.
And one of the things I learned through somatic work is titration.
Meeting difficult material a little at a time.
And we can also use something called resourcing.
A resource is something that helps you reconnect with a sense of safety and connection,
Comfort or steadiness.
Maybe it's your favorite beach,
Your children,
Or a beautiful vacation,
A beloved pet,
Or someone you love.
A place in nature.
A memory where you felt peaceful and connected or safe.
And you might bring your attention to the difficult feeling for a little while.
Notice it.
Feel what's happening in your body.
And then bring your attention to your resource.
If it's your favorite beach,
Really go there for a moment.
Remember what you saw,
What you heard.
How the air felt.
And most importantly,
Notice what happens inside your body as you connect with that memory.
Then when it feels right,
You can gently return to the difficult feeling.
Moving back and forth,
Like this is sometimes what we call pendulation.
You're not abandoning the difficult feeling.
You're allowing yourself to meet it in a way your system can actually tolerate.
Titration,
Resourcing,
And pendulation are specifically presented in my training as ways of engaging difficult or traumatic material without overwhelming the system.
And interestingly,
I found myself doing this naturally in my own healing.
During one of the deepest periods of my own inner child healing,
I was working with intense anger connected to my father.
I would sit and journal.
I'd write about a painful childhood memory.
And I've let myself feel what was coming up.
Sometimes there was a lot of anger.
Sometimes grief.
But then I would find myself shifting.
I'd write about a happy memory,
Something beautiful,
And I'd let myself feel that.
Then eventually I might find myself returning to something painful.
Right back and forth.
Pain.
Resource.
Pain.
Resource.
And looking back,
I can see that my body seemed to know how much it could meet at one time.
And that taught me something really important about what I mean when I say,
Stay with yourself.
Sometimes staying means remaining present with what's moving.
And sometimes staying means knowing when to move away from the pain and come back.
And both can be ways of staying with yourself.
And I understand why staying can be difficult.
I froze a lot as a child.
And when I look back now,
That makes sense.
I wasn't taught how to be with my feelings.
The adults around me struggled with their own emotions.
So they weren't able to teach me how to recognize what I was feeling or how to move through it.
There wasn't someone there saying,
It's OK to be afraid.
It's okay to be angry or it's okay to cry.
Or I'm here with you while you feel this.
And as children,
We don't automatically know how to do all of that for ourselves.
We learn so much through the people caring for us,
Through their presence,
Through their way that they respond to our emotions,
Through the safety that they create around having feelings.
So when something happened that brought up fear or anger,
Grief,
Shame,
Or humiliation,
And those feelings became too overwhelming for me,
My nervous system took over.
It did what it was supposed to do.
I froze.
And when I froze,
The emotional response was interrupted.
I couldn't cry when I needed to cry or I couldn't express the anger.
I couldn't move through the fear or humiliation.
I was a child.
My body was protecting a child who didn't yet have the capacity or the support to stay with what he was feeling.
But what I came to understand many years later was that experience had ended while the emotional response hadn't necessarily finished.
And that's what I mean when I talk about an interrupted or unfinished emotional response.
And for me,
This became the heart of completion work.
And in many ways,
This is also what reparenting has come to mean for me.
As an adult,
I can begin offering myself some of what wasn't available to me then.
I can notice the feeling.
I can allow it.
I can tell that younger part of myself,
It's okay to feel this.
I'm here.
You don't have to go through this alone.
I'm staying.
And I'm not trying to recreate what happened to me.
I'm allowing my body in the safety of the present moment to finally feel and move what it wasn't able to feel and move then.
As a child,
My nervous system had to interrupt what I couldn't safely feel.
And as an adult,
I could begin creating enough safety to feel what had been interrupted.
And that completely changed the way I began relating to triggers.
Instead of immediately seeing a trigger as something I needed to get rid of,
I began wondering.
What is my body trying to tell me?
Because in some of the deepest healing experiences of my life,
I discovered something remarkable.
My body knew before my mind did.
Sometimes something was trying to move.
Something was finally ready to be felt.
And sometimes something was ready to be released and completed.
And the trigger was often the first sign.
But I didn't always understand that at the time.
Sometimes I stayed with what was happening for days,
Sometimes weeks.
I noticed what was happening in my body.
I noticed the thoughts that were arising and I felt the emotions.
And instead of disconnecting from myself or numbing what I was feeling or immediately trying to make it go away.
I listened.
My body knew.
And eventually it began showing me what was underneath.
Sometimes an old memory surfaced.
Sometimes deep grief came.
And sometimes there was intense crying.
And sometimes there were physical sensations,
And sometimes the process was much quieter.
I didn't decide what needed to happen and I didn't force a release.
I followed what my body was already trying to do.
And I want to be honest about this part,
Because sometimes when we stop pushing a feeling away,
We may begin to feel more of it.
And in my own healing,
There were times when staying with what was arising eventually opened into very deep grief.
There were times I cried intensely,
And there were times that the crying was guttural and painful.
And when that happened,
I didn't try to make myself cry harder and I didn't automatically try to make the crying stop.
I allowed my body to do what it was naturally doing for as long as it needed to.
Sometimes that was a long time.
But not every experience looked like that.
When I completed an unfinished emotional response connected to childhood humiliation.
I cried for maybe 10 minutes.
As I accepted and felt that humiliation,
I experienced a very strong physical sensation moving through my left leg.
And then it stopped.
The crying stops.
And the experiences were completely different.
That's why I don't believe we should decide what healing is supposed to look like.
The goal isn't intensity.
The goal is presence.
And if something feels like too much.
Resource yourself.
Come back to something safe.
Ground or look around the room.
Come back to the present moment.
Staying doesn't mean forcing yourself beyond your capacity.
And there's one more piece that I think is really important.
You don't have to figure out what childhood wound you're healing.
And you don't have to go searching through your past.
And you don't have to wake up tomorrow and say,
Okay,
I need to work on this again.
Instead,
Meet what's here.
If the feeling is still here tomorrow.
Meet her tomorrow.
If it's gone tomorrow,
Let it be gone.
If it returns three days later,
Notice what's there then.
One of my deepest inner childhood wounds unfolded over a period of weeks before I fully understood what was happening.
I kept returning to my practice.
I kept listening.
I kept staying with what was actually arising.
And eventually something underneath.
Revealed itself.
I wasn't chasing the wound.
I was following my body.
And through my own healing journey and my work as an energy healing practitioner,
I've come to understand that some recurring triggers may be connected to unfinished emotional responses from earlier in our lives.
And sometimes a trigger just brings us back into contact with one of those unfinished feelings.
Not so that we can force ourselves to heal it,
And not because every trigger means there's some enormous childhood wound underneath it.
But sometimes the body may simply be saying,
There's something here.
Can you listen?
That's why also remembering something isn't necessarily the same as completing it.
I remembered some of my childhood responses for decades or experiences for decades,
Right?
I understood them.
I could tell you exactly what happened.
But understanding what happened in my mind didn't necessarily mean that the emotional response my body interrupted all those years ago had finished.
For me,
Healing changed when I stopped only asking,
Why am I feeling this?
And I began asking,
Can I stay with what I'm feeling?
Not forever,
Not beyond my capacity,
And not because I'm trying to force myself to heal.
Just enough to let my body know.
I'm here.
I'm listening.
And I'm not going to immediately numb this.
I'm not going to immediately run from this.
And this time I'm not going to disconnect from myself.
So the next time you recognize that you've been triggered.
Perhaps you don't have to immediately fix it.
Notice.
Name.
Feel.
Resource yourself when you need to.
And stay curious about what your body might be communicating.
Because staying doesn't mean remaining inside the pain continuously.
Staying means learning not to abandon yourself in relationship to the pain.
And sometimes that may be exactly where healing begins.
Thank you for joining me.
I'm John.
Take good care of yourself,
And I'll see you next time.
