Hey,
Createaholics!
I've been working on a course or a class on trying to figure out why people react.
Why do you react to things?
And I've come up with some ideas that I'm really excited to share.
And basically what you're trying to do in life is,
As we're growing as human beings,
We have traumas,
We have things,
It's stored in our amygdala.
And when things that are traumatic from the past that we've stored in our body,
That fires and then we react to something.
And the goal with mindfulness and the goal with meditation or with any type of inner work is to have a gap for that from when the event happens to the reaction.
That time in the middle is where we have a lot of power.
The power lies in that gap.
And when we do more inner work,
We realize in that gap,
We can pause ourselves and try to understand why we're reacting that way.
And still to this day,
There's things that I react to that I don't even know where they come from.
And sometimes something might not come into your life until later,
And then you didn't even know you had it.
It's like they say,
And this is a great example for me is,
I took a lot of time to get to be a good human with as little ego as possible and as much empathy as possible on my own.
But when I got into my relationship with Sarah,
Man,
I was triggered constantly.
Because there's things that a partner can trigger you that you can't get triggered by yourself.
And I literally had to sit back for the last almost two years and analyze why am I behaving this way?
Why am I treating her this way?
Why am I doing this?
And I had to unravel,
Just recently,
I had to unravel things of,
Okay,
Well,
I'm doing this because this happened,
Or I'm doing this because this is my pattern.
And that's the key.
The key is to start seeing patterns.
So we get to that mindful gap.
And we're in that gap.
And that's our moment where we go,
Why is this person making me angry?
And then you stop.
And you feel the anger,
Because we want to feel it.
We go,
I am honoring that I'm angry,
Because that's okay.
And then you say,
Well,
What did they say?
Who was it?
What time of day was it?
Had you eaten?
I mean,
You can look at so many different factors.
And what I like to do is I like to journal or journal throughout my day and go,
Well,
What did I react to today?
What was a moment that I was feeling this and feeling that?
And I came to so many beautiful conclusions about my childhood,
How I was raised,
And how I was treating Sarah and relationships with all these other people in my life.
And I just realized quickly that,
Oh,
My goodness,
I need to restructure this trauma or feel this trauma or ask questions of where these things came from.
I have to acknowledge them.
And I have to let them go.
And to me,
It led to a lot of inner child work,
Which we're going to talk about at some point,
Of sitting with my six-year-old self,
My 12-year-old self,
And saying,
Hey,
Dude,
Why did you feel this way back then?
And then honoring their feelings so that when my inner child is reacting to a partner or to a boss or to a client,
When my inner child is reacting,
I can react more from the older Tyler.
And this little child doesn't need to react because it's safe.
It's like,
No,
She's not trying to attack you.
When you were 12,
She's literally just asking this thing that triggers your little 12-year-old self.
I saw a really great cartoon the other day of an adult and a child.
And in the adult's stomach was his little self.
And the child comes over and shakes hands with the little self while the parent's yelling at him.
And then the parent realizes,
Oh,
It's not me.
It's my inner child yelling at my child.
And it really hit home to me because a lot of times when we're reacting,
We're reacting to patterns that have been in our system for a long time to protect us.
We have to honor them.
We have to honor what's there to protect us.
There are parts in us that have kept us alive.
And that's not bad.
There's reasons we were angry.
There was reasons we were frustrated.
There was reasons we felt depression.
There's reasons we felt sadness.
Those are not bad things.
Do we want to feel joy and happy all the time?
Absolutely.
But when we come to terms with the fact that those emotions were there to protect us and we need to honor them and feel them and allow them to flow through us,
Then we're going to start to see what these patterns are and unraveling them.
And I know from firsthand knowledge how far I've come,
Especially in a relationship,
To the point where I've never felt so safe.
I've never felt so seen.
I've never been able to see somebody or hold space for somebody as much as I can.
And really,
It starts with that gap.
And then when you're in that gap,
It's about honoring the patterns and honoring the emotion that's being processed in that time.
And as soon as you honor that and see the trauma and witness it,
Because that's what happens.
Trauma gets stored in our bodies if it's not witnessed.
And sometimes when we're 12,
6,
8,
We don't understand why it's happening to us.
So we go,
Oh,
We're going to put it there so that when we're older,
We can see it.
And that's exactly what this is.
So in your day-to-day life,
I would love for you to start seeing patterns and being mindful of what emotions are continually coming up.
I had a friend that was always very reactive and very angry when his mother would come to visit.
He would get frustrated and angry.
And I'm not sure what happened with that,
But we were talking about it.
And he said,
He said,
I just don't understand why I'm so angry.
And he was eventually starting to see the patterns of,
Oh,
When she says this,
When she does this,
Then you're unraveling and you're digging deeper into the layers to go,
Oh,
When I was six and she made this dinner and she screamed at me so loudly that I thought I was going to die.
That's probably what it is.
That's why I'm angry.
That's why I'm hurt.
And I'm lashing out because of it.
Most of the time,
It's something that happened when you were a child.
So take a peek,
Take a peek at your day,
Maybe journal at the end of the day and say,
What emotions,
Good or bad,
Came up today that I'm starting to see a pattern with?
And who was there?
What time of day was it?
What was the weather like?
All these things come into factor.
What was it smelling like?
What were your senses sensing in that moment?
And write those down.
And that's the best way to decode reactions and understand your trauma.
So best of luck with that.
I hope that you find much more peace in your day-to-day by understanding what it is that's bringing you out of that peaceful place.
Speaking of peace,
Until next time,
Peace and love.
