TRIGGERS - What To Do About Them

Today's topic is triggers.

The last blog I did was on rejection. It's the same low-energy, low-vibe topic.

Every last one of us has been triggered. 

It's not necessarily about a major traumatic experience.

It's just the dissatisfaction of not getting our needs met, trying to navigate our power, and trying to overcome other personalities that might be more developed or assertive than our own. 

Finding agreement within yourself is important because you'll never see full agreement with other people. 

Some ideas and things exist, but their lifestyle doesn't match yours, or their personal relationship choices don't match your idea. 

You know what's best, so you won't ever find that alignment outside yourself. 

You have to be aligned within yourself.

Wayne Dyer talks about squeezing an orange. 

If you squeeze an orange, what will come out of it? Whatever's coming out of an orange is what's inside the orange—most likely orange juice. 

But when we're squeezed, when we're pressed, when we're under stress, that's where the pressure is. 

That's why we're being squeezed: There's something we feel stressed about, like our performance, pleasing others, being enough, or belonging. 

Those are all things that cause us stress. 

If we think we're not doing something we should be doing, we feel some stress because shame and guilt are the same thing. 

So, should is stressful. Let's not should on ourselves. That's not nice. 

Looking at what is coming out of you, those are the emotions you have not yet processed. 

Unprocessed emotions trigger this because as soon as you process them, you put them behind you as soon as you let go of them. 

Guess what? You're never bothered by that thing. Again, you really are not. 

Now, this is not a hundred percent foolproof. 

There are a lot of different versions of the same kind of yucky energy. 

I was talking about yesterday, or a couple of episodes ago, that rejection is just one of the emotional energies associated with suicidal ideology. 

There are many levels, and we're probably never going to be smart enough unless you're super intuitively gifted and have developed the gift of understanding which emotions are setting you off or that you're even triggered. 

Let's start at the beginning here because being triggered is only obvious to some. 

When you're going through it, when it's you. 

When somebody else is having a hard time, we can identify it right now. It's like, you're struggling. 

Do you need an app? How about a snack? 

When it comes to us, it's like, ooh, that bothered me. Or, ooh, that person is driving me crazy. 

As parents, we probably say this many, many times a day. 

When we've never parented before, we have little kids, and they're doing stuff. We're like, where did you get that? Why are you doing that? Stop doing that. 

We are triggered, and our stress climbs throughout the day. 

By the end of the day, we have no patience. 

I remember a meme where it talks about or shows a picture of Barney. It's like, this is me in the morning. Barney the dinosaur. 

Then the evening picture was a picture of Godzilla, flame-throwing and burning everything in his sight. He's like, this is me at night. It's very accurate. 

On a regular day, when you've given your best and given it all, you probably didn't get enough sleep and still put it all out there. 

You have way more patience in the morning than at night. 

At night we're triggered. It's like, I'm not safe, I'm tired. 

I don't have a means of protecting my energy anymore or managing all the energy in the room, and I'm tired despite getting less sleep. 

When that's going on, we're triggered, and when we lose our patients, we're triggered. 

It can be huge. It can be big stuff, you know? 

I can't even tell you how many times in my childhood I experienced unfairness. 

Unfairness is a huge trigger, and I'm increasingly aware of it. It is like, Oh, you're triggered. 

Stop. Oh, you're triggered. You need to get your needs met. Oh, you're triggered. 

When you are reactive, whatever comes out is the emotion unprocessed as a child. 

I'm not going to go into the unfairness of the. 

When your brain is triggered, you turn into ControlZilla. Let's just say that. 

My mom was ControlZilla a lot, a lot, a lot. Never out in public, out in public, she wore that very happy face. 

Behind the scenes, I heard a comedian once say that his mother's shoe was a boomerang. 

She liked to talk on the telephone and was happy to do so, but she was unhappy that her children were making background noise that she didn't appreciate. 

She would take her shoe off and just whew, oh my goodness.

It's like, Hello, Dr. Heading's office. Then, making mean faces to us, trying to get us to stop talking behind the scenes so it would sound professional in the background. 

Some of that is just a humorous part of the not-fun part of my childhood. 

For me, well, and first of all, let's just say who you are. 

I'm a Libra, and Libras must find balance. Unfairness is a huge trigger.

If you know anything about yourself, what you were created for, how you were created, the parts of you that function well in a certain situation, and the parts of you that fall apart when things are not in the situation you think they should be, you will be triggered. 

So, the trigger. 

If I can just pull this together, sometimes my brain is just going boom, boom in a million different directions. 

Pulling it together, a trigger is an unhealed or unprocessed emotion coming from you. 

It has something to do with who you are, how you're made, and your character, values, truths, and untruths. It's not satisfying to you, and you're unhappy with the outcome. 

Somebody didn't perform the way you needed them to, so now you're not happy. 

Somebody could have performed in a way that they shouldn't have performed, and you're not happy because they imposed it; they trespassed on your ground. 

When those kinds of things are happening, what is the emotion you feel? What is actually coming up? What is the problem? What's the issue in you? 

If you can name it, you can process it. 

I am very intuitive and see both sides of the story. 

I could never win a debate. I just couldn't because I'm like, what? I see you robbed a store. Yeah, I can see that you didn't have love in your life growing up. 

It's like, oh, you got robbed. I can see how frustrating it is after all the work you put in to run an honest business. 

Then somebody comes and takes advantage of you. I can see both sides. 

Unfairness to me can come up quite a bit because it's unfair that somebody didn't get love as a child. It's unfair that somebody got their business tampered with. 

That’s unfair, but when it disrupts my life, I can see it out there and be objective. 

However, when it disrupts my life, 

When I'm all up in retelling the story and trying to control all the outcomes in my mind, I feel like I'm in the shower when I think about what happened. 

You're running through all the scenarios in your mind and trying to give somebody a piece of your mind about how they should have known that was the wrong thing to do.

They shouldn't have done it to you when you were a child, or they shouldn't have taken advantage of you for their well-being and all the things. 

That is just an unprocessed emotion. 

In the grand scope of things, once you're out of childhood, you have the ability to heal yourself. 

You have the ability to take personal responsibility for how you feel. 

You have the ability, and I hope you're taking advantage of it because it's wonderful to be your own person, your own boss, and use your free agency on your terms to choose what is right and wrong for you. 

Then when somebody tries to impose their values on you, you can pull back a little bit and go, Oh, that's just them talking. 

They just need to feel better. That has nothing to do with me. I got it. 

That's when we're healed and processed. 

We've taken that process or that unprocessed unfairness. 

Let's just use that as an example. 

You're just taking that unprocessed unfairness and saying, Oh. You need to manipulate or control my outcomes, and it's okay. 

You can do that because I don't have to let it affect me. I can push back, leave the room, draw a hard line, and we just don't talk anymore. 

Whatever it needs to do, you have the power to change the outcome there. 

Now, I'm not talking about when you were a child that you didn't have the power to tell someone to stop doing what they were doing that was harming you. 

Those are much bigger triggers and much bigger trauma and emotions to process because there's the emotions are compounded. 

When something happened to you as a child, and you didn't have the emotional maturity to process what was happening because it had happened to you, it blindsided you. 

It wasn't with your permission, and it wasn't maybe even with your parents' permission; it just happened to you. 

There's just so much more to it, right? It's just a much, much bigger wound. 

But if let's say you were a child and you're like, I want to go out and play, and your mom was like, well, this is not a good time because it's snowing and it's freezing and it's flu season and we don't want you to get sick. 

Then you're like freaking out; it took away your ability to just do what you want to do. You harbored some ill will in your little self.

I'm taking a very light example here. 

If you're especially prone to not following the hard, so to speak, if you just don't like someone to tell you what to do and when to do it, there's a good chance that the same emotion comes up.

When somebody tries to stop you from doing what you're doing because they don't think it's in your best interest, even though you're like, but, if it's not, I get to pay the price. 

You don't get to have a say in it. 

So again, that's you checking in with me. It's like, oh, they love me. 

They're trying to keep me safe and prevent something that will not benefit me. 

In those cases, just check-in. 

If you can name the emotion, you can process it. It's like, huh? That sounds like someone's trying to stop me from living as I want. Is it true? 

Maybe, but is it true that they have the power to do that? No. 

What do you do? Thank you for your concern, but I'm going to be okay. That's it. 

If this is a person in your life that does it all the time, and you're like, I'm so sick and tired of this person trying to decide what's best for me out of the concern that they have, then that's a conversation.

It's not just thank you for being concerned, but I will be okay. 

If it's affecting you negatively, then it's a conversation that you need to have where you can draw boundaries. 

You can put lines in the sand if necessary. You can say things like, I appreciate your concern, but this comes up a lot, and I will be fine. 

If something comes up and it's not to my benefit, I will discover what doesn't work for me so I can govern my life accordingly. 

I appreciate you not interfering anymore. 

That is processing an emotion. Otherwise, we're just going to be mad at this person. 

We're just going to be angry with them. We will send them laser beams from our eyes and think ugly things about them, which only hurts us. Yeah, it doesn't hurt them. 

Well, energetically, it can hurt them. 

They don't know they're being hurt, but it's worse for you. 

If you're doing this and sending bad vibes to other people, you're the one holding those bad vibes in. 

Those will continue to come out. Those bad vibes, they'll continue to come out. 

If that's bugging you, raises that negative energy in you, and it comes out when you're being squeezed or pressed. 

You're going to be like, okay, what is that? 

It comes up when I talk to Susie Bob, or when I'm at work, when I'm vying for a position, an award, a raise, or a pat on the back.

If it keeps coming up, name it and then take your personal power back. I'm sorry. You don't have the right to do that; tell me what to do with my life. I appreciate your concern. That's nice, but it's not necessary, and I don't require it. 

That's you taking your power back. 

Then that emotion kind of goes away because from then on, you have the language, you have the presence of an awareness to say, wow, I'm triggered right now. 

Sometimes, triggers can sneak up on us. 

If you're not familiar with realizing that you are triggered, you may be triggered by being super tired. 

I personally get triggered If someone disrupts my sleep out of inconsideration that they're like, well, I'm awake. So I can turn the heater on and close the door.

You're going to fry in the bedroom, where the heater is much more powerful than the rest of the house. It's going to wake you up, and you're going to lose sleep. 

I've had that happen to me before. I'm surprised by how angry I am because it goes back to my childhood, when someone would wake me up in the middle of the night, flip my light on, and then walk down the hall at one o'clock in the morning. 

You know, or someone running into my room petrified that they're going to be killed and locking my door and hiding in my room in the middle of the night where I'm like startled awake or even when I was much smaller.

We were asked to get out of bed and watch our parents argue, and then the police would come over.

I'm telling you that stuff happened in my childhood, and it happened in the middle of the night because people were up way too late past their bedtime and were not in good positions to make good decisions. 

They were triggered entirely, which caused my little nervous system and me to be triggered as well.

When you're triggered by something, you have to pay attention to what is it that makes you feel unsafe. 

What needs do I have that need to be met? What power do I have to set this situation right? 

Let me give you one more quick example. 

I was talking to somebody who I cared about very much. In this conversation, all of a sudden, she was talking about how people would treat her like she was handicapped and that they would. 

She talked to somebody else face to face, acting like she didn't have a brain. It just made her angry to the core. 

Well, first of all, that anger of somebody not showing respect and disregarding her because she was in a wheelchair happened to her. 

I guarantee that at some point in her childhood, she wasn't in a wheelchair, but she felt powerless to change how people were treating her. 

That was the undercurrent energy that made her angry as she zeroed in on this particular situation. 

All of a sudden, I was in her line of sight listening to her, and she lumped me into that category, and she was like, you did the same thing to me. 

I was like, what? Which triggered me because then she started saying you can't stand there with your arms folded because that means you're not listening to me, and I was like wait a minute. 

You can't tell me how to stand.

We were like going back and forth; her trigger triggered me. If this was before, I could say, " oh, I'm triggered. 

Instead, I was like you are a ControlZilla, and I was so upset with her for lumping me into a category and telling me what my intentions were to make her feel like a non-viable human being.

I was like, I've never had that intention towards you. I am sorry. 

Anyway, identifying is the only way to recover that relationship again, even though now I am aware of what triggers her. 

It helps me have more empathy and compassion for when she's triggered and not to take it personally. 

It's like, okay, I can see this is really bothering you, and to step away. When you calm down, I'll go calm down, and I'm going to make some lunch. 

We'll have something nice to eat, and it will be okay. 

That gives everyone in the room the opportunity to assess what just happened. 

Why am I so upset with that? 

This person is amazing and can also process emotions when they are brought to her attention. 

That was an excellent opportunity to have a good conversation and strengthen the bond. 

I know you were so upset. I want you to know I love you and that I did not do anything intentionally.

I may not have considered it the same way you did, but certain things have to be in place before something can transpire. 

That made you think that I was taking your power of choice away.

I am so sorry that that's what you thought was happening, but I guarantee. I love you. And I will be aware of that. 

If that's what you thought was happening, I will self-check and see if I can correct it.

I can't change to make her feel better, but I can be aware of what her triggers are. I don't step the poop too. You know? 

This is important: self-awareness, knowing when you're triggered and when you're not. 

It could be as simple as being tired, or it can go way back to some traumatic experiences and some emotional neglect. 

If that's happening, then it's within us to be aware, name the emotion, and give it space. 

What needs to happen for this emotion to be turned and changed? 

The situation with my friend that brought up a lot of unfairness was that she wasn't giving me a chance to speak to my point of view and what was happening. 

She wasn't willing to listen either. She was just a tyrant about what was bothering her. 

That unfairness really riled me up, but what would fix that unfairness is to use my higher self words to tell her I love her, but this is after everybody cools down, right? 

This is not in the middle of the height of being triggered. This is after everybody has had a snack and at least one nap. 

You've had a chance to pull in your higher self, and your higher self can say, okay, what do I need? I need a chance to add and contribute to the conversation. 

If there is no chance to talk with somebody, that's a hard boundary. 

You need to know that person is not well enough or healthy enough to converse with you. That's okay. It's okay. 

But, if you need to write it out and burn that letter about this, you made me feel like this, and nobody can make you feel a certain way. 

It's you, it's you. That emotion came out of you. 

Then you have to process it. 

That journal writing is, it can be interesting because as you're like, you made me feel this way, you didn't give me a chance to speak, you were so unfair in your accusations, and you write that out, read it back, and read it as if you're talking to yourself. 

So, because I was always making accusations, even though I wasn't able to speak them, you're unfair, you're out of line. 

You have crossed the line. You are not my friend, after all. 

I was making accusations, too. It's processing. 

How might this affect your spouse, a coworker, or a boss? 

You have the power to process this. 

If it's not something you feel you can open up a conversation around, or you've got that sensitive spirit that makes you run from conflict. 

You can process it and give yourself the support that you need. 

Processing it means writing it out and taking personal responsibility. Write out that part. 

I guess I didn't take responsibility because I did this and this. 

Take responsibility for it. Name the emotion. It just felt so unfair to me. Unfairness. That was it. 

What does unfairness require to heal? 

It requires some less judgment. Less angst, less over-explaining, less I'm in trouble—less of all that.

When the energy comes down and is so much less than it was in a tight state, you're healing. 

You're recovering, so the trigger will no longer be as strong in that particular emotion next time. 

Then burn it, let it go, and give it back to God. 

There's nothing you can do to change other people. 

You've tried, literally. I know you have. I've tried. I know I have. 

We're not in charge of other people. We don't have stewardship over how other people treat us, behave, or trigger us. 

We can't stop it or fix it. 

All we can do is take personal responsibility for what is ours, and that's really important. 

You just burn it, give it back to God, take in all the air, all the breath, breathe in, let it out, let it go, and know that you are supported, that you can tell yourself, next time I will have an ease about me. 

Next time, I will see that they're having a hard time. Next time, I will go and give myself the support I need because if you get upset, there's a time in your life. 

You can go back and nail that story. You're like, that's exactly what happened to me when I was six. 

If you continue and allow yourself to be triggered, you will act like a six-year-old. 

You have to go back and find that story. The first story you think of is the one you must focus on. 

Put your eyes on it, put your heart on it. 

How did that make me feel? Why did I think I felt powerless, or why did somebody impede my free agency? What was it? Process it.

Look at it and then take personal responsibility for what's yours. 

Forgive yourself for holding it in. Forgive the other person for not making good decisions in their life or not being able to see the harm they're causing. 

There are so many angles to it, but forgive this here because you're the only one who can help me feel better. 

You have to make that six-year-old feel supported. 

You have to write down the things that will be more supportive to you next time because, sure, shooting life will offer you many opportunities to practice this emotion you said you wanted to overcome. 

It's totally in your court. 

You get to decide what will work for you and what will not. 

You get to decide how to use your free agency. 

You get to decide to name the emotion that's coming up in the moment you feel stressed. 

As soon as you do, magic happens because there's one less negative emotion in you to process, and that's when your life gets better. 

That's when you find the answers from within. 

That's when everything changes, and you react less negatively in the rest of your life and more positively in the support of others. 

Note: You can access the full blog content in audio versions on Spotify and YouTube. Happy listening! 🎧 

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