How to Heal Your Emotional Triggers
Our emotional triggers can keep us stuck and single. In this video, you’ll learn how we get them and how to heal them.
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Dating and relationships are fertile ground for emotional triggers. What are triggers, where do they come from, and how do we heal them? That’s what I’ll be talking about in this video.
How to Heal Your Emotional Triggers
First, let’s explore what emotional triggers are and where they come from.
As children, we experience pain or suffering that we don’t know how to deal with. Many times, we don’t realize that what we’ve experienced is not healthy or ‘normal’. It’s all we know. Our caretakers are supposed to keep us safe, and they don’t always do a great job.
As adults, we can become triggered by experiences that remind us of those old painful feelings from childhood. If we don’t learn how to identify and heal our triggers, we try to manage those painful feelings in unhealthy ways, like numbing ourselves by shopping, overeating, overexercising, or scrolling endlessly on social media. Some of us shut down or yell when triggered.
The first step in healing triggers is to identify what they are.
Do any of the following situations trigger you?
- Feeling rejected.
- Fear of abandonment.
- Feeling helpless.
- Feeling unvalued or ignored.
- When someone is unavailable.
- Receiving a disapproving look.
- Feeling blamed or shamed.
- Feeling judged or criticized.
- When someone is too busy to make time for you.
- When someone doesn’t seem happy to see you.
- When someone comes on to you sexually in a needy or forceful way.
- Feeling controlled.
- Feeling smothered.
Which of these triggers you? You may identify with one or more.
Now that you’ve identified your triggers, take some time to think about and perhaps even journal about the first time you felt that way. This may bring up some painful memories, so please be kind and compassionate to yourself as you do this exercise.
A common way that most of us deal with triggers is to NOT deal with them at all. It’s natural to want to avoid past pain. That’s why we use avoidance techniques.
Which of the following avoidance techniques have you participated in when you’ve been triggered?
- You get angry.
- You get needy.
- You become a people-pleaser.
- You shut down and withdraw from the other person.
- You blame someone else for your pain.
- You turn to an addiction—food, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, shopping, work, gambling and so on.
If you can relate to any of these avoidance techniques, how do you feel when you participate in them? You may feel good momentarily, but in the long run, you will feel empty, upset, and depleted. The pain will linger, and not go away unless you do the deeper work of healing your triggers.
That’s why it’s important to be very honest with yourself about where your triggers started and what your responses to your triggers are. This inner work will help you process and heal your triggers.
Otherwise, we end up taking it out on the people we love.
To begin healing, notice when a trigger occurs. Then, take a step back and observe yourself from outside yourself, as if you were a journalist.
Saying something like, “Oh, there goes my trigger again” will help you see the trigger as something outside of you. It doesn’t define you anymore. When you give it less power, it begins to stop triggering you.
Healing your emotional triggers will help in ALL your relationships. That’s why it’s an important part of my upcoming communications course. If you’d like to become a better communicator and process your emotions so you always know what to say, when to say it, and how to create deeper connections, join today. We begin February 1st, and I won’t be teaching this course again for at least 6 months. Registration expires in a few days. Join us now!
If you’re feeling stuck in dating and relationships and would like to find your last first date, sign up for a complimentary 1/2 hour breakthrough session with Sandy https://lastfirstdate.com/application
Join Your Last First Date on Facebook https://facebook.com/groups/yourlastfirstdate
Get a copy of Sandy’s book, Becoming a Woman of Value; How to Thrive in Life and Love.
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