What Do You Do When You’re Triggered?

What do you do when you’re triggered? 

A trigger is an event that stimulates an emotional or behavioural response, large or small. It can be as small as the bus coming late, or it could be as big as, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from being in the war. 

Most of us are triggered throughout the day good and bad. You can have good triggers when somebody laughs and it installs a memory of when you had a really good time. Or you may hear a song or smell something that immediately takes you to a happy time. 

But most of our triggers are emotional triggers that take us down our spiral, and then it screws us up inside and we don’t feel good about ourselves. 

But what do you do when you have such big emotions? When you’ve been triggered it feels like you’re out of control. Often people rage or scream, or they start to blame the other person (if another person is involved) or they project or avoid people entirely.

They avoid the conflict which doesn’t make it go away, or maybe they vent to somebody or step into righteousness, or accuse people. There’s all sorts of reactions that people have when triggered.  

Whatever it is, your emotions are your emotions, so you need to feel them without judgment and do not suppress them. You need to simply feel what you feel. 

But when you’re in a place of anger or any kind of negative emotion, it’s not good for you to hang onto that any longer than you need to process it, because it’s eating away at you somewhere in the background, if not front and center! 

What’s really happening when you’re triggered is that there’s another emotion going on underneath that trigger. Why would the bus coming late trigger you? Sure, inconvenient, but maybe it’s because you have an important meeting that you need to get to and if that doesn’t happen, you’re going to miss an interview or something like that. That’s very literal.  But it could fuel deeper feelings of failure.

There’s almost always a deeper underlying emotion that we’re not in touch with. And that’s why we’re feeling so out of control.

What I really encourage and invite you all to do is that when you’re triggered, feel what you feel, but don’t hold on to it any longer than you need to, and then start to investigate. Read some books, talk to a therapist, go for a walk in the woods because it’s very good to get grounded. Do some physical activity to move that energy through your body so that it’s not all just stuck in you.

Let go of the negative emotion if you’ve processed it, and understand why you were triggered. 

Because when you start to unpick the triggers and understand the deeper reasons why, then it’s a gift because you see the parts of yourself that still need to be worked on, the parts that still need some healing. 

We all have deep core root deep emotions that vary, from not feeling valued or seen, or not feeling respected; deep things that we learned from our childhood. 

After you get over your initial upset about it, then turn inwards and start to really investigate the truth of what’s going on for you at a deeper level. 

And then your triggers can be your gifts and the more work you do then starts to balance things out and you’re not triggered as much.

So if you’d like some help on how to do this, I recommend getting in touch with me. This is the kind of stuff I teach in From Fear Into Love. It’s wonderful to watch people shift so radically in the first week. A little bit of self awareness goes a long way.

Consciously consider booking a 20-minute mind-shift call and let’s have a conversation.

I’m so excited to announce the launch of my second coaching book Dating Your Life – Using Your Emotions As A Guidance Tool now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Check out my life-transforming From Fear Into Love course.

ALSO, if you would like to join my Facebook Group, The Spiritually Conscious Traveller.

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