A trigger is an event or a conversation that invokes an emotion and a feeling in your body.
Sometimes it’s a happy one. I think most times when we think of a trigger and what triggers us it’s usually related to an unhappy one.
What these triggers do is hit a pain point, somewhere within, that is usually related to our beliefs about our worthiness or the beliefs we have about being not good enough.
We feel it in our body. We feel it in our body and by the emotion it invokes, but we don’t always know what to do with those feelings and emotions or even have the awareness of why we are reacting the way we are.
This episode is dedicated to help you understand your triggers and what to do with them.
I hope you enjoy this episode.
You can't hide from yourself
Let’s talk about the things that get you fired up. Sometimes they are small things that cause a small reaction and other times they’re big things that cause a bigger reaction.
We suppress and ignore unhealed pain but the right people will always show up to show you what you need to look at. They say or do something that triggers a reaction and almost all the time it triggers how you feel about yourself, specifically around your feelings of worthiness and whether you are good enough.
For example:
When I first started out as an entrepreneur in the coaching arena, I started out with one of my sisters.
We had started a self-help business. She was leading the way of our business because she had more experience in business than I did at the time.
She had a vision for what we would create and immediately I had my own ideas about how I wanted to contribute to the business.
I had a pocket of people that I wanted to help, very specifically, parents of teens because my kids were teenagers at that time. I wanted to offer my experiences as a parent to other parents who were perhaps having the same challenges that I was having with my kids at the time.
As we were building the business and putting our website together, I would write pieces, I love to write, and send them to her to be uploaded to our website.
I was really proud of my work and excited about what I had written but every single time the feedback was, ‘It’s good but … ‘ and she would send me back her edits which looked like complete rewrites that didn’t sound like me at all.
I remember how this made me feel. I felt like what I had to offer was never not good enough for her, and that it was not worthy of being on the website.
I knew how defeated and angry I felt but I didn’t know what to do about how I was feeling. In spite of my efforts to open up and talk to her about how I felt, which was usually intimated, I could not get past how hurt I felt and eventually I left the business.
I pushed down my hurt by making it her fault.
I didn’t have the awareness then that this situation wasn’t about what she was doing to me that made me feel horrible about myself, it was life trying to help me to see my own worth and know that whether I worked with her or not, I had something valuable to contribute.
It took me a bit of time to see the situation for what it was but in the meantime, the Universe continued to give me experiences, people, and events that would continue to trigger my, ‘I’m not good enough’ pain.
Maybe you can relate in some way in your own life.
When we aren’t aware that life experiences happen for us so we can grow instead of thinking our life and people are crap, we look for ways to cope because we don’t know what to do with how we feel by being triggered.
So what do we do? We look for ways to cope.
The more we ignore and suppress, the more intense the experiences become and the more we look for ways to cope.
We all have different things that we do to help us cope with pain but we don’t want to go through our life just coping; we want to be thriving in our life.
We want to have the tools so that we know what to do when we are triggered and balance out and heal that part of us.
It’s not an easy process. My process took me well over 20 years but that doesn’t mean your process has to take that long.
Be brave enough to face your fears
As we’re going through our life, doing what we do, managing and coping the best we can, if we still have stuff that we haven’t worked through we will continue to be presented with people and situations that will show us what needs to be looked at.
I did a social post this last week before this episode and it said,
That is true about our triggers. A lot of times we don’t know what to do with how we’re feeling.
If you were to think about this and think back to your childhood, were you taught what to do with how you were feeling and how you were expressing the emotion?
I grew up in an era where, if we cried parents would say, ‘Stop your crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’, so we never learned what to do with our feelings and emotions.
If we haven’t learned to express ourselves and learn that it is safe to have feelings and emotion then we don’t have the tools for doing that as we get into adulthood.
We are constantly being presented with people, conversations and different events that are showing us the very parts of us that we need to look at but what we do instead is we run away from ourselves.
The more we run away the more we look to the next thing that will help us cope and when that doesn’t work then we up the ante on the coping and sometimes things can really get out of hand and we find ourselves in a position where we’ve developed some type of dependency;
- on a person,
- on a substance,
- to an activity that isn’t healthy for us.
No one thing is bad for any of us but done in excess, it takes us out of our balance and it takes us away from ourselves.
Ways that you can stop running from yourself
I would like to offer you some ways that you can stop running because running is really painful. It is really tiring and exhausting.
Your worthiness fears or your not good enough fears and your not lovable enough fears are relentless. They don’t get tired. They don’t get exhausted. They’re just there and when we do all of this running away they keep on chasing. They just don’t go away.
We have no other choice but to stop running, turn around, look at what it is we’re running from, what is being triggered within us, and sitting with that damn uncomfortable feeling.
And sometimes that uncomfortable feeling is really painful.
That’s the hard part! because it is uncomfortable and it is painful. It’s just not a good feeling but the coping mechanism that we use? that’s not a good feeling either.
It’s also part of your past and no longer needs to be part of your current and future reality. Without doing this work your growth and your life are stunted.
So let’s look at some of the ways that you can do with your worthiness your triggers.
The first thing you can do is notice.
- Notice when your blood starts to boil,
- Notice when you find yourself having a pretty good day and then all of a sudden you have an interaction of some type and your mood drops,
- Notice how your negative self talk kicks in.
In the split second, instead of running away to that thing you do when something triggers you, can you take a breathe and see the interaction as if you were someone who happened to pop in to watch.
Can you just detach for a moment and breathe?
Then what would it look like if you just sat with how you were feeling for a few minutes, grabbed a notebook and wrote down what you were feeling instead?
Writing helps to get your thoughts onto paper and out of your mind. When you first start to write it all down it looks a lot like anger, blame, shame and guilt. That’s okay. It’s part of the process.
Can you just be okay with whatever comes up and give yourself permission to have every feeling and emotion and not run away from yourself?
You aren’t looking for answers, you’re giving yourself permission to be and feel perhaps for the first time ever.
I find when you take a heartbeat and be with what you’re feeling instead of trying to run away from it, when you let yourself be with the experience, oftentimes it will diffuse itself; the intensity of the emotion will start to diffuse and you come back into balance with yourself.
When you practice being with what you feel you can start to ask yourself deeper questions, such as,
‘Why did they or this upset me so much?’
Your external world is a reflection of our inner world. So when things come up from the experiences you have, it is life’s way of trying to help you heal and know yourself at a much deeper level.
I hope you have found this episode helpful.
My work is helping women feel better about themselves and reconnect with the essence of who they are.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please look around website or follow me on Instagram @IrisSirianni and until the next episode,
Be brave. Forgive yourself and others. Live big. Trust yourself. Make the tough decisions even though it may break your heart. Trust that what and who leaves your life is meant to leave. Have faith that the space that’s left will be filled with new experiences and opportunities that expand your heart and your life.