07 Apr What to do when you’re triggered?
During the recent Becoming Safely Embodied course, as well as in the professional certification program which finished last week, a few participants acknowledged how much they want to change –> Preferably now. RIGHT NOW.
Magic wand kind of now.
[I can relate. Can you?]
When we’re overwhelmed with anxiety or depression we don’t see the benefit of each tiny moment that is happening within the larger shift in time. Yet it’s there.
It’s in learning to slow down time, open up space, that instead of making us more overwhelmed…we actually come into greater balance.
Barbara Fredrickson, a professor and researcher at the UNC Chapel Hill, describes this as the “Nourishing power of small, positive moments.”
This comes in simple moments, like when you’re caught up in someone laughing out loud and find yourself joining in. Or noticing your shoulders ease when someone you care about smiles back.
Every week, in my work in all my groups, someone will hesitantly tell me their truth: they can’t imagine good things.
Or they might make general statements about how things don’t work out. (Maybe you’ve thought something like this yourself? We all fall into this at times.)
When we’re in a non-optimal state we can get caught in a “negativity bias.”
That’s the slippery slope of the evolutionary magnetic pull. It’s not just years of habit that have us slide easily down that slope, but our evolutionary makeup that warns us to be prepared for the next bad thing that will happen.
Being positive, on the other hand, is a much harder hill/mountain to climb, or so it feels at first glance.
We are drawn to states that make us feel positive. We love the “hit” that comes from it.
That’s why we turn to the quick fixes, like over-consuming just about anything. Or getting the hit of feeling good by controlling. That can work too.
Generally the quick fixes don’t actually give us what we really want, especially because they don’t last. They don’t deal with the underlying needs, hopes, longings that are foundational to building a secure internal self.
So, what do we do?
We need to learn to make life more granular.
This idea of granularity is something I learned in my early years with meditation and yoga. Later I found the same idea in the academic research of Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the work of UCLA behavioral scientist, Robert Maurer.
When we make something granular we “look” into the “moment” to find many moments. Instead of denouncing how improbable it is that we could ever feel [x], [y], or [z], we slow down time and explore how to break things down into smaller and smaller components until we can “touch” it, become aware of it sensorially, through our experience.
That does bring on a difficult conundrum for many people with trauma and attachment wounding. Sensing into the body can be hard. When we try we might feel numb. Or so anxious that we shut down. Attuning to the body can be too darn complicated – so we avoid it altogether.
This is especially true when we’re triggered.
Yet the body can provide the doorway into the micro-moments of goodness. It’s where, if we learn how to do it, we access the molecules of ease, warmth, comfort. If we take one tiny, tiny, nano moment and connect it to another tiny, tiny micro moment we begin to build a bigger moment.
It requires our internal sensing apparatus to orient toward goodness more than toward the negative.
Yeah, I know, it’s hard for many of us to do.
It was for me, too. I didn’t have the basic skills I needed when I was doing my healing work so many years ago.
Which is why I put all the resources together…and continue to innovate.
I’ve come to learn (the hard way) that life does not have to be overwhelming.
It does not have to be a horrible repetition of the past.
We do not have to live triggered all the time.
There is a path through. And it works.
Please take a moment to give me your thoughts here.
And enjoy a FREE pdf: What To Do When You’re Triggered
The pdf even has a TWO checklists inside when you aren’t sure what to do.