This is somewhat of a follow-up from one of my previous posts, How Inner Healing and Health are Connected. Today, I am walking you through the seven steps I have used to process, release, and heal emotional triggers. So, if you would like to break old patterns that are keeping you stuck and holding you back, then grab a notebook and pen, get comfortable, and read on.
Alright, if you’ve been following my blog for a bit, you may have gathered by now, it is focused on what I call whole health, which is the physical body, the mind, and the soul. A huge part of our overall well-being has to do with our mental and spiritual well-being, yet we often we don’t think of these when we think of health. Our experiences over our lifetime, the things people say to us, the things that happen to us all get interpreted in our minds. They ultimately turn into beliefs, values, principles, and just our framework or paradigm for how we perceive and respond to our world. While we may have some conscious awareness of some of this, most of it is subconscious. A lot of it is things we picked up in our childhood or younger, formative years. They became beliefs so deeply ingrained in us that we think they are our truths; we don’t recognize them for the lies they often are.
I was completely unaware of this concept until about a year ago. As I sought my own wellbeing, and to get at the root of a lot of my own challenges and issues, I learned about emotional triggers and how they are key in self-healing. Through various coaching programs, self-help books, and research, I learned a process for healing emotional triggers. I have broken it down into seven steps:
- Learn to recognize your triggers.
- Identify the underlying emotion behind the trigger.
- Determine the last time(s) you felt this way.
- Trace it back to the first time you can remember feeling this way.
- Identify the beliefs you adopted as a result of the past incident.
- Create new beliefs.
- Forgive and release.
Inner healing is the process of self-healing past trauma, hurts, or various events, circumstances, or experiences you may not have been emotionally equipped to process at the time they occurred. In response to these things, we develop defense mechanisms to protect us. One of the ways this manifests is emotional triggers. So, what is an emotional trigger? It is essentially an emotional response to a situation, event, something someone said, something someone does, etc.
For all of my life, I just thought that my reactions to things were just my personality. I never realized they could be triggers, and I certainly never realized they could be healed. There were certain triggers and limiting beliefs I had that I knew weren’t normal, so to speak. For example, how hard I have always been on myself, how introverted I tend to be because I didn’t want to be seen, or how I used to struggle to look in the mirror because I struggled with body dysmorphia. I had gotten to a point where I just figured I had to live that way, because I couldn’t seem to overcome it no matter what I did.
It all stemmed from my childhood and early adolescence. I was bullied daily from about age 10 to age 14. Most of it was verbal, name-calling about my weight. There were multiple kids and groups of kids that did this to me. I have memories of seeing nothing but faces all around me laughing and just wanting to hide. Most of my bullies were boys and many would ask me out as a joke. It only took one time and I never trusted any boy that asked me out after that again.
By the time I was 12 the bullying had become physical. I had well over ten different kids that seemed to be on some planned rotation to bully me. It spanned the usual school groupings of kids, from the rich/preppy kids, to the more rough/harder kids and everyone in between. I got pushed down the stairs all the time. One boy threw a ball at me so hard in PE, on purpose, that it pushed the stud of my earring into my earlobe, causing me to bleed all over my shirt. I had to go to the doctor to get the earring removed from my earlobe. Another boy threw an unopened can of soda at me while I was walking through the middle of the quad at lunch. It hit my shin so hard I fell down from the pain and the soda exploded all over me. Everyone in the quad laughed. The same boy used to follow me around at lunch, throw food at me, and “moo.” PE was daily torture; if I missed the ball or messed up in any way during the sports we were playing I’d get relentlessly screamed at and verbally attacked.
Needless to say, I dreaded going to school. I’d beg my parents in tears to let me stay home. Worse, over time I had grown to hate myself. At some point I adopted the belief that they must all be right. After all it seemed like everyone in school hated me or found me repulsive. I was told day in and day out how disgusting, fat, and ugly I was. My clothes were made fun of, my hair; every aspect of my appearance was attacked every day. I started to believe it all at some point. I felt worthless. I remember how I avoided the mirror. I used to wish I would die and often tried to think of ways I could.
Of course, I grew up, and the memories of this faded, but the damage was done. My sense of self-worth ended up being tied to my weight. I eventually adopted a victim story that I lived by for many years. Over the years I built this paradigm where I had to be more in order to be worthy. I had to be as perfect as possible to make up for my body. I had to make sure there were no visible flaws in character, performance at work, fulfilling my obligations, etc.; there could be no room for anyone to criticize me. As I’ve discussed in previous episodes, I later found a program that taught me how to undo some of this; how to shift my mindset and love and accept my body and myself regardless of my weight or size. However, there was a pattern of self-destructive behaviors, patterns of relationships, and something of a defeated backstory that was still running in the background. This has led me to go through cycles of self-destructive behaviors over the years, until I started to use this process of healing emotional triggers that I am sharing with you here. I’ve broken this into seven steps, though this doesn’t have to be linear, or perfect in how you go about it.
1. Learn to recognize your triggers.
Ok, so before you can heal emotional triggers you have to learn how to recognize them. As I mentioned earlier, it is basically anything that causes an automatic, emotional reaction for you. So, take some time and reflect on what some of these are; most of us have some. For example, do you experience a reaction when you see another woman dressed a certain way, perhaps wearing very little or dressed in revealing clothing? Do you have a strong reaction when someone cuts in front of you in the grocery store line? Do you find you get emotional or upset trying on clothes when you go shopping? Does the idea of walking into a gym create an intense anxiety in you? Do you get jealous when your significant other is talking to another woman? Do you feel bad or shameful if someone helps you with something, does something for you without you asking, or offers to help you in some way?
These are all different examples of what emotional triggers can look like in day-to-day experiences. Your reaction is telling you something. It is trying to bring awareness to what you perceive as a threat in some way, because the thing that caused the reaction, on some level, reminds your brain or your nervous system or your ego of a similar past event. Another way this can show up, is not so much triggers as patterns of relationships. Some examples, have you had many friends or coworkers throughout life betray you? Do you tend to be the one who does more of the giving in a relationship? Does lying or cheating tend to be a common issue in your relationships? Again, these are all just different examples and there are many more than these. The point is these are all reflections of something going on within you. People reflect back to us what is already inside of us. When we start to change what is inside, we start to get different reflections from people. So, the first thing you need to do as you start to explore your own healing is to learn to recognize your own emotional triggers.
2. Identify the underlying emotion behind the trigger.
As you get more tuned into the things that trigger you, the next step is to find the underlying emotion behind the trigger. There is usually an initial emotion that triggers the response, but you want to get to the core emotion, which there are six: joy, surprise, love, anger, fear, and sadness. You want to use an emotion wheel to help you identify the core emotions from the emotion that triggered the response. There are many online you can find. Some of them organize into more core emotions, but most use six.
Most emotion wheels have three layers, an outer layer, with the largest list of emotions; a middle layer with additional emotions that are closer to the core emotions; and then the center, with the core emotions. To help illustrate how this works, here are a couple examples. Let’s use the example of anxiety walking into a gym. Anxiety is usually on the outside layer of the wheel. So you find it, and look to the next layer, which may have nervous, which will then take you to the core emotion of fear. Let’s use the trying on clothes as the next example. You might feel displeased or dismayed. So, you follow that to the next layer in and find, disappointment, perhaps shame, which leads you to the core emotion of sadness. Last let’s look at when you get triggered by what another woman is wearing. Let’s say you feel annoyed or aggravated initially. Follow that to the next layer and maybe you get to disgust, which will then lead to anger.
Ok, so hopefully that gives you a feel for how you identify the underlying emotions. This also gives you a feel for the range of emotions tied to each of the core emotions. This all helps you understand your own emotions. Allow yourself to feel them without judgement. You are becoming aware and stepping into your own healing and growth. Give yourself grace and try not to judge yourself. Be honest with yourself so you can release these patterns and heal.
3. Determine the cause of the trigger.
So now that you have a sense of what some of your emotional triggers may be and how to determine the emotions involved, you’re going to start paying more attention to them as they come up in day-to-day life. As they do come up, you want to start taking note of what causes them; what situations bring them up. You’re going to need to start journaling through these, though you can also process them more instantly as you get more familiar, or when you aren’t able to journal.
As you start with this, you likely won’t catch them right away. Something might happen, and then it may occupy your mind throughout the day, perhaps affect your mood and then you may realize or you might ask yourself, why am I feeling this way? This is where you want to identify the incident that initially caused the emotional trigger. What happened? What was the incident that caused or triggered the emotion? Take note of it, and journal it. Write down what happened, how you felt, what emotions were involved.
4. Trace it back to the last time you can remember feeling this way.
Once you’ve identified the trigger and the emotions, you want to think back to the last time you can remember that you felt that way. When was it? What was the situation? Who was involved? What things were said or done that caused those emotions in you? What emotions come up as you reflect on that previous situation?
Let me give you an example from one of my own, to help illustrate what this looks like. This is one I still process at different times, and as a side note, you’ll find that you will process various iterations of the same trigger or re-process the same trigger at different times. Just keep in mind it is layers and like all things health and wellness, it’s lifelong work. So, one I have is if I walk into a crowded place, a meeting room, store, restaurant, etc. and it seems like everyone is looking at me or staring at me. I immediately start to feel uncomfortable, anxious, sometimes inferior – like why are they looking at me? Something must be wrong with my outfit. I must look bad in this outfit. There must be something wrong with my hair. And so on, and so on. A similar thing happens if I am asked a question in front of a large group of people and all eyes are suddenly on me. I don’t like the feeling of being in the center of attention.
So, if I were working through this process, I’d pinpoint the initial feeling. In this case, it would be something like vulnerable, exposed, anxious, mortified, or inferior and then I’d trace that to fear. Next, I’d ask myself when was the last time I felt like this? One that comes up was at a party my ex-husband and I were at not long after we got married when he told someone how he wasn’t really that attracted to me when we first met, like he could take me or leave me kind of a tone, without saying that point blank, Everyone stares. Now in hindsight, they probably couldn’t believe what a total jerk thing to say that was, but I took their stares almost as validation of what he said. All the same emotions came up. So, you could stop here, and process this incident, or you can keep tracing it back further and further to identify all the instances that you felt that way. For me, it goes all the way back to being bullied in school. On an emotional and subconscious level, it takes me all the way back to when it felt like I was completely singled out and targeted by my whole school and had no escape from it.
So this is what you want to do in this part of the process. You’re trying to identify and trace back as far as your memory will allow to get at the first time you felt these emotions in a similar incident or event. That said, as you begin, you can go back to the first one you can remember and process from there, as this can be really difficult work and you may need to process piece by piece. Give yourself time and go at the pace that works for you. To give you the example I just did, I got all the way back to the school bullying after processing numerous separate trigger events that eventually led me back to that.
5. Identify the beliefs you adopted as a result of the past incident.
So here you are looking for what you have come to accept as truths or what are often referred to as limiting beliefs from these past events, hurts, or traumas. Taking my example again, some of the beliefs I had adopted was that my worth was in my weight and my looks. I wasn’t beautiful or worthy if I was overweight. In order for anyone to love and accept me I needed to be perfect, skinny. It was not safe to be seen or noticed. It was not safe to be in the spotlight. Attention of any kind was dangerous. People would always hurt me. There are many others, but I think you get the idea.
You want to write down as many as you can identify. A good way to do this is on a sheet of paper, write the limiting beliefs on the left side of the sheet. Some of them you may actually find from some of your own behaviors; so you can work backward from there to get to the underlying limiting belief. Examples of this are things like not buying certain clothes because you’re not yet at the weight you want to be, or not wearing certain things because you’re not “thin enough.” It may be that you don’t do certain things because you feel like you need to be better in some way first. These are all examples of limiting beliefs and how we stop ourselves from doing things we want to do.
6. Create new beliefs.
Now that you’ve identified and listed the limiting beliefs, or falsehoods that you’ve been living by subconsciously, you want to turn these into new, positive, uplifting beliefs. You want to write these down as well and a helpful way to do this is to write them next to the limiting beliefs on the right side of the sheet. Do this for each limiting belief you’ve identified.
Again, I’ll illustrate a few examples from my own. So, the limiting belief that my worth is in my appearance would be changed to my worth is not tied to my appearance. It is not safe to be seen or noticed would be changed to it is safe to be seen. People will always hurt me would be changed to I am surrounded by people who love and support me.
7. Forgive and release.
Once you’ve gone through all the other parts of this process I’ve laid out here, the last thing is to forgive and release. This helps let your subconscious know you are ready to shift and create a new paradigm for yourself. There are different ways you can do this. Some prefer, myself included, to go through each item you listed, and forgive those involved for their part in it as well as to forgive yourself for adopting that belief. Others, prefer to do it in a collective and forgive all the people involved in the various incidents listed and then forgive themselves for adopting the belief. However you prefer to do it, it helps to do this verbally – again, subconscious reprogramming. I like to tap on my heart as I say it and finish with the following prayer, which is called the Ho’oponopono prayer:
I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
Forgiveness is probably the most important part of all of this, as difficult as it might seem. There are certainly experiences, actions, deeds that we think of as unforgiveable and I don’t mean to dismiss those in any way. However, forgiveness is for your own wellbeing and peace. It is release. You are breaking the chains of that thing that happened from binding you in pain, anger, bitterness, victimhood, sadness, depression, sorrow, etc. Holding on to these emotions or holding onto to what someone did only hurts you in the long run.
This verse from Matthew 18, I feel is very fitting for this post and the process of this work. It is Matthew 18:21-22 and it reads then Peter came to him, and said, Lord how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven. Not only is Jesus saying that you must forgive over and over and over, and this includes yourself as well as others, but this is also another place in the Bible where we see sevens and I think that is so interesting for this episode, because seven is the number of spiritual awakening and forgiveness is integral to spiritual growth and awakening.
So, that is the process I have used for my own self-healing. It is one of many things I do, but this is really helpful for healing emotional triggers in particular. As with many of the other things I share in this podcast, there are lots of great resources out there that can help you with this. A lot of great books to help you understand some of what may be at the core of some of this for you. Depending on the severity of some of your past experiences, you may want to discuss some of this with a counselor or therapist to help. This work can be difficult because you are re-experiencing these past experiences, hurts, traumas. Only now you are on the other side of it, ready to understand and in a more mature place, where you may be better able to process these things that you weren’t capable of emotionally processing when they occurred. As uncomfortable and as unpleasant as this work can be, there is freedom in allowing yourself to sit with the emotions and feel them, process them, because then you get to choose something different and release and heal these things that have been hindering you without consciously realizing it.
As I dug into doing this for my own healing, I created a journal and published it on Amazon. I designed it to work through the process similar as I have outlined in this episode. It includes a free version of an emotional wheel I found online in doing this as well as pages with prompts to help work through emotional triggers, identify limiting beliefs, change those beliefs, and find forgiveness and healing. It is available on Amazon here: Growth & Healing Journal: A Tool for Personal Growth
I really hope this has been helpful to you. I hope you explore doing this work for yourself because it is truly life changing. The more you heal and shift the inside, the more you will see shifts and changes in the outside world around you. In addition to this process I’ve shared here, my inner healing also led me to energetic healing. I have since gone through training for this work and also provide energetic healing to others now. If you are interested in this, you can join my private Facebook group: Faith by Design.
Please share your thoughts in the comments. If you enjoy this blog and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also follow Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram or check out the Faith Fitness Joy podcast, available on most podcast apps. I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!
3 thoughts on “Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers”
Comments are closed.