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As someone who is highly sensitive and has experienced feeling really emotionally triggered much of my life, I have to say- I'm at this place in my life where I'm reflecting on this experience in a different way.
For much of my early adulthood, especially my early years as a mother, I was very reactive to these sensations that would come up in my body when feeling dysregulated or anxious or in this space of fight or flight- reacting from that place of trying to escape.
Because let's be honest, it's so uncomfortable.
But what I can see now in retrospect is I really lacked the depth of understanding of why the experience was happening. I lacked the tools to hold space for that experience to get curious. And as a result, I lacked the opportunity to grow and heal what my body was actually pointing me towards, but I was resisting.
I'm curious if you can relate to this?
How I’m reframing the way I see my triggers
The older I get and the further I get into my parenting journey, my adulting journey, and just evolving as a human, I am starting to look at these moments that I feel triggered and uncomfortable as these little glimmers of opportunity.
And this may sound crazy, but hear me out. I am literally reframing the way I feel in these moments rather than rejecting this part of me.
Rather than:
Letting my mind go into these automatic patterns of judgment and criticism and wanting it to be different than it is.
Instead, I've been:
Leaning into curiosity around the trigger and seeing it as this opportunity to learn something about myself, to heal a part of myself that needs my love and attention and is still wounded.
It's been a very empowering shift, and it's showing up in all different kinds of ways because we're triggered all the time.
Finding courage in the tough moments
It might be your kids: the reaction, a meltdown in public where you immediately go into fight-or-flight mode, wanting to escape, change, or fix whatever the situation is.
It might be after you go to dinner with a friend and come home, and you just have this feeling: something feels off. What is it? Your mind wants to take over and make sense of it. Maybe it was them, maybe it was me, maybe it was that thing I said.
Having the courage to pause, reflect, and sit in our discomfort is very confronting. But it is so expansive when we start honing that muscle.
There was a quote. I read recently, by Cory Muscara:
Inner peace doesn't come from getting better at tolerating discomfort. It comes from connecting to the part of you that is expansive enough to hold the full human experience without being defined by it.
And I relate to this so much. It ties back into our need for emotional regulation and expanding our window of tolerance and all of these buzzwords we hear thrown around, but it can be really hard to embody that and truly understand what it means.
Self-love and growth is the goal
So I love this idea of:
How can we be more open to feeling the discomfort of the moment? Feeling these confronting emotions?
And rather than judging them, dismissing them, wanting to change, fix or react from that space- taking that step back to get curious and become more self-loving in those moments.
Because I think the knee-jerk reaction is to go into self blame.
Like: “I shouldn't be feeling this way. It should be different, or I should be different. My child should be different. This environment, the situation should be different.”
Rather than going at it from this blame place of there being something wrong. What if this is actually happening for me? Not against me.
This is actually for me to learn, to grow, to evolve, to heal, to move on to the next lesson. And with this reframe and the way I'm looking at these moments in my life, I'm learning so much about myself.
It's like these layers of an onion because healing is just this ongoing process, right?
Better understanding ourselves, learning, growing- it's constant.
The work is never done.
So, we can embrace that the journey is the work that is never done, that it is the process of growing, evolving, healing, and desiring to show up differently in our lives.
When you think of that as the goal, then the triggers are just the moments along the way that are helping us get closer to our true selves and how we want to be and show up in the world. Helping us find who we want to be and how we want to feel in our lives.
I'm curious if this lands with you? How do you feel about triggers when they come up in your life? How do you respond to those triggers? And is it something that you're open to getting more curious about? I will tell you for myself this shift in perspective has really been a game-changer.
Reframe Friday: Handling Our Triggers