Deep Wounds That Trigger

Trigger Warning — Today, I’m talking about deep emotional wounds and triggers.

I’m going to talk about the mechanics of emotional wounds and triggers and what you can do.
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We all have triggers, okay? For some of us, it’s being treated like we are stupid. For some of us, it’s criticism. For some of us, it’s people overly relying on you. All of us have triggers. So how do we manage them?

The reason why we react emotionally is that when we have an emotional wound inside of us that has not been healed and someone has triggers it, we react.

For example, we may have a deep emotional wound from childhood, but we have not allowed ourself to heal from it, so we act like it doesn’t exist.
In order to avoid the pain of feeling it, we ‘drug’ ourselves, but
sometimes we literally drug ourselves with alcohol or drugs. However, sometimes we ‘drug’ ourselves with food, sex, shopping, social media, exercise or yelling at someone; whatever it is, when we feel uncomfortable, we might try to distract ourselves.

Imagine it’s like this. You have a cut on your arm, and it’s a deep cut, and you feel pain. Ouchie! You know the cut must heal but in an attempt to just avoid the pain and see the deep wound you grab a roll of masking tape and wrap your arm to stop the bleeding and just so you don’t have to look at the cut. Then the cut gets infected, but that’s not a problem because if you feel pain you simply use a Novocaine so you don’t feel the pain. Plus, the wound is not visible to you because it’s under the masking tape. So
you go on with our life pretending you don’t have a wound covered up by masking tape.

Why do we do these types of things? In this world that we live in, as it relates to emotions, we are essentially told
it’s not suitable to have them. We are constantly gaslit into believing that feeling emotions means were weak, ridiculous, silly; it’s BAD to have negative emotions!

A kid might cry because he doesn’t want mommy to go to work. The mom says, “You gotta stop crying, someone has to make money.” or “No baby, don’t feel like that, it’s a part of life.”
While the second phrase is better than the first it still implies it’s not okay to feel bad, and it’s wrong.So then the kid is basically trained into swallowing their discomfort. Unfortunately, emotions work just like a wound on your arm. If you get a cut and treat it, it will heal. If you wrap it up in masking tape and act like it doesn’t exist, it will get infected under there. So when a kid feels depressed or worse has some kind of trauma and they don’t allow themselves to feel the emotional pain, the pain festers. It gets “infected.” The wound gets more significant. If someone so much as brushes up against it, it triggers pain.

Frequently, we think it’s the person’s fault for pulling our trigger. It’s really, an unhealed wound. Let me tell you a story. I used to have an issue with people lying to me.
I had a wound that was caused by a betrayal. When people would lie about anything I would be like, HOW FRIGGIN’ DARE YOU! It could be a lie as silly as a friend being late and telling me they got stuck in traffic. When the real reason was they didn’t want to have to explain that their mother-in-law started drama. Who then started crying and then coffee was spilt blah blah blah. So is it reasonable for me to say she betrayed me because she told a personal white lie? No. It was my unhealed emotional wound and she brushed up against it. She didn’t put an ax to it. She didn’t cut me. She simply brushed up against it. But the wound is “infected,” so it hurts like hell.

The goal is to heal the wound under the tape so that you are made whole again. Then if someone does actually trigger that wound, we can respond accordingly. Because right now, it doesn’t matter if someone is chainsawing it or brushing up against your wound; either way it feels painful as hell because the wound is not completely healed.

How do we heal the wound?
You must allow yourself to feel that very uncomfortable emotion and not just apply novocaine; you have to sit with the emotion.

I will often get triggered when someone talks down to me.
I get pissed. Then I will sit, literally sit and actually give a shape, a color and a place of origin for the emotional pain somewhere on the body.

Emotions register to your body as a physical sensation. That is why when you cry you feel it in your throat. When you are mad, you feel it in your belly. And it works with the positive too. When you are in love, you feel it; you know where… lol

Say you are mad. The sensation of mad is originating from my heart
it looks red, and it looks like a diamond. And then you sit with it,
like 10 minutes. Just look at it. What this achieves is it transports you out of your brain. The mad sensations are wanting to declare something bad to the person who brushed up against your wound. “It was her fault!”

Our brain is wanting to intellectualize all of it. But emotions cannot be intellectualized, they have to be felt. So sit there. Be with the emotion. It’s so freeing.
Once you cut the tape off and allow your wound see the light of day and allow it to exist, it has a chance to heal. So if you were wounded emotionally, sit there with it. Allow the emotional wound the opportunity to heal by being with it.

Consider this technique. Where in your body do you experience it?
What color is this emotion? (first answer is always correct) and what shape? Is it moving or still? And merely observe it.
After awhile you will see it will start changing color or changing shape or it might get bigger, whatever. That is actually a sign that it’s healing. Stay with it.

A wound looks different when it’s fresh and when it’s scabbed.
It’s going to look different in progression. So stay with it until it doesn’t feel so destructive and you feel okay.

This subject is a complicated one…So check out my blog on how to fail at happiness and emotional momentum to learn more about this kinda stuff.

See ya!

Originally published at https://theartofbeingyay.com on March 12, 2021.

Aidan Park is a Los Angeles based bestselling author, comedian, certified life coach, certified NLP master practitioner and public speaker. Visit AidanPark.com to join his weekly FEEL BETTER NEWSLETTER.