If you’re going to address the fact that you're easily triggered, then you have to regulate your nervous system.
A trigger is an event or experience that opens a core wound. We experience the past in the present and our automatic nervous system launches its army of defense and protection. It is often the child in us that emerges when we are triggered and we display our survival responses from our developmental years.
What's more, the body is objective enough to react as if it's happening in present time.
Triggers stir unconscious beliefs. Unconscious beliefs are notoriously evasive. They also have the ego as their protector.
Conscious shutdown/Dorsal Vagal thoughts can sound like: "What's the point, no one cares." Unconscious: "I don't matter. I am a burden. I have no value. I am worthless."
Actions and patterns can include: Fawning, feigning, people-pleasing, avoiding, ignoring, ghosting, procrastination, social avoidance.
Conscious sympathetic nervous system thoughts can sound like: "I'll show/get them."
Unconscious belief(s): "I am powerless. I have to dominate or be dominated."
Actions and patterns can include: Insults, intimidation, passive and overt aggression, gaslighting, stonewalling, over-commitment, competitiveness, defensiveness, co-dependency.
Structure has integrity. All unconscious beliefs have deeply imbedded structures.
A long-term thought (a belief) always follows an elevated nervous systems state:
Something shitty happened (your father intimidated/beat/dominated) you.
Your body responded with a survival response. (Fight and flight/Shutdown).
Your mind made meaning of the shitty event. (I am not good enough/I am worthless).
Around the meaning you built a wall of defense. (I will now defend myself by proving I am worthy/good enough/better than anyone else).
The wall of defense acts to protect you from the initial feeling you got from what happened in 1.
However, the feeling you got from number 1 is not that you're not good enough.
It's the feeling of fear that you won't survive this onslaught.
You created the unconscious belief to discourage you from addressing your most basic childhood fear: the fear of survival.
When you change your structures, you change your behaviours, you change your life.
When we address our triggers, it's much more than dealing with an irritation. You're addressing feelings and thoughts, even if they are untrue, that are profoundly influenced by your nervous system. The ego will tell you anything to postpone awareness of subconscious beliefs and that often shows up as panic, fear and shutting down. Regulate yourself as you address the layers of fear you have to dig through to get to what is beneath the trigger.
I know from personal experience, if we don't regulate for our basic fear of survival, we have a tough time making sense of our triggers.
Through bioplasticity, the nervous system learns to become hypersensitive to challenges and threats. To build nervous system resilience, and to overcome anxiety, a bioplasticity reset is what is needed. We do this by learning the body's 3-Step response and the accompanying thoughts, feelings, stories, breaths, energy, beliefs, and actions in each one.
As you refine this self-awareness, you'll start to listen more readily to your body's cues. In time, you'll realise those cues are defining moments for regulating a body that is responding to past events in the present moment.
Never push yourself past what feels good for you. You have time.
The Restore Method guide and workbook has effective practices to support your bioplasticity reset, in your own time. It is a gentle self-awareness journey to let you understand your body's automatic, 3-step stress response, and lets you explore the underlying beliefs that uphold the dysfunctional, unhelpful structures in your life and plenty of regulation tools to help you to calm and clarity as you neutralise those beliefs (that simply aren't true).
Comentários