Emotional Triggers

November 2021

I was living in England at the time of Brexit, an interesting time of tension and change in that society. There was a clear divide of ideas in the staff room and even walking down the main street I would never forget seeing a man holding a sign saying Vote Leave and turning to see someone else holding a Remain sign just five metres away. 

I was never able to form a view of which way I’d go - part of me would want to keep the freedom of movement and another part would do anything to avoid having more rules, regulations and restrictions from other governing bodies. It was one of those things I just couldn’t make a decision on. 

The language school I worked for had a customer base of at least 70% Europeans and a significant portion of staff also hailed from the EU. They would presumably now require visas to work or study in the UK. 

The morning of the announcement I remember an English colleague walking into the staff room where he stood in his usual spot by the window, arms folded, announcing, “Well, I’m out of a job.”

Not long after, an email came around from Head Office reassuring UK staff that this would not affect jobs or funding, so he couldn’t have been the only one thinking and reacting in this way.

So this very intelligent guy went from zero to a hundred and imagined the worst possible outcome: having such a diminished student cohort that there would be inevitable job losses - and he would be the first to go!!!! 

Fortunately for him, he ended up promoted, the whole Brexit thing dragged on for over four years, and international students travelling to learn the English language in its birthplace seemed as popular as ever. 

He did what we’ve all done: he catastrophised. And sure, he could have gone through a process where he observes his thoughts, looks at multiple possible outcomes and, through rectifying cognitive distortions, calms the panic that led to the catastrophic thinking. Or so cognitive theorists would say…

But does anyone ask where the fear, i.e. emotion, goes? That it was fear that led to his mental responses? That fear was lying in wait within my colleague, where all it needed was a trigger like Brexit to tap into deep, even primal, fears of not surviving. 

We all have a Brexit (deep, primal trigger) and to cope, most will either wait for the situation to resolve, distract or numb themselves from the erupting feelings, or work on their thoughts to build more sandbags around their inner emotional dam. 

However, you can’t “think” the fear away any more than you can pray the gay away. Fear is something to be felt and experienced, expressed and then released. Using cognition to avoid feeling is pathological, and has consequences. 

We live in an emotionally illiterate society that tells us not to feel and to avoid feelings at all costs, with no mind to the catastrophic impact this has on mental and physical health, abuse, substance misuse and relationship volatility. The emotions remain trapped in our physical bodies and build and build…

This is why I work with energy - when I work with a client, we go into the feeling. Here in this example it’s fear, but it could also be anger, shame or anything. It usually only takes a few minutes to identify, feel, express and release an emotion before returning to balance feeling a lot lighter and freer.

Without this regular process, our internal navigation system becomes “off”, we no longer accurately sense and feel, have wildly disproportionate emotional responses, are easily triggered and can massively project or engage in other inappropriate defence mechanisms - all because we want to avoid feeling and expressing an emotion for one to two minutes. 

The fear and every other emotion stored and suppressed in your body affects:

Your emotional scope and range

Your emotional freedom (ability to feel the full gamete of the human experience and return to balance)

Your capacity to love and connect

Your relationship with alcohol, other drugs and other addictive behaviours

Your likelihood of engaging in criminal activity

The condition of your living space

Your physical health and wellness

Your physical appearance 

Your thoughts and ideas

Your mental agility and memory

Every reaction you have

Every decision you make

Your interactions with every living being

I ask you to consider whether you would like to make choices and interact with others as yourself, and simply engage with life as it presents itself to you, or whether you’d prefer to have suppressed fear, anger or shame taint everything you do, say, perceive and experience? Because this choice doesn’t just affect you…

A woman nearing thirty chooses to marry a man who physically abused her due to fear of being alone and insecurity around starting over. Her choice has devastating and life-long consequences for their child after his abuse doesn’t magically vanish, but instead escalates, as domestic violence is well known to…

A man in a workplace is advised on a matter by a younger woman with a higher level of education and more subject-specific knowledge than him. Instead of collaborating and using that knowledge to make the task as successful as possible, he tries to get her fired so he can maintain a sense of “higher” status…

Can you imagine the difference if these individuals had consciously chosen to heal themselves emotionally? 

If the man in a workplace could have swum in a pool of his feelings of inadequacy for a while, letting it wash all through him and around him for a while until the tears came up and the energy was released? 

If the woman who married a man who harmed her could have similarly dived into humiliation and loneliness until it worked its way out of her body and she could breathe again?

Emotions are the drivers of our lives and, like I have outlined, infiltrate our every interaction - for better or for worse. Trying to control them is like trying to control a vast ocean. We can learn instead to work with them and flow with them as they guide us where we need to go. 

When we get far enough along in our healing we’ll even welcome triggers as they provide us with the opportunity to fully feel something that we weren’t able to before. We work with it until it is healed and released from our system, just as it was designed to be. 

There is nothing more important than emotional healing and the answer is, was and always will be:

energy balance and flow

      energy balance and flow

            energy balance and flow.