A Guide To Identify And To Overcome Your Emotional Triggers

You must have encountered the feeling when someone made a jokingly mean remark that might not be a big deal to that person but destabilize you for the rest of the day? Suddenly, you find yourself feeling off-centre and thrust into a battle of anxiety, humiliation, or shame. That comment worked as the activator to your emotional trigger. The process of getting to know and understand these triggers can help us heal and learn how to cope better in response.

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How to deal with someone humiliated behaviour?

What are emotional triggers?

Emotional triggers are those super-reactive places inside you that become activated by someone else’s behaviour or comments.

When triggered, you may either revoke emotionally and simply feel hurt or angry or respond in an assertive way that you will probably regret later. Your reaction is so intense because you’re defending against a painful feeling that has surfaced.

These emotional triggers are your wounds that need to heal. These beliefs are based on fears—they are not reality. You don’t want to be frequently triggered. It is exhausting and painful, especially for highly sensitive and empathic people. Watch the video for the psychology of emotional triggers.

To heal your emotional triggers, it is advised to know how and when these triggers take place.

How and when do your emotional triggers form?

While growing up to adult, you certainly experience pain or suffering that you could not recognize or deal with adequately at that time. And these emotions can sometimes be stored in the body as physical pain. So as adults, you typically become triggered by experiences that are reminiscent of these old painful feelings. As a result, you typically turn to a habitual or addictive way of trying to manage the painful feelings. You need to learn to identify and manage these triggers to be better in response.

How to identify your emotional triggers?

Though these might look a little different from person to person, yet just about everyone has some emotional triggers. They might include reminders of unwanted memories, uncomfortable topics, another person’s words or actions, even your behaviours.

Common situations that trigger intense emotions include:

Rejection

Betrayal

Unjust treatment

Challenged beliefs

Being humiliated

Being judged by someone

Helplessness over painful situations

Being excluded or ignored

Someone being unavailable to you

Disapproval or criticism

Feeling unwanted or unneeded

Feeling smothered or too needed

Insecurity

Loss of independence

Become Self-aware

Self-awareness is an important step in understanding to recognize your triggers as it involves paying attention to your body and mind. You might experience some physical symptoms of anxiety, like:

Pounding heart

Upset stomach

Shakiness or dizziness

Sweaty palms

When you notice these signs, stop to assess what just happened that you feeling so. Try following these feelings back to their origins by thinking back on other situations that made you feel what you’re currently feeling.

Sometimes, the connection isn’t quite as clear, so you may have to do a bit more digging. When strong emotions come up, don’t try to ignore them or fight them back. Instead, approach them with curiosity to get more insight into what may have triggered them.

The strategies to overcome your emotional triggers

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Accept the responsibility for your reactions

The key to healing emotional triggers involves acknowledging the emotions you experience and the reaction you gave. The trick is to accept these feelings and not let them overtake you. You might not be in control of all your feelings, but you do have control of your actions.

When you investigate what is triggering how you feel in the moment, you give yourself the chance to feel differently if you want to. You will also have more clarity on what you need to do or what you need to ask to change your circumstances.

Don’t judge your emotions

Don’t judge or fear your emotions. No matter what you learned about the evils of emotions, if you don’t recognize your feelings, you can’t change them, negatively impacting your relationships, job performance, and overall happiness. Meditation is a great help in observing your emotions without any judgement.

How negative emotions are not negative at all?

Look if the threat is real or not

The quicker you notice an emotion is triggered, the sooner you can discover if the threat is real or not. Be honest with yourself.

Ask yourself:

Are you losing this person or not?

Is the person actively denying your need or are you taking the situation too personally?

Is it’s true that someone is ignoring you?

Can you either ask for what you need or, if it doesn’t matter, can you let the need go for now?

Choose what you want to feel

With practice, the reaction to your emotional triggers could subside, but they may never go away.

The best you can do is to choose what to say or do next and so how you want to feel. Learn how to choose what you want to feel.

Healing your triggers is liberating because you won’t be thrown off or drained by people’s inappropriate comments. They may still be annoying, but they won’t have the power to zap you. The more you heal your emotional triggers, the more emotionally free you will be.

It’s a big request to all my readers to share these words with people you know who need to hear these, and please subscribe to the website so that you don’t miss out on the next updated articles.

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