47b. My Triggers Have a Theme?
Hello, this is Anne with your Coaching on the Go. Last time we talked about being triggered, and your assignment was to note when you feel triggered and make a list of those triggers, and now that you’ve done that, because often we have a certain trigger that is more dominant than any other, but there are… We’ll have basically a trigger for anything that we have something deeper about, and the trigger is really about us. It’s not about the person who said it. What you might find is if you clear what’s underneath a trigger, then somebody could say the very same thing to you when you’ve cleared it, and it won’t trigger you because you’re not going to be taking it personally. It’s not going to be connected to something that goes all the way back into your two-year-old or your four-year-old.
I had a discussion with one of our speakers for our next event, it’s said that in utero we begin to create our system of operation, what we believe and what we think is true. And I have a friend that revealed to me recently that when she was 17 months old, something traumatic happened and she began to respond in a certain way, and it has affected her life. She didn’t realize until now in her 50s that she made that choice and that she shifted the way that she operates to protect herself at that moment. So our triggers have a vast amount of information in them.
For years, I walked around being annoyed with things and people, things on the outside of myself, and really it was information for me about what’s going on inside of myself. So it’s an interesting perspective to know that the people or things triggering you really aren’t triggering you. It’s something within you that you’ve set up, usually for your own protection, usually to adapt to something traumatic that you experienced and to make sense of it for you, to put it in a category and keep you safe. But often when you go back and look at these things, they actually are doing more harm for you now than they are at protecting you.
So today your assignment is to go into this list of triggers that you created yesterday, and you can continue noticing for weeks. You can do this for the rest of your life. You can notice a trigger and then go into it. But for today, we’re simply starting to put these triggers in categories. So if you can notice when you’re annoyed or triggered or hurt, anything that bubbles up, emotions that don’t feel good, keep track of those and then see if you’re finding a pattern. I would highly suggest to not just find one trigger and think that’s it for you. Allow yourself to continue to investigate on this. It can be a lifelong process that’s really enlightening. So today you’re starting to put those triggers into categories and notice if you have some themes on how you’re triggered, and then we’ll continue.
Have a beautiful day. And I really enjoyed hearing from some of you about your triggers yesterday, so feel free to return an email and tell me what your trigger is. And better yet, what I would really appreciate today is if you go into our Facebook page, go into our SpiritRiver community and be bold enough to put your trigger or put a trigger in there, or at least say hi. I would love to see this community become a service to one another. So if you start engaging and meeting one another, that will be beneficial to you. Sending you big, big love and joy for a beautiful day.