Whether you’re highly sensitive or not, everyone gets triggered emotionally. The sensitive folks just have a lower threshold.
Once we’re triggered we tend to react in predictable ways. From an autonomic nervous system perspective, we tend to react by running, fighting, withdrawing, or a combination of those states.
You can consider which of these reaction styles is most familiar to you personally.
Regardless of your preferred reaction style, it’s still a reaction that’s taking you out of the present moment and particularly out of your frontal cortex where you’re more likely to make life affirming choices.
One of the values of a regular self-regulation practice is that you become more aware of bodily felt experience. It was Candace Pert, Ph.D. who said that your body is your subconscious mind. If she’s right, then enhanced bodily awareness of feelings gives you real time access to unconscious processes
This gives us an opportunity to update these unconscious processes that if left unchecked continue to keep us stuck in old survival programming.
Aside from your regular practice, here’s a very brief, in the moment self-regulation practice that you can employ whenever you’ve been triggered emotionally.
This process helps you to neutralize the triggers, especially when practiced over time, so that you’re able to stay more emotionally centered, grounded, and resilient. And when you are triggered, yes that will still happen, you’ll have the ability to more confidently and consciously shift into a balanced state.
The HeartMath folks have the Freeze-Frame Technique that will work beautifully for our purposes. You can download the written instructions and worksheet here.
You can have a guided, direct experience of the process in this 5-minute video.
Steve is a retired Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Acupuncture Physician, and HeartMath Trauma-Sensitive Certified Practitioner with over 35 years of clinical experience in the fields of Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and Biofeedback. 