Transcript:
Introduction
Good morning today we’re going to be talking about what our triggers are telling us. This is such an important topic; if you understand what I tell you today it can potentially change your life so last week I had a guy come of me he’s like your recommendation was so bad I wanted to write you a nasty email.
One of the things I always do when giving any recommendations is I tell them it does not matter to me if you want to try this or not this. It’s on you: if you think it’ll work for you go ahead if you don’t think it’ll work for you then don’t do it. So in this case this guy tries the recommendation he obviously did not like what happened and he actually gets offended at me and then wants to send me a nasty email and tell me what a bad person I am.
And this is what you have to keep in mind is it has nothing to do with me. We’re going to explain why this happened. He was triggered by something that happened at…anytime you have a negative reaction, think of that something’s triggering you has nothing to do with the present moment. It’s actually something dealing with the past.
So, if this guy had done the recommendation and didn’t like it, the healthy thing for him to do would just think “okay this is not for me” and move on. Instead, he actually got offended and angry at me for that recommendation.
A Trigger Indicates a Negative Pattern
Because of the way he reacted to that recommendation, I knew that there was something more going on here, there was something inside of him that needed to be healed. Some past (not necessarily) trauma but something with him that is going to be a pattern that’s repeated in his life, and it needs be dealt with.
So the question is: What’s going on here? Why did he react that way? And it is great to actually think about this.
So the next time I met this guy, I said “okay now let’s go back to feeling the offended emotion, the anger against me and think about where you felt that before because this is a pattern here and this is not about me: this is about somebody else. There’s somebody in your life who has given you “recommendations” and they were not actually recommendations; they were actually something where you didn’t have a choice. And because of that the guy would get offended.
And he immediately could tell me “Okay yes I know exactly who this is. There is somebody that used to do that and I was offended by it.”
So what I just did; it wasn’t really me, it was basically in that situation that brought up again something in him that he needed to deal with. And these are things that should not be ignored because if you do ignore them it just keeps on happening and happening again. So the key to the triggers is really to realize that when you have a negative reaction, are angry, frustrated…whatever it is…maybe shame or something: it’s not really about the present situation anymore. This is a pattern you need to go back and try to feel “where did this start?” because the original situation is what really needs to be processed through and have that brought up, instead of having this negative reaction which always leads to tensing up and keeping those emotions down.
The Current Situation is not the Problem
What you want to do eventually is actually allow those emotions to be fully experienced so they can be released, and you no longer go back into these patterns. To give you another example of triggers: I knew this guy spent a few years ago who talked to me about how he was playing board games with his grandson and he got so mad because his grandson was cheating. He’s like: that’s not right! How do I get this guy to stop cheating!
I could have told this guy that this is just the present situation and what’s going on is that his grandson, of course you know, like everybody else, wants to win because it’s a self-esteem thing. And if he doesn’t win the game then it means he’s not loved: he’s got his own complex.
But while that explains the cheating, that doesn’t explain why that guy was getting angry. For a trigger, we don’t want to focus on what’s happening in the present situation: we want to focus on what this is bringing up from the past in order to not have this pattern keep on repeating.
It turns out that a couple weeks before (this guy didn’t even make the connection) that he had been dealing with for a long time with a neighbor and they were having some kind of legal issue where he just felt that his neighbor was completely unfair and it was driving this guy crazy. So when it comes to processing emotions and healing old wounds…actually in a book that I wrote and published this year, Sacred Journey, it actually has some information in there about how to heal from the past wounds and trauma.
Dealing with Triggers
There’s also another thing you can do that goes along with that…there’s two strategies here to dealing with triggers and preventing the patterns from repeating. So, one is to start working on healing the old experiences and any trauma that you felt that’s keeping those patterns repeating in your life. Now the second thing you can do is based on the Law of Attraction which a lot of people already understand. So think about for a second when you have these old wounds inside…these negative vibrations that are attracting these same experiences again.
So you can actually counterbalance those things inside of you while you’re working on them by cultivating love and gratitude in each moment of your life. And this is, I think, underestimated: people don’t really realize how much of a big deal this is. One thing that people are always thinking about is “what do I do in the present so that I’m happy in the future?”
That’s not a strategy that’s going to work because what happens is if you cannot be happy in the present moment then when the future becomes the present you won’t know how to be happy in that moment either. So instead, you actually have to work on each moment in the present…the now moment…figuring out how to be happy in that moment. How to have joy in that moment…gratitude in that moment…love in that moment. And it’s just a matter of being conscious of every possibility and bringing in more gratitude and more love into those moments.
And that’s going to really help you because when you are triggered by a situation, if you do not have that stable foundation of love and gratitude, you’re just going to get knocked over very easily and have those knee-jerk reactions. But if you have that stable base by continually bringing in gratitude and love then it’s going to be a lot harder for you to get knocked over each time by these triggers, so that’s really going to help you and make a big difference.