"Relationships are the best seminar in town."
"No issues?! Attend a family reunion and get back to me.."
Anyone else doing well in recovery finally and then get triggered on Facebook?
I used to fear it
I used to avoid it
I used to heal it
Now I notice it and accept it.
I accept the emotions that are triggered, like when I feel the sting of pain of rejection or judgement.
Before I heal it, I feel it for a few minutes. I let the emotions come up and practice self-compassion and acceptance for the pain and frustration. The key is feeling compassion for yourself for having gone through whatever it was that made you feel like that.
Then I heal it and move on.
The Recovery Journey is full of change and loss. It's not easy to navigate your path when you're not sure what is the right thing to do. Especially when involved with toxic people. It seemed like I was damned if I do, and damned if I don't. Meaning, when I left the toxic environment, recovery people cheered and who I left behind shamed me. When I try to go back they make snide remarks to push my buttons. Are the jealous I got free and left? Are they feeling I abandoned them and should have stuck it out? Or was it my unrealistic expectation that they would be proud of me and happy to see me?
It doesn't really matter. The "WHY" never matters.
What matters is the "WHAT", ...as in ..."What do I want to DO about it?" I don't waste my time with why people do/say what they do/say. That's their business.
My business is attending to my triggers and embrace them as my friends because they are a part of me. Plus, its another chance at healing another layer of the onion. And onions make you cry, but what's wrong with a good cry?
Not a thing. Don't be ashamed you have feelings.
What is torture is having these dark feelings with no way out.
What feels like torture is being stuck with toxic relationships that are killing you slowly.
But once you know a healing method or two, the whole dynamic changes around!
You no longer fear your inner reactions to outside events. You notice them and heal them.
You no longer avoid anyone because they remind you of what you still need to heal; or how far you've come. But you DO make choices on who you choose to spend your precious time with.
When you know how to heal your issues, you no longer heal it ASAP to get rid of it, but rather you embrace it and take it in for a moment, love it, listen to it, learn from it.
EFT Tapping is the perfect tool for getting started on this journey of learning from your triggers as you clear them.
It saved me 5 years of therapy. I mean, healing is snail-pace slow when you don't have a healing tool to DO something about it. Before healing tools, we just suffered with it and hoped it would run its course eventually. Or get a quick fix, ...but like a ball in the pool, it always pops back up.
Practicing somatic mindfulness on it and feeling it as body sensation and then just simply stating it as fact helps too. When you tune into it that way, you go straight into your unconscious mind. You do not get into 'meaning' and 'beliefs' and negative self-talk or feel like you have to start all over.
Which is what happens when you try to think your way out with your conscious thinking mind.
The important thing is to find a healing tool that you like and then get honest with self on how you feel and what part needs healing. And handle that crap as it comes up.
The more you remove the stuff in the way that is holding you back, keeping you stuck the more you grow and open and become more of who you really are.
You might already know by now that my main go-to healing tools are:
1. EFT Tapping
2. Somatic Mindfulness aka NLP Parts Integration
For a cheat sheet on somatic mindfulness/parts integration, look for my post called NLP Ninja.
These techniques are so Ninja I just had to name them that. NLP is for the Neuro-network Linguistic Inner Language Programming or Processing.
NLP is a way to by-pass the thinking brain without hypnosis trance.
EFT Tapping is a way to clear the issue by clearing the energy of the issue and getting your stuck energy to move. Then it naturally processes and resolves.
The end result is freedom and peace and, (big deep breath), relief from the tight, stuck, bad feeling you had before.
You remember you had it just minutes ago but the sting is gone, the charge is 'discharged' and you feel back to your natural state of calm awareness. BUT, we're not calm monks who practice meditation - we're screwed up kids from toxic families who got into trouble a lot, right, so we beat ourselves up mentally for every little thing.
Which is why I say, when you get to 'calm awareness', have compassion for yourself for all you've done and all you went through, and then while you're there see yourself accomplishing something you really want to do in the near future.
We're here to recover our life and move forward, not just sit in calm awareness. There are a few ways you can do this.
What I like to do is activate future action by making decisions about what I want to do in the near future and make that decision in that calm aware place.
Then, I use a little Timeline Therapy, which is to see yourself on your time line, like in the future, practicing that action and then go to 15 minutes past when you got it done, then sit there and look back to now. Then come back to now and just let go.
Later you find yourself doing the action you wanted quite naturally. You don't have to force yourself to do everything. You can program yourself to move forward toward your recovery goals as soon as you heal any upset.
I don't know about you, but that upset held me back for long enough (decades), now I want to move forward and do what I wanted to do all along. So visualize yourself taking action on your goals next week in detail and really feel yourself doing it. Use your imagination.
Sometimes these little programs are so powerful, you find yourself doing things next week that feel like deja vu! And that's a neat feeling, something just feels right about it and you're amazed because for so long you tried visualization stuff that never seemed to come true. And now its like a future memory just came true and it makes your head wobble for a minutes. But you're happy. You are now Awake and Aware to do that again and again.
You would be naturally doing your own thing anyway, but you didn't know that you had conflicting inner parts of you that were holding you back from taking action on them.
Once an issue is cleared or healed, its a whole other story. You're ready to move forward. Your energy is running forward and it can propel you into riding the wave when things just seem to fall into place naturally and you are enjoying your work, your actions, your tasks and feeling excited about them.
That is so motivating and empowering. I really can't begin to explain it to you. I want you to experience it for yourself. So learn EFT Tapping and use it and Try my NLP Ninja (free) download to practice somatic mindfulness on your emotional issues and gain control of your life.
NLP Ninja Somatic Mindfulness Post
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Thank you,
JP Bailey, M.A.
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