Your Triggers Are a Way Through, Not Just Something to Get Over

How working with emotional reactivity through the body can transform old patterns and restore access to more of yourself.

One of the most powerful tools I have in my own life—and one of the things I see transform my clients’ lives again and again—is learning how to work with reactions in the body.

Not just understanding why you react the way you do.

Not just becoming aware of your triggers.

But learning how to open up what happens in your body and nervous system when you get triggered, so the emotional energy underneath the reaction can move, be digested, and complete.

Because awareness isn’t the same as change.

You can know exactly why you get defensive when someone questions you.

You can understand where your people-pleasing comes from.

You can recognize that you shut down when conflict gets intense.

You can have done years of therapy, read the books, practiced mindfulness, and become incredibly self-aware—and still find yourself doing the exact same thing when the moment comes.

Something happens. Your body reacts.

And suddenly you’re angry, anxious, defensive, shut down, overwhelmed, or desperate to make the feeling go away.

You’re not choosing it. We have an autonomic nervous system, which means it’s an automatic response.

This is where I think there is so much power in working with emotion through the body.

Your reactions aren’t random.

A reaction is often an old pattern of protection that your body learned for a reason.

At some point, it made sense to brace.

To hold your breath.

To get small.

To push harder.

To stay in control.

To disconnect from what you felt.

To make sure everyone else was okay.

These patterns can become so familiar that they start to feel like who you are.

But what has become normal isn’t necessarily natural.

And just because your body learned to respond a certain way doesn’t mean it has to keep responding that way forever.

The problem is that you can’t think your way out of a pattern that lives in your body.

You can tell yourself, I’m safe now.

You can remind yourself, I don’t have to please everyone.

You can understand that the person in front of you isn’t the person from your past.

And yet, your body may still tighten, collapse, pull away, speed up, freeze, or prepare for something that isn’t actually happening anymore.

The body is still responding to something the mind has already moved beyond.

This is where the work begins.

Rather than trying to get rid of the reaction, we can learn to meet it.

To use our bodies and depths of attention to open up that reaction and begin to finally digest and complete the emotional energy that’s stored inside.

Because emotions are energy in motion, and it takes energy to stop energy.

So when we continually suppress it, override it, or act it out, that energy doesn’t disappear. It becomes trapped inside and can show up as tension, reactivity, shutdown, anxiety, overwhelm, chronic pain, or the same patterns we keep promising ourselves we’ll stop repeating.

But when we learn to work with that energy directly, physically, tangibly in the body, something can begin to change. You start to gain that energy back as substance.

You begin to have more space, choice, and agency.

You begin to grow your capacity to meet yourself and life differently.

You become free.

And the really cool thing (I think) is that you are not just changing your reaction, healing the wound, and growing a deeper trust in yourself; you are actually gaining qualities, parts, and pieces of yourself that are required for what you are longing for in life.

By going into the reaction where you normally shut down and beginning to open it up and allow the anger that was hidden under the freeze to move, you come out the other side with a new “I matter” energy that allows you to make the moves you’ve been too afraid to make in your life before.

By undoing the people-pleasing pattern, you feel the fear underneath of disappointing someone in your history, and by freeing yourself from that trapped pattern in the body, you unearth your rebel who’s been waiting to show you what you are really passionate about doing.

THIS is how we use what’s “in the way” (our trigger, our reaction, our pattern) “as the way” (to a deeper, richer, more true, whole sense of ourselves).

I want every human to know how to do this.

Can you imagine if everyone could work with their emotional reactivity in an empowered way???? The world would be a very different place.

This is radical, world-changing work.

If you want some of this empowerment for yourself, I’m doing an in-person workshop in Bozeman on November 7th. Details here.

If you don’t live in my area, I have a full online course (with a live monthly class component) that walks you step by step through an embodied learning of how to work with your reactions and emotions in an empowered way. So you don’t just leave with more information, but with an embodied way of living that allows for more freedom, trust, and possibility.