M4 : Lesson 7: Dealing with triggers
For more help with retraining with your specific triggers, remember to utilize our forum or work with a 1:1 mentor to assist you through the process.
Transcript
Lesson 7. How to deal with triggers. In this section, I will give some understanding of how to use brain retraining to rewire your response to triggers. We have triggers that are conscious and some that we might not be aware of, which sets off our nervous system into threat mode. Either way, we can use brain retraining 2 desensitizer solved to these responses.
Common triggers that result in limbic system stress responses include body symptoms, emotions, biochemical changes in our body, fluctuating hormone levels, food, smells, sights, sounds, people, weather, and much more. We have to create new associations with these things to desensitize our brain’s threat response. I know I say this again and again. But it’s important because a lot of people do brain retraining, but they aren’t doing it to establish new associations with the things that scare them. This is where you would expose yourself carefully to the stimulus or trigger in a manageable way and do a brain retraining practice to self generate a positive state while being exposed to whatever the trigger is.
Now, this needs to be done very slowly, but for others, sometimes they can jump right into exposing themselves and recover quickly This practice of exposing yourself to triggers is commonly called incremental training or incremental exposure. There are 2 ways that I see doing this incremental exposure training. 1 is do your brain retraining visualization practice. This during the experience while you’re actively exposing yourself to a degree that you can handle. In other words, you’d slowly expose yourself to a trigger while doing a brain retraining practice maybe right before the exposure, during the exposure, or after the exposure, or do 3 brain retraining practices before during and after the exposure.
The second way is to do brain retraining while simply thinking of the trigger and imagining a new way to respond. This is how I often would add a little challenge to my future visualization by bringing into the scene something I might need to improve my limbic reaction to. You might have noticed when I did my example of floating in the ocean, in my future visualization, in lesson 4. I talked about how I was a little afraid of the deep wide ocean. I brought that in on purpose because I wanted to bring a little bit of test.
And then I said, I saw myself relaxing into it. So that might be how I challenge myself a little bit in my visualization. And see myself meeting that challenge. You are teaching your brain new ways to perceive and associate with the trigger. Our goal is to completely reverse the reaction to the triggering experience, so there is no perceived threat.
Or reaction at all. Over time, you are trumping your amygdala’s imprint that this trigger is dangerous. And over time, you will not have a severe and autonomic nervous system response. I know this feels counterintuitive to do a brain retraining visualization about the things that scare us or to hold or eat something that scares us and do brain retraining. Our goal is to make a new association in our limbic system, and we’re desensitizing ourselves to the trigger Over time, we create a new experience in our brain instead.
It gives our brain a new meaning to what we’re reacting 2, and the limbic system starts to learn that you’re not afraid of that thing or that feeling. And then a memory, amygdala, a social initiation starts to be repatterned. Thinking of this as learning to include the things into your life that have scared you in order to bring you more freedom and that you’re befriending these things or the sensations versus needing to avoid them. Exposure training examples. Smell.
Imagine a smell and reassociate by loving the smell as if it were your favorite flour or food cooking Specifically, if you have multiple chemical sensitivity or any type of mass cell activation, it’s important to get into the habit in general to find ways to be non resistant to your current moment over and over, and to teach your brain new associations of safety in that moment even though you might be smelling something or having a reaction. And notice how much resistance you have to doing this even as I suggest it. That level of resistance is part of the issue. That is brain resistance. That’s not even the actual chemical resistance.
You have to retrain your habit of resistance. This will include small exposures to smells and more, and helping you to get safety and acceptance of these things back in your life in an incremental way. Food, eating, holding, or maybe even just a small taste, I would recommend to find the nutrition and healing aspects and see the food as it’s healing rather than something that hurts you. You might say in your visualization, I choose this food. I choose to eat it.
It’s healthy. I am better off and safer. Having this nourishing food that has nutrients I need rather than avoiding it, even though I might not feel perfect eating it right now. I recommend choosing healthy foods to do this with births. I’m not saying to do this with, you know, soda pop and harmful sugars.
I’m saying to do this with the healthy foods that you have resistance to. I would often practice laughing and enjoying my meal, and I’d be grateful for the taste And maybe you start with just tasting the food and then having the rest of your meal without it with joy. Over time, This should allow you to be able to really eat anything you want. And that’s what happened with me. I can now eat anything I want.
But I still generally choose healthy nutritious foods. Exercise do practices to visualize being able to exercise often. I had pots and chronic fatigue, and I would see the value of having some short term physiological responses and trade for getting my body stronger. I stopped avoiding exercise. I did a little bit every day.
And we’ll go over how to do this a little more in module 5. And lastly, triggering people. Practice visualizing compassion, gratitude, appreciation, or at least a curiosity about them. I had so much healing by working with people in my brain retraining practices and reassociating my nervous system’s response I believe that relationship wounding was one of the biggest wounding that was affecting my body’s ability to heal. I highly recommend as you’re ready to start bringing people into your visualizations and reestablishing a different association with them.
Other exposure training examples include the weather, sometimes the dark or rainy or cold days, can be triggering for us. It was for me. I had to find what sounds cozy and supportive to do today. Boy, this would be a good day to sip some tea and read a book and just find a way to reassociate that. Some people get triggered by the sun or the warmth, so Same kind of thing.
You’ve gotta find what would be lovely about that weather and be creative with it. And mold, chemicals, toxins, and allergens. This was a big one for me. I wasn’t able to completely move away from mold. I had to live in some of it.
I cleaned my environment as best I could, but what I had to do was to find the beauty in the environment that triggered me. I had to believe that I could teach my body to tolerate a normal amount of the substance by being calm and happy while living amongst it. For other triggers or for other ideas, please ask in our primal trust forum of how others might have worked through the same things you’re working with. We are here to support you, and people have a lot of ideas about this. So you don’t have to figure this out by yourself.
Life on planet Earth. We live a life full of imperfect people and imperfect situations And when we have chronic illness, our days are full of feeling imperfect inside of us. We basically have triggers everywhere that can potentially keep the limbic system stuck in a threat response. We are not trying to get away from symptoms or triggers, but focus on creating a sense of self that can handle your internal and external world. We have to redirect our thoughts to focus on what we want to experience and not avoid what we don’t want.
Again, your practice goal is not to get rid of symptoms. It is to teach your brain and nervous system that you can handle what is happening. This is your innate safety, and this sends a deep message of I am okay even though I don’t feel perfect. We need to see these triggers that they are not the issue, but it’s how we have responded to these triggers that is the issue. So we have to work with responding to them in a new way.
And believe that we are not in the threatening situation that our brain and our body might think that we’re in. This is moving from that perspective that, yes, something is happening to me right now, but I can handle it, and I have an inherent okayness inside of me. Brain retraining will help you to reassociate this over time. This is just a reminder to keep up with your module 1 awareness pattern interrupt and be here practice as a mini ABC throughout the day. So it’s just simply becoming aware.
What are you resisting right now? What are you triggered by? What does that feel like in your body? Cancel. Be here now, and then choosing to connect with the present moment, noticing the beauty around you.
Remember the purpose of this practice in the program is to get into the habit of coming into the present moment without resistance. So When you don’t have time for a full ABC practice, remember the pattern interrupt. It is a mini ABC. It’s doing a similar thing, but in a much shorter time, the goal of coming into this moment and being here with acceptance. You’ll learn over time how to be present even though you have pain and symptoms, and this seems impossible at first.
But it’s an essential part of building primal trust So you’ll also learn how to get in touch with your perception of upset versus relaxed pretty easily over time, and you’ll realize like, oh, I’m getting tight right now. I’m getting triggered. I need to shift my state to be able to open to this moment. So with your triggers, just do what you can to say, how can I open right now? How can I open my heart?
How can I become more present? We do this again and again, and you’ll learn a little more how to do this in the next module of semantics But do know this has a big impact on your brain over time. You’re showing your brain is safe to open even though I’m having this experience. In the next lesson, lesson 8, we’re gonna learn about what the limitations are of using brain retraining alone as a tool. See you there.