Part 5: Trigger Tracking
This is the last in our series. When you go over all the posts from the first 4 parts and you add in the Juxtaposition which I did September 1, 2022, plus this one, you’ve got the essence of the most important tools that we use to help you here in this group.Just to summarize what you’ve missed, here are the previous posts:
Sept 1 Juxtaposition, which is the art of putting together two ideas that oppose each other so that the healing and healthy one “wins” and you are no longer pulled in two opposite directions. This can happen through a process called “memory reconsolidation.” (More about that below…)
Part 1 – Affirmations, the art of saying something to yourself that you need to hear because it is positive about yourself and it was constructed in a way that you actually believe it.It is a message from your core essence, your Self, to the parts of you that are not feeling too positive right then. When you say Affirmations that are constructed properly, it literally lifts your spirits reminding you of who you really are.
Part 2 – Breathing, with longer exhales than inhales, which is the art of calming your body and your mind which in turn, almost magically makes you feel happier. Part 3 – Positive Thinking which is the art of seeing what is good in your life even when mostly everything feels bad. This one requires mental effort which the Affirmations and breathing don’t. Still, it gets you ready to do the IFS work. Part 4 – Distress Tolerance which is a way to no longer be reactive to things people say that have, in the past, distressed you. It is never meant to be used to “get used to” abuse; for abuse, we must leave the situation. And IFS, Internal Family Systems – the main tool in our Love Yourself Love Your Marriage kit; it has been threaded throughout all of these posts. It is a way to discover your true, core essence, your Self, and all the parts of you that have helped you get through life to this point.So Why Should We Track Our Triggers?
See, what’s really happening when you get triggered is that a part of you got triggered. The part that experienced the disturbance did so because that very part got hurt once by something quite serious.Alice saw Cassandra on the street but her friend did not say “hi” or acknowledge her in any way. “But she looked right at me,” Alice said to herself.
And a shiver ran down her spine, feeling dejected, depressed, angry, and totally yucky, like a piece of garbage. Her day was ruined.What was that? What happened to her?
The part of Alice that got triggered was about 7 years old. The kids in her bunk in camp would whisper and stop when she came by. She knew that they didn’t like her although she didn’t know why.Alice grew up and became a success at her business, learning to put on a good front to disguise the yucky person she knew herself to be.
The reality is that Alice wasn’t a yucky person at all. She developed some obnoxious childhood parts because all of her heart craved a bit of attention from her depressed mother. Her mother didn’t have what to give, though. Little Alice didn’t know how to socialize and fit in; who would she learn that from? And although the adult Alice certainly did pick all that up, there was that little kid part of her that she was sure was the real her. (It wasn’t. It literally can’t be.)And that is who got triggered walking on the street when Cassandra didn’t acknowledge her.
The good news is that Alice was tracking these triggers. She came to see a pattern which basically came down to being highly sensitive to feeling rejected by others.Not only that, she started to connect the dots to her childhood.
And that is where this trigger tracking smoothly leads into IFS
One of the key ideas in IFS is that the healing will take place on a permanent and total level when the exiled children are rescued.In neurological terms, it means that our DNA connections for those memories will change.
How can that be? How can DNA be altered?
When we recall a memory, feeling all the emotions and sensations of the event, the DNA apparently softens its connection to the next strands of DNA.That softening is called “becoming labile” and the fancy term for the connection is the “synapse.”
This leaves opportunity for the synapses to “reconsolidate” in a different way.Literally.
This is how the human brain works. (And research shows even lowly animals work this way too.) Amazing.For more on this, see my Sept 1 post on Juxtaposition and Bruce Ecker’s research.
So in IFS, we take advantage of this opportunity to literally change the feelings of our memories.But instead of talking about changing your DNA synapses, we talk about the memories themselves, the child in each experience, the child you once were. And we help the child release the pain and join us in the here and now.
When you connect to the memories of your childhood experiences as the grownup that you are, bringing calm, loving energy to your inner children, you find permanent peace inside with regard to the events of those days.This is healing.
And when this healing has taken place, Alice will not feel rejected any more. She will caress and love that child within and be alright.But to start the IFS work and even begin to remember events of the past, it helps to have done the trigger tracking first.
Because, really, it is not you that gets triggered, but your parts. And those protector parts are protecting the innocent children locked away in your mind. They’ve been hidden all these years to keep you from suffering.But now, it is safe to remember because we have a healing process for them.
So tracking your triggers speeds up the ability to recall various childhood experiences so that the children can be rescued – and you can heal.
Who wants to heal? Now!