Why Am I STILL Not Over It??
Triggers suck… but they might be the key
When things haunt you from the past it can make you feel hopeless and stuck. Because it’s in the past so it’s not like you can go back in time and change what happened.
BUT today we’re going to talk about two things:
Some fascinating discoveries from neuroscience that might change how you see your past
A technique I use with clients to help them finally process the things that still haunt them
My name is Sean. I’m a mental health coach, I see 40+ clients a week and I have a 98% satisfaction score from over 1600 ratings.
So yes, these experiences are in the past. And to the best of my knowledge, time travel hasn’t been invented yet.
(BUT... if it is time travel, then the future is an illusion and all time runs simultaneously, so who even knows?)
Anyway...even though we can’t go back in the past what science has discovered is that when you get triggered the way that the brain lights up is exactly the same as when you are going through the traumatic experience.
So LITERALLY to your brain there is no difference between the trigger and the experience itself. What this means is that when you are triggered you have the opportunity to process that emotion in a new way.
You know how problems always seem to trace back to when we were kids? That’s because our brains are not as developed as children. We do not have the same capability to process situations. So when our parents are not able to help us through those things they stay in our system.
So when you are triggered to a situation because our brain doesn’t know the difference between it happening in the past and it happening now, it is an opportunity to reprocess that situation with our big adult brains in a new way.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that when you were younger you were bullied and the conclusion that your child brain came to is that there was something wrong with you. Then as an adult you are working an office job and your boss triggers that feeling that you had when you were a kid of being bullied.
But now because you have your big adult brain you are able to recognize “Oh there’s actually nothing wrong with me—I’m able to recognize that my boss is just really insecure about his position and is compensating by trying to make me feel small.” It doesn’t excuse the behavior but it does take the blame and shame off of you.
Now comes the tricky part. As you have this realization you can actually connect it back to your childhood experience and recontextualize it—MAYBE! Your adult brain can now process that childhood situation of being bullied as “Oh it wasn’t anything wrong with me. It was a bunch of insecure teenagers that were confused about what the heck was happening to their bodies taking out their aggression and confusion on me.” Now if that works for you, congratulations you have effectively gone back in time and changed your past.
BUT there’s a very strong possibility that even though you were able to view the boss situation differently you weren’t able to actually FEEL the bully situation. You can understand it logically but your emotions still aren’t on the same page.
That’s where thread hunting comes in. Imagine that your emotional experiences are like a ball of thread. I can point right to the center of that ball (the core wound or belief like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unsafe”) and say “Here is where the core problem is” but you’re not necessarily going to be able to feel it or process it because it’s gotten covered by so many new layers of thread. And the thread is all tangled and knotted which makes it even harder to navigate. To navigate this, the trick is to find the end of the thread and start pulling.
Outside of the analogy here’s what this looks like.
Identify the root experience: Probably something that happened to you as a kid. Even though you recognize it as important in your life story, you can only understand it — not feel it.
Think about what you would’ve felt: It’s okay if you can’t remember. Just think about the situation and ask yourself “If I was a kid and I was going through that situation how would I feel”
Find similar experiences: Once you’ve answered that question think about situations in your life that match that emotional profile. You’re looking for the ones that you can actually FEEL.
Those are the ends of the metaphorical thread. When I start to recontextualize those (like I described above) with my clients something interesting happens. Their mind starts to naturally present them with more memories that fit that emotional profile. A lot of times clients will say things like “Sorry this is probably a tangent and has nothing to do with what we’re talking about but…” It’s not a tangent. It’s the thread starting to unravel.
The more that you continue to recontextualize those memories the closer you get to the center. And eventually something magical happens. You arrive at the core memory only this time you can actually feel it. And remember once you can FEEL it—now you can travel through time and recontextualize it.
It’s amazing to witness when this happens. You can start to approach life in an entirely different way. You now begin to question the conclusions that you had come to about yourself.
In the bully example you’re able to actually FEEL “Oh maybe there was never something wrong with me and they were just insecure.” There’s a weight that gets lifted off your chest. A release that you can feel in your body.
Now remember that this is a ball of thread so it’s wavy and knotted. You’ve gotta go through hoops and things may get more tangled before they get untangled. And even once you do feel that release for the first time. There’s a lot of muscle memory there. Your system has been in this state for a long time. So it’s completely normal for you to slip back into old ways of thinking and behaving. We all know how easy it is for thread to get tangled again if you don’t take special care with it—your thread is no different.
Furthermore, untangling your thread all by yourself is incredibly challenging. You can do it—it’s just much harder. It’s like trying to untangle a cord while it’s plugged in. And my philosophy is “why do it the hard way when the other way is so much easier.” If you’d like some help in this process of thread hunting I’d love to have a free 50 minute session with you.
When the thread unravels, what you find isn’t just pain — it’s power. Power to rewrite the story, soften your heart, and walk through life a little lighter.
With care and service,
Sean