Emotional Competence

We’ve all been there; one minute you’re perfectly fine, the next minute you’re intensely angry, hurt, sad, etc.

Your wife asks you where the peanut butter is and you find yourself yelling back, “Why do I always have to do everything!” Your son comes home from school hurt by another kid’s words and you find yourself wanting to give that kid a piece of your mind. You’re watching tv and when that one commercial about car insurance comes on, for whatever reason, you tear up again.

The jargon these days is being “triggered.” It speaks to how intense emotions can show up on a dime and flip our world upside-down. Part of us often knows, in the moment, that how we’re feeling and reacting is a bit extreme for the circumstances, but a larger part of us just doesn’t care. The feelings are too compelling.

What is happening here? Well, a more accurate description of this experience is “unconscious reaction.” It describes how we have parts of us we are not very aware but that can show up when the circumstances are right.

These parts exist in our unconscious. Now, there’s not much debate anymore about if our unconscious exists, but there is still some about what is in there and where exactly there, is.

For example, Freud argued that our unconscious contained base urges and repressed experiences and therefore healing was about making the unconscious, conscious through psychoanalysis.

Conversely, Dr. Milton Erickson contended that our unconscious contained untapped resources and deep learning that could be accessed and utilized to help with current problems, often through the process of clinical hypnosis.

My experience is that both are true; our unconscious carries suppressed pain too painful to feel alone, as well as rich capacities that can help us through adversity.

That’s because, from my perspective as a somatic therapist, our unconscious mind is our body’s experience.

Another way to think about this is that your body has a mind of its own, its own consciousness, if you will. And this makes sense. While we’re usually up in our mind thinking about our experience, our body is down there below our neck actually experiencing our experience. Because most people don’t know how to access and connect with their body’s consciousness, however, it remains UN-conscious.

What’s in your body’s consciousness? Well, a lot of things, but related to being “triggered,” a big thing that’s there are your emotions. Why? Because even though we can put names to feelings and even find places in the brain that light up when we’re feeling certain feelings, emotions are fundamentally experienced as sensations in the body. Euphemisms like “a broken heart” or a “lump in my throat” speak to this phenomenon.

If this is the case, then why do we react? What I’ve learned is that feeling emotions can be a complicated process. Emotions that feel pleasant are easy. We love those. But emotions that feel unpleasant, or really unpleasant, we struggle with because in order to feel emotional pain we first have to feel safe.

Where does safety come from? Two places – you and others.

This means you have to be safe for you. If you’re harsh, mean, critical, judgmental, demeaning, or shaming of yourself then your body is going to have a tough time feeling emotions that make you more vulnerable.

You also need to feel safe with others. Not everybody, but at least one person who you know as your back and can listen and care about you even when you’re struggling.

When we feel safe with ourselves and with others, we are much more able to feel emotional pain. But if you don’t have one of these things and emotional pain comes up, you’re probably going to push it down.

Where does it go? Into your body.

And so, we arrive back at reacting. When we push and hold emotional pain in our body it lives there, but it doesn’t want to stay there. That’s because our body is always trying to heal, which means emotionally it wants to rid itself of pain and come back to its healthiest state of calm, connection.

Therefore, our body always looking for possibilities for healing – situations or circumstances that are a close enough match to what caused the old pain we’re holding onto, under the logic that “this time I’ll do it differently,” whatever that is, and the pain will be released.

So, you’re standing in the kitchen. You wife calls to you asking you where the peanut butter is and, in the blink of an eye, your body goes, “I’ve seen this before…My mom used to always make me look for things that she lost. I couldn’t go out and play until I did. And it always took forever! But no more! She’s not going to control me anymore. I’ve had it!” And you yell back, “Why do I always have to do everything!”

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve just been triggered.

Of course, it doesn’t work. When we react from an old place of pain, yet in a new place that only vaguely reminds us of the pain, we often make a fool out of ourselves. We get labels like, “Hot-headed,” “short-fused,” or “sensitive.” At some point we usually feel bad about it too, after we’ve woken up from the past. And so we usually then just push the pain back down and try to move on.

That’s being triggered. What do we do about it? That’s what I help people with.

Learning to stop reacting is learning to be more and more connected with your body’s experience. It’s getting to know your suppressed pain by becoming familiar with the sensation of your pain inside.

When we get good at feeling our emotions, we can know what’s going on in the moment. So, when your wife calls asking where the peanut butter is, you can feel that old anger inside come up within you. You can know, “Hey, this isn’t present time stuff here.” And you take a breath, come back before you open your mouth, and respond in the ways that reflect who you want to be.

But this process is also the tip of a very big iceberg. Because beyond developing an in-the-moment awareness of your body’s emotions, my experience is that we can unpack and heal those old emotions so that they aren’t there anymore. No more triggering because there’s nothing there to be triggered. Okay, maybe not nothing – but much less.

How do we do this? We’re back to safety. When we learn to cultivate an internal ecosystem – inside your body and your mind – of acceptance, compassion, curiosity, validation, kindness, and presence, we create the conditions for healing.

What is healing? Feeling, in ways that don’t overwhelm you or make you numb out.

But remember, it’s not just inside us that needs to feel safe. We also need our relationships, or at least some of our relationships, to be safe as well. In some ways, that’s the point of therapy. We naturally need our therapist to be a safe person in our lives.

But therapy eventually ends, so beyond just our therapist, we need some of our relationships to be safe as well. Because it’s within these relationships that we’ll have to bring our painful emotions too.

No, I’m not suggesting that you must process all your old pain with your friends. That’s for therapy. But eventually you’re going to experience new pain. New things will happen to us that hurt and we need people in our lives that we can turn to who want to be there for us and know how.

Not someone who’s going to pour you a drink, someone who’s going to give you hug and sit down with you.

When our relationship with our self and a few others are safe our body feels safe enough to feel the pain it’s suppressing, allowing us to heal. Not overnight. But also not for the rest of your life.

Still, I will say, that many of the people I’ve helped go on this journey with themselves – no longer wanting to be so triggered – end up really liking the process because it changes us in ways we just can’t do intellectually. At least I can’t.

As always, please take from this article what feels true for you and leave the rest. You are the best judge of what’s right for you, not me.

Thanks for reading,
Jake