Are you Stuck in Reactivity?

When you’re living a proactive life, you’re free to consciously choose how you respond in any given situation. When you’re reactive, you bounce through life at the mercy of your emotions. The proactive life is empowered. The reactive life is powerless.

The human brain stem can house a vast array of fears and emotional triggers. This complex collection of structures at heart of the brain processes your survival instincts and raw emotions, and anything that reminds it of a past trauma or perceived threat causes it to cascade into an emotional reaction. The triggers themselves are often nonsensical – a facial expression, a tone of voice, an aroma, a song, anything the brain connects to a profound past experience. When the trigger is struck, you can erupt with dramatic emotion, or it can bubble under the surface, just beyond your conscious awareness, nagging at you until you finally face it.

Because many of our triggers are associated with past traumas, they often cause us to react with fear or anger. But the experience that sparked the trigger can be any memory the brain wants to avoid – the pain of a past breakup, a public humiliation, a car accident, and so on. Most of the time we have no conscious awareness of what the initial trauma was, but long after the event is forgotten the triggers remain, causing us to react in ways that make no sense to anyone. A specific perfume might spark jealousy, even if you have no idea why. Or a shade of lipstick may trigger shame or embarrassment without you recognizing lipstick as the cause.

When you’re aware of your triggers you can take steps to manage them. However, your triggers operate at an unconscious level, so they get tripped long before you know what’s happening on a cognitive level. Conscious trigger management involves adjusting your behavior after the fact. It would be better not to be triggered in the first place. Furthermore, you can have emotional outbursts without ever knowing what set you off. You know you’re angry or jealous, but you have no idea why. This is confusing and painful both for you and for those who unwittingly stumble into your minefield.

When you’re riddled with triggers you live in a reactive state. And when something happens to set you off you react instantly with little or no conscious control. The reaction is typically irrational, and therefore it’s inherently limiting, both for you and for those you interact with. Our goal in Light Bridge is to neutralize your triggers, so you can be proactive rather than reactive. Because triggers are almost always linked to traumatic experiences in the past, purging and healing trauma is essential.

Sometimes other people can become aware of our emotional triggers and use them to their advantage. When one of your triggers is intentionally manipulated by someone else, I call it a button. Our parents know how to push our buttons to manipulate us in countless ways. Not all buttons are inherently negative. For example, a hug or a kiss on the cheek can be a wonderful calming button. It’s possible for you to install your own beneficial buttons, and you’ve probably been doing this your entire life. We all have a list of activities that we use to lift our spirits when we’re down. This is called “self-medication,” a term that often has negative connotations because most of us self-medicate in destructive ways, with junk food, anonymous sex, biting fingernails, drugs and alcohol, and so on. You can train yourself to self-medicate in more positive ways, for example deep breathing, gratitude, soaking in a hot bath, and so on.

You give your power away when you allow others to tell you what to think or believe. You also give your power away when you demand that others embrace your beliefs. Whenever you get upset about the beliefs or innocuous lifestyle choices of others, whenever you demand that someone else adhere to your morals, you make your happiness dependent on the actions of other people. Countless people waste valuable energy living in judgment of others. They bask in outrage that not everyone lives in accordance with their own values or rules. And often they’re so busy telling others how to live their lives they lose awareness of their own. Contempt is literally the surrender of power to whatever you dislike. And in fact, all forms of reactivity are the surrender of power to whatever triggers you.

This doesn’t mean that when you see someone actively causing harm in the world you don’t take action to stop them. When you see a man kick a child you intervene. When you see a dog locked in a car on a hot summer day, you smash a window and set it free. When you see government officials gleefully destroying the environment, you resist, and you vote. The guiding principle is to act in the most beneficial way for all parties involved, but bear in mind that it’s not always up to you to decide what’s best for others.

Beyond those situations where intervention is clearly called for, whenever you allow yourself to get worked up about the lifestyles of others, you’re giving your power away. Countless people seem to be addicted to Facebook and other social media platforms, but what they’re really addicted to is outrage. They’re addicted to being offended, and to spreading anger. This drains your energy, and very savvy professional manipulators and cyber trolls reap the financial rewards.

Once you’re aware of your triggers, the solution to reactivity is not to avoid the triggers, but to neutralize them. If you’re triggered by political news, for example, you can avoid news programs and go through life blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the world (in other words, live in ignorance). Or you can heal whatever made the news painful in the first place. Of course, I’m referring to legitimate news from a reputable source, not propaganda, and these days it’s hard to tell the difference. But if you heal the original trauma, your natural intuition will no longer be clouded by reactive emotion, and you’ll be able to better recognize what’s true and what’s deceptive manipulation.

For most people what makes watching the the news painful is your very well-developed sense of empathy. The news (much like our brains) tends to focus on the negative, and your powerful empathy can make you feel sick, anxious, and depressed when you hear about the traumatic ordeals of others. It’s difficult to live a pro-active life if you feel you need to shield yourself from a constant barrage of emotions and energies that are not yours. So learning how to manage your empathy can utterly transform your life and open up all sorts of doors you’ve avoided in the past.