10. EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS: Learning From (Instead of Running Away From) Our Triggers with Somatic Healer Jessica Benstock

What if I told you that our emotional triggers are actually teachers in disguise. 

How does that land for you? Do you feel resistance? Fear? Acceptance? Surrender? 

When you feel wounded and triggered, every muscle fiber in your body (including that big beautiful beating Heart) feels unsafe and is seeking security. The default setting for most is to numb the feelings. When we numb, we feed our addictions, we retreat to protect ourselves, we apologize insincerely to avoid the hard conversation...

The thing that you do when you feel triggered might feel comforting in the moment, but in the long run, it buries the pain and creates more entanglements which might end up with you being

• in a relationship that feels hollow and unfulfilling
• in a career that doesn't feel like it has purpose and feel misaligned
• exhausted
• addicted 
• frozen with fear
• reactionary with the people who love you

When you are scared of your emotional triggers, you are afraid to feel the emotion beneath the trigger. You might be afraid to disappoint or hurt people so you keep martyring yourself. You might be afraid to look weak so you are selfless to the point you completely drain your cup. You might be afraid that you aren't living up to the image of The Good Wife/Daughter/Employee so you mold yourself to the point that you can no longer recognize yourself.

It's time to start looking at your triggers with compassion and curiosity. To stop numbing and step up to your triggers to see if you can learn anything from them.

Here’s a glance at what you’ll learn from this episode: 

• Understand the physiology of your emotional triggers and where they come from 
• Learn tools to create safety in the body when starting to connect to amplified negative emotions
• Understand the nuance of the different containers that different emotions need to alchemize. For example, anger needs movement. Grief needs ceremony. The balms for each emotion is different.

Jessica Benstock is a somatic healing practitioner who works in the realms of somatic and holistic psychology, energetic imbalances, source level trauma healing, emotional derepression, subconscious reprogramming, hypnotherapy, meditation, and feminine sexuality.

• Jessica's Website // Instagram // LinkedIn

Kat HoSoo Lee is an Emotional Alchemy Coach, Spiritual Business Mentor and host of The Emotional Alchemy Podcast.

She loves playing in the space where science and spirituality converge because this is where we get to experience emotional alchemy. In her work, she educates space-holders about somatic physiology and environmental biology so they can deepen their practices of listening and presence which ultimately helps them expand their capacity to hold space for others.

As a Spiritual Business Mentor, she guides soulful entrepreneurs to approach their business as a spiritual practice. The work bridges the emotional landscape with practical tools which allow them to cultivate businesses that are rooted in conscious values, relational marketing and purposeful service.

• Youtube
• Instagram

Chapters

• 0:56 Introduction to Jessica Benstock, healer and coach
• 2:55 Subscribe, Rate and Review the Empowered Curiosity Podcast
• 3:59 Kat asks Jessica: What is your experience with accessing our emotional triggers?
• 4:32 Jessica talks about emotional survival instincts
• 5:50 The intelligence of emotions is designed by the same intelligence that designed our bodies
• 9:24 There is a lack of integration between mind, body and soul in our current clinical model
• 10:44 Looking at the body as the storyteller of our lives
• 12:57 We have been trained to bypass using our intellect
• 15:36 Kat to Jessica: What is an emotional trigger and how do they show up
• 17:29 Childhood triggers becomes a part of your story because we are energetic sponges between ages 0-7
• 20:44 Emotional triggers may feel unrelated and illogical
• 21:57 As adults, we access beta/theta brainwaves when we are meditating or dreaming
• 23:10 Kat talks about the effect of stress in the uterine environment and how it manifests in sensitivity to triggers
• 24:47 Jess shares a womb regression experience
• 27:18 Your human story is part of the collective human experience
• 29:54 Our lives begin already feeling plugged into the collective and then we differentiate into individuals and then the work of becoming conscious is about coming back to our original state of being a part of the collective
• 30:37 Relates to the Black Lives Matter movement and the coronavirus epidemic
• 31:57 Our brain is very binary
• 32:20 Noteworthy from Jess: When I feel the most justified, the most likely I am in my Ego and I am not seeing the situations very clearly
• 34:49 Letting go as a form of emotional bypassing
• 35:36 If you’re having an emotional breakdown, it’s a sign that there is something that you’re not attending to.
• 36:20 Watch for patterns in your emotional triggers
• 40:31 Question from the Audience: How do you create safety in the body when starting to connect to the body around amplified negative emotions
• 40:50 Breath and awareness in the lower centers of the body regulates your nervous system
• 44:48 Emotions are undomesticated and we have no control over how it comes out
• 46:00 The deepest healings come when the person feels held and unjudged enough to be able to fully go into the depth and rawness of what’s there
• 46:33 We have to allow ourselves to go through the full expression of the emotions without attaching to an answer
• 48:35 Invitation to future podcast tapings
• 49:09 Question from the Audience: What are some fundamental practices that we can utilize to check in with ourselves daily to prevent ourselves from getting to this place that feels escalated. How do we translate those sensations so we can address them?
• 50:16 Kat talks about how important it is to have a trauma-informed coach
• 51:30 Kat references Episode 3 of the Empowered Curiosity Podcast
• 52:54 Jess talks about her past experiences of anger
• 54:39 Using retrospection as a tool
• 56:10 Body scan
• 58:42 Kat talks about the balance between Masculine and Feminine
• 1:01:33 Jess talks about how the body gets compromised when we are not allowing ourselves to feel and be present
• 1:03:36 Kat talks about how each emotion needs a different container
• 1:06:09 Jess asks “What do you want right now?”
• 1:08:15 Asking the question of "How do I want to be held" can help you exercise the resilience muscle.
• 1:10:47 A comment from the Audience “This is an epidemic of unprocessed grief. It’s an emotion I struggle with the most and it requires a lot of grounding to hold it.”
• 1:11:07 Jess: Grief is a profound core emotion
• 1:13:58 Kat’s experience of embodied anger and grief with the Black Lives Matter March she attended
• 1:17:00 Grief as a purifying act
• 1:19:08 It’s ok to be messy