❤️🔥 In Relationship With x 💙 Asian Mental Health Project | Resolving Emotional Triggers Effectively
Note on the session: This live session will be recorded and accessible to the facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie. They will use it to write a follow-up summary and post the recorded part of only their story on YouTube, to be accessible to folks who cannot attend the session live. Due to the privacy and protection of folks who attend the session, the rest of the recording will not be published or accessible at all.
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Trigger words and phrases are those that can cause a listener to feel strong emotions because of previous experiences.
This change in emotions can be sudden, and in most cases, it will feel more severe than what the trigger would typically call for.
In relationships, reactions to these phrases or words can often be the cause of friction or conflict. Thus, knowing how to name and honor your experience (feelings, needs, bandwidth) can bring about grounding and enable you to seek support to clear, soothe, and regulate your heightened state.
While we can’t avoid triggers, we can seek to understand what causes them and communicate what’s beneath the surface, so healing, forgiveness, and moving forward become possible in our relationships.
If you aren’t as familiar with how to honor your feelings and experiences when being emotionally hijacked, your behavior might look like:
👺 Rushing and powering through the difficult emotion by saying “It’s OK” when it’s not
🛡 Continuing to interact with your partner in conflict, despite not feeling completely ready yet
⏳ Minimizing the impact by rationalizing and justifying why the experience “isn’t a big deal”
We must learn how to honor our feelings and experiences, so that we can gain the wisdom that’s underneath, become known in our relationships, and find ways to repair constructively.
Being with these experiences in the moment, instead of brushing them off immediately, gives us the chance to practice regulating, ask for support as needed, and create opportunities for deeper connection within our relationships.
Relational dynamics facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie, will unpack these themes in this Brave Conversations session. We’ll specifically explore:
❤️🔥 Unpacking the iceberg: How to slow down to honor feelings, while simultaneously unearthing the moment-to-moment process from trigger to release
❤️🔥 Understanding the root cause: How we hold space to capture the story beneath the trigger ❤️🔥 Tools for relating: Mirroring skillset by Relating Between the Lines
It’s safe to say that Kevin and Stephanie’s Asian experience has lots of complexity, and while their experience isn’t representative of all Asian cultures, their intention is to create a space to normalize having conversations about these themes.