How to Navigate Triggers That Arise on the Road to Sacred Union
The journey to sacred union can be a heart-opening, expansive and beautiful experience - but it can be equally heart-breaking, triggering and painful. The purpose of a divine union with an external counterpart is to come into sovereign and also unconditionally loving connection with another human being, which means that in the process of coming together - and throughout the stages of relating and deepening the bond - anything internally that is blocking or in contradiction to either of these things, will be up for review. Literally every single inner child wound, past life trauma, attachment style, belief system and behavioural pattern that is not serving or is keeping you in separation from others, preventing you from fully loving and accepting yourself, or perpetuates co-dependency or unhealthy relationship pattern will be cleared in the process.
Your counterpart - like any person you willingly encounter in this incarnation - acts as a mirror, a reflection of your deepest wounding and trauma, forcing it to be so obvious and apparent that you can no longer ignore it. It is extremely tempting to want to blame your partner for triggering all of your BS, or externalising your triggers by projecting them, but in order to consciously navigate your way to divine union, you need to be willing and prepared to have an awareness of what is actually behind your reactions, so you can heal that shit and develop the foundation of a relationship that is based on internal security and wholeness, rather than placing the responsibility of your happiness, security or wholeness on your partner.
Look at the underlying core wounding and stop misplacing your blame
The truth is, 90% of the time, it’s not actually your partner who you are upset with. You are playing out well grooved, learned behaviours and reactions that you developed in childhood when first learning how to give and receive love (from your parents or primary caregivers).
For example —
Your parents didn’t listen to you as a child because they were always busy at work, so you learnt that throwing a tantrum and getting angry would get their love and attention. Therefore, you developed a tendency to have big, dramatic shows of emotion and act out when you don’t get your way, and learnt to ‘test’ the love of those close to you.
One of your parents walked out on you, so you learnt that everybody that you love will eventually leave you, and you can expect to be abandoned. Therefore, you developed an anxious attachment style where you are constantly living in fear that you will be abandoned, and you need constant reassurance and validation that you are loved.
Your parent reprimanded you or abused you, so as a child you took on the belief that it’s because you weren’t loveable, you weren’t good enough, and that it was your fault that they treated you that way. Therefore, you develop an avoidant attachment style and withdraw immediately whenever somebody gets close to you or real love or intimacy is on the table, because you feel you cannot trust others and that the ones you love will always hurt you.
It is whatever meaning you attributed to these events as a child that grooved the neural pathways, behaviours and triggers that prompt your reactions to your partner in the present moment.
So, for instance, your partner not texting you back for five hours might trigger your abandonment wound from childhood and cause you to have a reaction that is blown well out of proportion, when the reality is they weren’t purposefully ignoring you or ghosting, they were just busy. You might desire to rage at your partner, cause a fight, snip them out of your life because you’re feeling unappreciated, undervalued, unloved, abandoned and like you are not a priority to them, or find your mind bringing up several other instances in the recent past where your partner didn’t ‘meet your needs’, causing you to delete, distort and generalise memories to fit into the story of your partner not valuing you.
When your partner eventually does message you back, you are already well down the rabbit hole of your own emotions and the interaction you have does not come from a healthy place, but from deep wounding. Is your partner not messaging you back immediately really that big a deal to a rational, reasonable, version of yourself who feels fully secure internally? Nope.
I personally can attest to this one, as in the beginning stages of my relationship - before all the triggering and karmic clearing came into play - when I felt fully secure, being left on read 5 hours did not bother me at all and I would barely blink an eyelid (he’s just busy, no big deal!) but suddenly months down the line when I was battling all my inner child abandonment wounds, not being responded to suddenly caused a rather unpleasant emotional volcanic eruption to become imminent within me (and ready to spurt out whatever fuel from a week of stored material of passive-aggressive bitterness and bitchiness towards my partner).
Having childhood wounds triggered means that the pain, the emotion and the reaction that is brewing under the surface or that you play out actually is attributed to so much more than the event in the present that triggered it (being left on read). The being left on read is the tip of the iceberg, and the reaction is the 90% of the iceberg that is lurking under the surface (the original trauma, wound or event). It means, when that triggering event occurs in the present, certain neural pathways and networks light up related to the memories of abandonment or abuse from childhood, prompting a spontaneous trauma response within your nervous system where you might find yourself actually reliving the moment of the original trauma, bringing all of that sadness, pain, rejection, anxiety grief or whatever else caused by the original event rushing to the surface. So the reaction you have towards your partner is completely displaced and unsolicited, because it’s actually your Mum for forgetting to pick you up from pre school, or your Dad for walking out on you when you were 5, who you are upset at - your partner merely poked the original wound by triggering your abandonment by not responding to your message.
It’s one thing to recognise after the fact that your emotional reaction was linked to deeper trauma, and another entirely to be able to recognise what wounding is coming up as it comes up and self-regulate before reacting irrationally.
Now we’ve established that 90% of the emotions you are feeling actually have nothing to do with the present moment and situation with your person, how the do you recognise that in the moment and not blow up and take it out on them in the heat of the moment when it feels so real and you’re in the depths of your triggering? I’m glad you asked…
How to self regulate and recognise triggers when they’re coming up
It takes a highly self aware (and awesome) human to witness and recognise these triggers rising, and to disassociate the current event from the emotions that are coming up from a prior trauma. The key is awareness and asking yourself at any given moment when you are feeling upset with your partner or triggered by something - is this emotion/reaction truly warranted given the situation, and if not, where does it really come from? Take yourself immediately away from the situation/person who has triggered you, and give yourself time in solitude and self reflection to answer the following before you react:
Step one: What actual emotions you are feeling, what about this situation upsets you and where do these emotions reside in your body?
Step two: Ask yourself what this event makes you believe it means about you. (AKA - my partner not messaging me back means I’m not important, I don’t matter, I am not a priority).
Step three: Where in your childhood can you attribute these same feelings showing up? Who are these feelings actually attributed to? Is there a specific event, memory, or trauma that happened which caused you to form these beliefs?
Step four: Do an energy healing, a meditation, EFT, journaling, therapy or whatever emotional release process you can to move through and witness these emotions in a healthy way - if you don’t have a coping strategy for yourself, or are finding it difficult or too painful to address the core wound without support, enlist the help of a professional (book a session with me)!
Step five: Communicate to your partner what the trigger was, what emotions it made you feel, what core trauma/event it brought up, and offer a solution so that next time you don’t have to experience this again (for instance, coming up with a strategy together where they will tell you when they are busy for x amount of time and unable to respond to your messages).
Develop true intimacy and learn to communicate with your partner
I can’t stress enough how important it is to be able to consciously and lovingly communicate your triggers, your wounding and your boundaries with your partner - preferably BEFORE they show up and you’re already ovaries deep in your feels or in an irrational state. When you have an awareness of the type of wounding your partner has, what their attachment style or tendencies are and what sorts of things trigger these reactions, it makes it a lot easier to navigate the actual events as they arise. When you’re communicating, it’s super important to not blame or attack the other person while you’re expressing yourself and take responsibility for your own emotions. Try using phrases like “when you did x, it made me feel y” rather than “you were wrong for doing x” or "you’re a horrible person for doing x”. It’s imperative to recognise that your reaction - while it’s neither correct, nor incorrect - is mainly due to your wounding or trauma. If you didn’t have previous wounding or trauma that reflected something within yourself that you didn’t like or brought up an emotion that was uncomfortable, the present moment situation wouldn’t have bothered or triggered you at all.
And of course, I need to state here that I am not referring to being the victim of intentional cruelty, abuse, gaslighting or narcissistic behaviour - divine union with a sacred counterpart is never your partner intentionally trying to hurt or manipulate you. If you find yourself in a situation where this sort of behaviour is frequent, it’s time to reflect on what sort of relationship dynamic you’re actually in - I would suggest you check out my post on soul contracts, because this screams karmic relationship to me.
Being able to concisely, clearly and lovingly communicate with each other and also have protocols in place for when one of you is feeling triggered is going to make all the difference when the shit hits the fan and enable you to grow and evolve together through your individual healing processes. Remember - these connections are quite literally designed to bring all of this stuff up to the surface so together you can transcend all the wounding and blocks around the illusion of separation and anchor frequencies of unconditional love into the planet… so nobody said it was gonna be easy! But, if you have done enough of the self reflection work necessary on your own and are committed to rolling your sleeves up and doing the work together, it can mean rapid evolution and expansion for both of you. (Just saying, it also doesn’t hurt to have a conscious, loving, patient and understanding partner who is self aware and also committed to their own healing and growth working through it all with you as you navigate your triggers).