The answer
Behind this question is the probable desire to prevent yourself from being emotionally triggered when you don’t want to be.
To achieve you must first understand:
You have a particular way of thinking and beliefs–a way of being. Because of your current state of beliefs and thinking, there are certain stimuli in this world that trigger (ex: anxiety) you regardless of your desire to be undisturbed. Why? Our beliefs get triggered rapidly. Fortunately, you have the ability to modify your thinking and beliefs and thus, eliminate the emotion-causing power of different stimuli. Eliminating one of your triggers, which happens as a result of a shift in your psychology(thinking and beliefs), has the chance of eliminating multiple other triggers at the same.
Another strategy for achieving the end goal of “controlling our emotions,” which equates to not having any anxiety-causing beliefs is:
- Use triggered moments to neutralize the emotion-causing power of the stimulus/trigger by identifying and eliminating the emotion-causing beliefs you have about the stimuli.
- Anticipate future situations you’re going to be in and the possible triggers you’ll encounter. You can then work to neutralize the emotion-causing powers of those triggers before the situation happens in real life.
Illustration of what controlling your emotions looks like – from triggered to calm
When you identify the anxiety-causing belief(s) associated with a trigger and drop them, we’ll be emotionally undisturbed when encountering the stimuli again or experience the emotion less intensely.
Example of people finding and eliminating the root cause of triggers.
Definitions
A trigger = something, that when encountered, we experience a physical anxiety/fight-or-flight response.
Triggers can be anything
Examples: physical and non-physical objects like thoughts, people, aspects of yourself, emotions, events, memories, words, behaviors, actions, and impulses.
