Emotional triggers, pain and creativity
Awaken your heart and let the sky pour light
To not react is a reaction. There I was a fifteen-year-old lost child with one or two pimples my terribly ugly boss liked to point out. I worked at a natural food store. She, I guess, noticed I was a little lost and invited me to a spiritual weekend retreat that helped her so maybe it would help me.
There were about thirty people there ranging from my age to middle age. The speaker workshopped us through facets of personal development and self-help. There were your typical trust workshops where you’d group up and fall trusting someone would catch you. There were goal setting workshops where you’d vision board your best case scenario. Anger workshops where you’d rip up a box and what not to burn away the past and release all the pain you felt within.
I was curious about the participants for sure. What was their life like? Why were they here also? People pay $250 for this for real? I could barely believe it.
The bathroom seems to be where all the good stuff happens in high school and this was no different. A tall, platinum, short haired girl came out of a stall as I put lipstick on and washed my hands and she said, “I see a shrink like five times a week. This stuff is just next level, I guess. They think I’m nuts and I just can’t handle it.”
She almost sounded sarcastic as she spoke because I could tell she was strong, and she was introspective.
“I’ve learned,” she said with all seventeen years of existence, “That to not react IS a reaction. You know? They want you to react. You don’t have to. That’s control.”
She took a cigarette out of the pocket of her black leather biker jacket.
“Sometimes it pisses them off, but you know you have to take time to process information sometimes. To sit in it. Sometimes though I just do it to piss them off. You smoke?”
I felt like she was damaged and wise and dangerous. And I never forgot, to not react is a reaction. I would use intense calm in situations where my father would have outbursts or when I was threatened at knife point in Knoxville as a runaway or any other moment of crisis and I became good at it.
Where were my emotions then? I had them. I cried and became angry at people and had moments of pressure, discrimination, oppression, abuse, gas-lighting, lies, heartbreak, love, confusion. I sought clarity and discernment often in this murky world.
Because of the pandemic, I have been attempting month long challenges. Some are to get me back on track with my health that I started slacking on like yoga or plant based eating habits. Others are time and productivity based like cutting social media or screen time. Some are as simple as ‘read every day for at least thirty minutes’.
Upon embarking on a new month of challenges I knew I’d have to cut back on movies so before the day came for me to shut it down, I watched as many movies as I could. I shoved, crammed, jammed movies and stories into my eyeballs sometimes feeling like I was holding them open to get in another ten more minutes before bed time. I felt like a junkie or like Alex from A Clockwork Orange when his eyes are forced open by those prongs, so he couldn’t look away.
Then a funny thing started happening. Emotions started welling up inside me. I had to grab pen and paper and start writing. I started drawing sentimental memories from childhood. I cried. I researched topics I had forgotten about and picked up my guitar to remember how that one tune sounds. Maybe I can still play it. I was smiling sometimes at sweet things. Sometimes I would think of friends and share what I was watching to let them know I was thinking of them. Sometimes I would laugh out loud and remember how annoyed I felt when my father would do that sitting alone in the living room.
Forgetting or avoiding my past and my pains to get through day to day life became second nature. My childhood seems so far away and so long ago. To think of them is surreal. I have vague memories that don’t even feel like me. Other times specific memories emerge from the darkness of my mind. If they are painful, now I try to remember them and dive deeper into them to see if I can empty the luggage and sort through the belongings for further examination and understanding.
Trigger after trigger I would empty out my thoughts on paper. I began to think about how I could force this during meditation. The quiet and the mental space I can create during an active meditation session opens the door to flow, an inner energy, that will allow the processes of my mind to unfold naturally.
I found myself keeping a notebook around me always and I began exploring the depths of feelings that were triggered. My notebook was full in no time and I feared my unconscious mind less and less as I came to understand it more and more. And that gave me a feeling of peace and resolve like no other.
In a cursory study of emotional triggers I found that marketing agencies love to use them and even to this day some therapists recommend avoiding them. Triggers are labeled as exhausting and painful. Perhaps you can create a time and space for triggers to exercise those mental muscles. Advertising, these days, is ubiquitous. If you are triggered negatively, you can always fall back on To not react is a reaction to allow yourself time to process it. It’s not healthy live life numb or live in a cave or react to every thing. What is a healthy balance?
When reading about artists, writers, poets and other obsessives it is easy to see they have learned to use the pain. Some turn it around. Some dive deeper in to the darkness. People such as Van Gogh, Beethoven and Mozart are believed to have been manic or bipolar. Harnessing the emotion is the objective, not exploding into high highs and super low lows. But how?
This is a perilous topic that I am treading on and I want to be delicate about it. I do feel now is a good time to state that if anyone reading this is feeling overwhelmed by emotional triggers, consult a therapist. Ask a friend for a recommendation, do some research, review ratings online, interview them even — but do no sit stagnant in your overwhelmedness. It will do you no good.
If you are enjoying your emotional triggers in controlled environments or safe spaces, I would go so far as to say make a word cloud, explore it, journal, run, ride bikes, paint, dive deeper, ask questions, write an ed op, write your congressmen and women, share your discoveries, be rejected and feel that, be accepted and celebrate that!
I am starting to remind myself of Brené Brown here as I am certain that when she started suggesting that everyone dive deeper into their own vulnerability — people must have thought she might be nuts. But what she says is true and valuable in order for our society to continue to move forward with one another. If we all were strong enough to allow ourselves to live our truth and accept each other’s differences and all, we would be indeed a stronger society. We are, after all, the cells of that organism.
Back to the fun stuff: word clouds.
First, I want to share with you what I found to be emotional triggers marketers want to exploit — just in case you hadn’t heard of such things. These are as follows: fear, trust, time, guilt, belonging, instant gratification, competition, value, leadership and trend setting. Ever have FOMO or see a sale that’s just about to end? That is marketers trying to hit your emotional triggers.
Works too, doesn’t it? Crafty marketers.
Emotional triggers can also be (here’s what came of my word cloud): transcendent, the subconscious mind, painful, a relief, honesty with yourself, healing, gratitude, revealing feelings of shame, your past, not you today, something you’ve grown out of, a demonstration of resistance, full of hidden desires, an exploration of your self, compassionate, fearless, a road to recovery, a cause to meditate, reactive, a reason to control reaction, a substitution of avoidance, help set boundaries, and clarify what is ‘okay’ and ‘not okay’.
Do not be afraid, be creative. Create with this magic that is you.
I’ll end this invitation to fearlessly explore vulnerabilities, and to turn around triggers by using the tool of creativity by leaving you with a simple, lovely reminder from the poet, Hafiz:
“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.”
