What are your reactions to other people?
Who has been irritating you lately?
What emotion did you experience just by watching someone enter the room?
· Were you irritated, angry, or resentful – continuing from the last interaction you had with them?
· Were you nervous, inhibited, or anxious based on your first impression of them --they appeared so beautiful, confident or powerful
· Were you overly engaging or nice, showing off, or acting coy or silly as you drew the person into conversation, tried to gain favor or friendship?
· Did you shut down completely, diverting your eyes as you quietly predict this person will not be interested in you or anything you have to offer?
All they did was enter the room. What happened to you? Where did this turmoil of emotions come from?
Short answer: Unintegrated emotions are buried in your body. Your subconscious will keep triggering them as long as the emotions remain unresolved. Emotional Resolution®, EmRes®, resolves the imbedded emotions, integrating them into our past experience. As a result, we will remember, but not be triggered by them.
Long answer: continue reading to learn how are emotions triggered, how do they get integrated or not, when are they revived or resolved. It works the same way for all triggered emotions.
1. You are sitting in a meeting room, and Tom enters. You didn’t know Tom was attending, so it gets your attention. But nothing else about Tom’s arrival or appearance provokes a secondary reaction. You go back to your coffee.
2. You are still waiting for the meeting to start and in strolls Becky. She’s to lead the discussion and is late. Becky holds an important position in your organization. Again, you focus because she will start the meeting. But now you feel anger and irritation because she is late. Your inner conversation: “It’s totally inappropriate! She should be on time. She doesn’t respect people’s time and our contribution to the company. We have work to do, and she shouldn’t waste our time by arriving late!” Geez, where did that come from? She wasn’t the last to arrive, but Becky is who you are angry with.
Emotions are prompted by something outside us. Our subconscious interprets what we sense (see, hear, touch, etc.). It compares this information with memories to create a prediction about what will happen next. It communicates the prediction via physical sensations that our cognitive mind interprets as emotion. Everyone’s matrix of physical sensations-emotions are unique to them, but we all have experienced anger, fear, shame, etc.
When you see Tom and experience heightened attention, you feel the physical sensation/emotion, and it passes quickly. No triggering. This is a primary emotional RESPONSE.
When you see Becky, your attention is drawn away from your coffee as the meeting starts. Again, your subconscious has activated physical sensations caused by a mild alarm to take notice/pay attention. This initial response to Becky quickly passes, but it is replaced by anger.
The anger toward Becky is a secondary emotional REACTION. Secondary emotional reactions are felt more strongly and last longer. They happen because we have unresolved high-stress events and traumas from the past.
Sometimes, our bodies can’t finish processing our experienced emotions due to extreme stress or loss of consciousness. The emotion’s remaining physical sensations remain in the body as sensory imprints in hibernation. Our subconscious wakes the dormant sensory imprints when it predicts that the current situation is “similar enough” to the original situation. “Similar enough” is often very subtle.
In this meeting scenario, there is something about watching Becky casually walk into the meeting that connects the subconscious to memory and a dormant sensory imprint, which produces anger. The subtle trigger could be the color she is wearing, the shadow she creates on the wall or the sudden quiet in the room as the meeting starts. Only the subconscious knows what the precise trigger is. And unfortunately, the subconscious isn’t confessing. Luckily, with EmRes, we don’t have to know or understand it—we only know that the trigger exists. I’ll get back to this shortly.
How do we change our secondary emotional reaction?
Primary emotions are responses to something outside us. Secondary emotions are reactions to something INSIDE us, and they are uncomfortable. To ease our distress, we spend a lot of time employing coping skills as temporary fixes. There are whole disciplines and industries that promise to make us feel better: relief by breathing through the anger, extra reps at the gym, glasses of wine or beer after work, snacks, gambling, etc. But none of these behaviors fix the triggering. Secondary emotion triggering will repeat until the sensory imprint is integrated.
We could find out why we have these feelings in the first place. Maybe if we knew why it would stop? The problem is most of our injuries originate in the womb, during birth, and the first thousand days of life. Who has clear memories of those times? We may never know the details of the original injury that caused the emotion to be unprocessed and buried in the first place. And knowing doesn’t integrate the buried memory anyway.
What works?
Uncomfortable emotions are triggered by three components: a situation in the current reality, an associated memory (connected by the subconscious,) and the related sensory imprint.
We will continuously be in new situations that mimic old conditions to our subconscious. So that side of the triangle(current situation/memory) is not “fixable.” The sensory imprint must be integrated—it’s the only handle we have. The good news is that EmRes will address these buried sensory imprints to break up the triangle of triggered emotions.
Our bodies have an innate capacity to resolve primary emotions once their message is delivered to the cognitive brain. It does this all day, every day, without even noticing. EmRes capitalizes on this capacity to remove imprinted emotions.
When situations trigger emotions, it demonstrates that a buried emotion is screaming for integration. The emotion-situation acts as a GPS to the sensory imprints. EmRes then pairs the body’s innate capacity and the triggered secondary emotion scenario to resolve the buried emotion. And the anger-triangle breaks! Now you notice that Becky is late, but you don’t get angry about it. And unless you are Becky’s boss, you can care about other things.
It sounds too simple to be effective. EmRes is straightforward and precise. Our cognitive mind will try to derail the process by explaining, judging, or suppressing uncomfortable emotional sensations. In EmRes sessions, certified EmRes practitioners keep you on track through the process of integrating emotions.
EmRes sessions are like having a conversation with a friend. It’s not about re-triggering. Share only as many personal details as you feel comfortable expressing. You are conscious and in control the whole time. The discussion starts by telling about the moments before a recent triggering event, and the practitioner guides you through the rest of the process.
Leave triangles to music
Integrating buried emotions/sensorial imprints means the emotion triangle no longer exists. The triggering can no longer happen when that current situation/memory fragments are connected by the subconscious. It may connect them, but there is no residual emotion to trigger. Hallelujah!
Every uncomfortable emotion you experience, large or small, is an emotion-triangle waiting to happen.
What other emotional reactions do you experience that are unnecessary? Uncomfortable emotions take up our precious mental and physical resources—even small annoyances build-up if experienced all day, every day.
If you are not content, there is a buried emotion to work on!
· When do you feel worthless, anxious, uninspired?
· When do others drag you down, irritate you, and waste your time?
· When are you blaming, controlling, complaining?
· When do you find yourself overreaching to impress or letting go of boundaries to gain ground?
· When are you thinking of memories or impossible futures that encourage not being in and enjoying the present moment?
· When is “that’s just my personality” your excuse?
· When are you not happy?
· Do you believe angst is a normal human condition? IT’S NOT!
Are you ready to be content?
About Sue
Sue Siebens is an intuitive holistic healer based in Dallas, Texas. In her practice, she uses techniques that work at a fundamental level, where the roots of the illness, fear, and pain can be accessed and resolved. Sue teaches and blogs to broadcast and raise awareness about these new technologies so that as many people as possible can find relief and peace in their life.
