Ok, so here’s the dilemma.
This has come up recently with a few clients and also for myself personally in my couple’s work.
We are all imperfect people (yes, all) and we all have wounds to heal. We all have painful places within us as a result from the past, which can feel unbearable when they get triggered by something in the present day. We would have developed coping strategies in our young brains which would have been the best that our brains could’ve come up with at the time. Now that we’re in adulthood, we recognise that these aren’t helpful and can also be somewhat triggering to the people that we love and live with – withdrawal, distancing, distraction, numbing with various addictions, dismissing, shutting down, anger, aggression, and so on. We all experience these to some degree, differences being that we just live with them and the impact of them, or we have the courage to heal ourselves (now, will in the future, or have done in the past).
Well, let’s say that your partner (with their personal wounds, painful places and coping strategies) conducts a behaviour that’s not cool for you, and it triggers you. Let’s say they make big financial decisions without talking with you first, and these decisions affect you, and this is just not an OK behaviour (please note this is not a personal example, just an example).
Let’s say that this triggers you into one of your painful places that isn’t healed yet – a sense of exclusion and not feeling important. You get angry and aggressive (coping) and your partner shuts down and withdraws (coping). You’re aware that you’re being triggered “disproportionately” – at 110% charge rather than perhaps a 10-20% charge, which would be more relative to the situation at hand.
Let’s say you’re a self-aware person and it comes up in a session 1:1 with your therapist. You want to heal yourself. Your sense of exclusion and subsequent anger is not something you like happening, and you know it’s causing problems, and you want to heal and change.
Let’s say you successfully heal the wound and no longer have the painful place, or the reactivity you once had as your coping strategy. Your partner again, makes a financial decision that affects you without consulting you. This is still reality, regardless of your own personal evolution.
What happens now?
Now that you’ve healed and the trigger is no longer causing a disproportionate reaction, then that’s OK, we can just leave it?
Does this mean your partner is now off the hook? They don’t need to change?
Now you can be Zen and let things slide off you, without getting all caught up in the tangled and painful patterns of the past?
Maybe.
And – it’s much more likely that because you’ve changed your own inner world to be more balanced, that a particular behaviour is still not OK, and you recognise it as such. It has a negative impact.
Even if you’re only triggered at a 10% charge, it’s still not OK.
Just because we change ourselves, a damaging behaviour is still not OK.
Also – by asking our partner (or whoever) to change a damaging behaviour while not being willing to look inwards and change ourselves, is also not OK. These things interplay and they go together. Two sides of the same coin.
Now it’s time to understand how your own healing and changes can influence your external world, as well as your internal one.
Firstly, think of everything as an interchange. A flow of energy, vibes, words, verbal and non-verbal communication, conscious or unconscious signals, between us and the people around us. We are constantly influencing one another, for better or for worse, we can’t not. This may be completely under our conscious radar. By changing ourselves, we will be giving out different signals, that others will either consciously or unconsciously pick up on – vibes or blatantly obvious communication or behaviour changes – and then they react differently to us as a result.
Great! Good outcome there.
Secondly, once we’ve changed our triggered reactions from a 110% charge to a 10% charge (for example) we can look at some other important things:
BOUNDARIES and;
COMMUNICATION.
We can begin to get clear with ourselves with what’s OK and not OK in our important relationships. We can begin to communicate these in a way that protects the other person’s self-esteem and the relationship.
There is interplay. These things work together.
A thought for the day.
Love, Charlotte.