A healthy emotional response is one whereby the emotion rises and then passes. If an emotion lingers long after the trigger has disappeared, then we’re in the realms of an unhealthy emotional response.

If you want to see healthy emotional responses in action, just watch young children. One minute they’re experiencing frustration, the next it’s joy or happiness. Moments later they’re angry, and minutes later they’re laughing again. For them, emotions are flowing just as they should. It’s life that clogs up their system and starts conditioning them.

A healthy emotional response;

• Experiencing the correct emotion for the situation. For example, if you’re not in actual danger, then you shouldn’t be experiencing fear, If you are then you’re triggering the wrong emotion.
• Experiencing the emotion in the appropriate amount or intensity. Let’s say someone makes you angry because they’ve taken your parking space right in front of your nose! Here we would expect to notice a tension rise in your arms and shoulders and maybe some gritting of the teeth. But if you feel the need to lash out physically, then it would be fair to say that you’re experiencing an inappropriate level of emotion.
• Expressing the emotion correctly. Staying with anger, this means expressing it appropriately and acknowledging it. A wrong response might be that instead of expressing your anger, you bottle it up and give someone the silent treatment, only to find that three days later you explode for no apparent reason.
• You allow the emotion to pass, rather than carry it around with you all day or all week.

Your emotional triggers are those things that trigger the emotional reaction within you. Here are some examples

• People lying to you triggers your anger
• Seeing pregnant women triggers your fear of pregnancy
• Being told what to do triggers your feeling out of control
• Seeing a needle triggers your fear of injections

In his book, Emotions Revealed, Paul Ekman identifies 9 emotional triggers;

1. Sub-conscious automatic triggers
2. Self-reflection (which triggers the automatic triggers)
3. Memory
4. Imagination
5. Talking about past experience
6. Empathy
7. Others instructing us
8. Violation of social norms & personal values
9. Voluntarily assuming the appearance

Working with emotional triggers is a really powerful way of minimising the occurrence of some of the negative emotions in life. By addressing the things that make us feel fearful, stressful or anxious, we are able to reduce the fear, stress and anxiety we experience. This of course, applies to any emotion that we feel we are experiencing in excess.

Great questions to ask are:

• What situations make me/you [insert emotion]?
• What behaviour in others makes me/you [insert emotion]?

Answering these questions can uncover many emotional triggers for a wide variety of things and if you take the time to work on each of these triggers then you’ll notice a huge shift in your and/or your client’s emotional wellbeing.

This is when an emotion may have become stuck in our system, perhaps due to an emotionally intense experience. Because it’s stuck, it’s so readily available to us (it’s near the surface), so we tend to experience it a lot. For example, if frustration is stuck, you will add frustration to most of your life experiences – frustrated at missing the bus, at not finding a parking space, at having too many emails; everything is filtered through the lens of frustration.

Over time our system can become clogged with trapped emotions that haven’t been fully processed and if our system is weighed down by emotion then our body will start to experience dis-ease. Illness and disease will follow. Many dis-eases have an emotional imbalance at their roots.

Positive emotions need to be cleared too

All emotions are like warning signals. When we have negative emotions they are warning us that certain things in our lives aren’t right; they are warning us not to go there. Positive emotions tell us about the things we do want, but equally when something makes you feel good it is also warning you that if you lose this thing or person and you have a void of it you will feel bad.

It’s equally important to work on the positive emotions as it is to heal the negative emotions. When we over love something (needy of it) we will hate having a void of it. The closer we can be to feeling good without the neediness brings us closer to neutrality we can be which is a feel-good state where energy just flows without the positive and negative emotional polarities.

When we work on an emotion directly, it doesn’t mean that you won’t experience it ever again, it simply means that if you currently have a backlog of trapped emotion, then you can release it, which should provide some short-term relief.

A good time to clear emotions is when you’re in the thick of it experiencing them. If you’re overcome with emotion and would like to calm down, and return to a calmer state, then going through the clearance process will be a great way of doing that.

It is possible to work on both the emotional trigger and/or the resulting emotion.

When to work on the emotion

• When the emotional feeling is overwhelming and the person needs to calm down or let go of some of the excess emotion. This might be just as the person has been triggered emotionally. They can’t think clearly enough to figure out WHY they’ve been triggered, but their emotion is getting in the way in that moment.
• When the emotion is stuck in their system and it’s always cropping up in some shape or form regularly. For example, frustration might need to be cleared if someone is always frustrated; frustrated by missing the bus, frustrated by not finding a parking place, easily frustrated by friends or family, frustrated with themselves over lots of little things.
• When the emotion is being displayed disproportionately for the situation, phobias are a good example.

When to work on the trigger

Working on the emotional trigger offers more lasting impact. Also one trigger point might result in a range of emotions, so it can also be quicker to work directly with the cause of the emotional feelings, rather than with all the individual emotions.

• Once an emotional trigger has been identified and it is something that is likely to crop up in the future.
• If a situation has taken place that created excessive emotion, and it continues to do so as the person thinks about it. Working on the trigger helps the person to make peace with what happened and will help to reduce the replaying of the situation in their head. It will help them to let go of it more easily.
• When someone imagine a future scenario and it’s causing them angst

How to decide between working on the emotional trigger or the emotion

Clearing the emotional energy from the emotional trigger will mean that it is no longer a trigger. If it continues to be, it means that the trigger is a little more complex than originally thought and needs to be explored further.

Sometimes the trigger might be too ‘big’ to work on, i.e. It is too emotionally charged for the person to be able to work on. For example, if someone was attacked and it triggers feelings of vulnerability and fear, it can sometimes help to work on the clearing the excess emotion first to help make things more manageable. 

Emotions Revealed, by Paul Ekman

The Emotion Code, by Dr Bradley Nelson