I received a lot of grateful feedback after writing How to Respond to Rage-Inducing People. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has encountered people that seem hellbent on pushing every single button you have. Go figure.
Life delivered a Part Two to that post recently, and the result was so incredibly healing and liberating that I knew it needed to be shared. So here we go.
I had another interaction with the same person over the same topic. Seriously, virtually all of the button-pushing details were in place. (And if you didn’t read about the original interaction, this will make more sense if you do.)
The healing and liberating part? I wasn’t triggered at all. Not even a little bit.
In fact, I didn’t even realize that I was dealing with the same potentially triggering content until a couple of days later when I was talking to my husband, fleshing out new thoughts that were swirling around in my body and mind about the power of emotions.
I was explaining how purifying it felt to simply allow myself to feel the feels, and how, regardless of how intense the emotions might be at the onset, they always faded. And if I allowed them to do their thing–i.e. if I didn’t immediately start narrating them or venting about them to a friend or distracting myself by doing something else–then the end result was sublime.
Once the emotions washed through me, I felt cleansed.
It was like initiation by fire: initiation into a deeper peace than I have ever known.
As I was describing this to my husband, I realized that, holy shit, I’d just had an identical experience with the rage-inducing person, but it had so little effect on me that I didn’t even realize they were acting out their rage-inducing routine. And, not surprisingly, my response was different, too, without consciously trying to make that change.
Another added bonus? Free from the sea of my own inflamed triggers, it’s easier to witness that the other person is merely acting out their own pain rather than operating with the perceived agenda of “trying to make my life miserable.” Compassion enters the equation like a soothing coat of aloe, and man, does it ever feel nice.
The “power” they once had (i.e. the power that I once gave them) to completely trash my state of mind, no longer exists and the incident passed without even making a blip on my consciousness radar.
I actually went back and reread some of our exchange, because I almost didn’t believe that my experience of the same content could be so different in such a short amount of time (less than two weeks). In the past, I have simmered and stewed over things for months–years! Could it really be possible that something that’d triggered so much anger in me was completely neutral twelve days later?
Yes.
Like I said, this was so ridiculously exciting to me that I promptly plopped down and got to meditating. I giddily said to my Guides, “OMG, thank you thank you thank you. This is, like, the coolest thing ever. Can you help me understand how this worked?”
Here’s what they showed me: I saw pockets of emotional energy, like globules of hardened wax, embedded in my energy field. These were my triggers, and they were subject to being activated by circumstances similar to those that created them.
So, if I felt abandoned and I blocked that emotional experience in some way, that emotional energy became trapped as a little wax blob. If a future situation resonated on a similar abandonment frequency, the blob was triggered and I felt the emotions of the current situation and the past situation, amplifying my discomfort. And if I resisted again, I was simply adding more wax to the blob.
When I allowed myself to be present and feel my emotions, those emotions acted like a sacred fire, burning through my system and melting away any wax blobs on their frequency. Thus, when I remained present for the emotions of the original rage-inducing interaction, those emotions burned away the triggers that this person was pushing. The next time around? No more triggers, no more effect.
Magic.
Had I not experienced this, I would find it hard to believe that this could happen so quickly.
Will there be future situations in which I will feel triggered? Of course.
But now I know that each of these situations truly is a gift: It’s a gift of the purifying fires of emotion that will burn away another set of triggers, expanding my freedom even more.
Burn, baby, burn!
