Increasing your effectiveness with EFT, part 56.
When it comes to dealing with our “triggers”, our insecurities, and our unpleasant “excessive” emotional reactions, some people feel ashamed about having them in the first place.
Let me say first of all that there are some circumstances and situations where perhaps strong emotional reactions are warranted. For example, getting angry when someone disrespects ourselves and/or our boundaries sometimes is the appropriate response, and the anger can help us enforce our boundaries (by letting the other person know that what they did is not ok) or take action to change the situation.
However, there might be other situations where you might perceive that you react in an excessive way, or perhaps someone that you trust and who cares about you tells you that you are overreacting, or taking things personally, or letting your insecurities get the best of you. Maybe it’s in situations where you receive negative feedback from other people, or where someone says “no” to you or doesn’t pay as much attention to you as you would like.
I would like you to know that there’s nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happens to all of us, in one way or another. It’s our nervous system reacting to something it learned to perceive as threatening, based on our previous life experiences. You are not doing it on purpose. These reactions are “chosen” by our nervous system below the level of our conscious awareness.
This is normal and it’s part of what entails being a human being. And when I say “normal” I mean both that it’s “statistically frequent”, meaning, it happens to the vast majority of people, and also in the sense that nobody is perfect. The ideal of being someone who never experiences any excessive emotional reactions is simply an ideal, something we can maybe strive towards in some circumstances, but never quite achieve.
That being said, we can still make an effort to diminish and release these unpleasant emotional reactions, insecurities and “triggers”, if we feel that they are affecting our lives and/or the lives of our loved ones. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), or “tapping”, is one of the tools we can use for that. And we can even use it to diminish the shame we might feel about having them in the first place.
That’s it for today. I hope this article was helpful. My name is Bruno Sade, and I’m a certified EFT practitioner with a mental health background as a clinical psychologist licensed in Argentina. I use EFT as a tool to help people (who speak English or Spanish) diminish and release their “triggers” and their negative emotional reactions.