Letting It Go

You can’t really break up with stress. After all it is an important part of life. You grow by responding to stress. When you need to stretch to respond to something you increase your capacity in that area. However, what you can do is reclaim the energy you are using to protect yourself from your reactions to toxic stress in your recent and distant past and in your imagined future.

Finding the trigger really means searching your body, your memory and the physical space that surrounds you to discover the bits of energy you froze around this stress. You froze your energy in order to protect yourself from the pain and overwhelm you experienced then. You may also be losing energy by imagining that similar painful events will occur in the future.

You may be very aware that your energy is stuck in toxic stress you are currently trying to manage in your life. On the other hand you may know your energy is stuck because you feel vague, nagging, hard to figure out or explain, anxiety or depression or a whole variety of other symptoms. In any case, in order to use the Logosynthesis sentences to reclaim that energy you need to describe what triggers your distress.

When the trigger is deactivated, the memory of the stressful event will remain but your reaction to the memory changes. It may seem as if the stress magically disappears but what really disappears is the block you once created that kept your energy from flowing freely.

Searching for Your Trigger

Your challenge now is to explore places in your life where your energy is stuck in order to focus the power of your true Self to allow the powerful words of the Logosynthesis sentences to dissolve the frozen energy.

In Chapter 3 you learned about some common clues to frozen energy. If you know you are experiencing some out-of-proportion reactions in your life right now, start there. Answering these two questions will help you find a trigger to use.

First answer this question, “How are you uncomfortable right now?” It could be about a relationship, your work, your health or your aspirations. Looking at what you can’t stop thinking about or what you avoid because it scares you or makes you very uncomfortable may help you answer that question.

Your current discomfort may be an emotion such as anxiety which is a form of fear, or anger or sadness. Emotions are temporary and change as circumstances change so they do not make good triggers. They do often suggest where to look further to locate your trigger.

Your next question is, “What did you experience (think about, feel, notice) just before you experienced your current discomfort?” Often this is a real or imagined event. A snapshot of the most uncomfortable or stressful part of this remembered or imagined event makes an excellent trigger.

Don’t worry if you have trouble answering these questions now. As you review the following examples, you’ll see how others responded to the questions. You can use their chosen triggers as models for your own.

Trigger: A Stressful Event

This story is about me responding to a stressful event.

Recently I found myself losing my composure during a telephone conversation with the driver of a car that had rear-ended my stopped car earlier in the day. I had made the mistake of not calling the police at the time because the damage was minor.

She had promised to call with the missing insurance information later in the day. She did not call. Instead, she avoided my calls and when she finally did respond she accused me of harassing her. When I asked for her insurance information so I could report the damage she raised her voice and implied that I was trying to get her into trouble.

The answer to the first question seems obvious. I was nearly in tears and desperately wanted to verbally attack her, but I knew that doing so would only make the situation worse.

Fortunately, my husband was there and I asked him to take over the call. He had no reaction at all to her belligerence and calmed her down enough to get the information we needed. The answer to the second question also seems obvious. The unpleasant telephone call triggered my distress.

Using “this telephone call” as the trigger I said the sentences aloud and got a very clear image of an incident that happened when I was 16 years old. The image was me, staring fixedly at a black crack between two white tiles on the floor, feeling guilty and frozen, while my father yelled at me for making a mistake.

The really important trigger was the snapshot of “this image of the crack on the floor” because it represented so much frozen energy from the past. Once I said the sentences with that new trigger I relaxed completely.

Yes, I did file a police report and her insurance did pay to have the damage repaired. And I had no particular emotional response to writing this account of the incident.