Have you felt frustrated when you have had chronic pain, health issues, or anxiety and people told you to just relax? First, would it be that easy? Second, perhaps you have already looked into it a lot and wonder if there’s more. Actually you already do a lot of stuff to cope: breathing, meditation, nervous system work. Maybe you have read Louise Hays and done energy work or co-counseling or somatic therapy.

Maybe you’ve done decades of talk therapy or other processes. Maybe the issue is, you know what’s going on. Even so, do you still find yourself triggered?

Many people forget that “stress” was originally discovered when a researcher named Hans Selye found out that when people or animals have too many “adverse events” in their lives, they start to develop chronic illnesses. What are these events? They involve important changes or tragedies in our lives big and small, positive and negative, like the death of a parent, a major move, having a child, a new job with new expectations.

Yet the way we typically think of stress - and how to cope - like hot baths, breathing, mindfulness, tapping our face, exercise, changing our attitude, stopping our thoughts, energy practices, talking to a friend - have limitations in that they work on the physiological or coping level.

In fact, you probably have had all that go out the window when that dreaded ex calls you, or the parent who still treats you the unpleasant way they did when you were young.

Or these days…it happens when you open up your Facebook feed, and see what people are saying about the latest political news.

Or maybe you get stressed when you get into relationships or social situations. You may notice that pretty soon, the emotions that get stirred up in you, bring your stress levels right back.

Many times, these emotions are stressful because they include complex feelings, particularly when they involve people we loved or cared for in the past, who hurt us. These are complex feelings that many of us have experienced in other ways early in life that we never learned to cope with. It is complex to feel anger and pain towards people who matter to us. In fact, having anger and grief…this is a natural response to trauma. When these feelings go unresolved, they can continue to cause us to feel “triggered” and stressed when even small amounts of conflict come up. They can lead to a life of avoiding things.

What if I told you there was a way you could learn to work through these feelings so that you could handle more situations with ease that currently stress you out?

In the most contemporary therapies and understanding of how we develop - called dynamic systems theory - mind and body and emotions work together. Similarly, untangling the emotions and stress involves a journey of working through the mind, body and emotions together. We change through experiential change.

By working in this way together, we support you to untangle dysfunctional ways - way that maybe served you in the past - of coping. You begin to have the capacity to find strength and courage. You reclaim agency over your emotional well-being. Let’s find a path through what is difficult to deal with in your own emotional world. Let’s support you to trust yourself. So you act authentically with your own feelings.

If you’re interested in finding exploring the mind/body emotion connection, I invite you to give me a call and see how we can support you.