Rose Coloured Glasses

What triggers feelings of love and what triggers feelings of fear?  The answer to this question is different for us all. 

It could be a smell, a song, driving through an old neighbourhood, a person's hands, voice inflection, a single word, a favourite food, or a certain time of the year.  We can find that one moment we are feeling fine and all is well, and then all of a sudden the next moment, our heart is full of thunder, we want to cry or just run away.

Not knowing our own hearts intimately and why or how we are emotionally triggered is what causes us great anxiety and stress.  Being afraid of ourselves and the unpredictable reactions we sometimes have due to uncontrollable triggers results in feelings of internal chaos and fear.  Many people resort to using and even abusing what I like to call 'weapons of mass distraction' in order to control their emotions and their environment thus diminishing the possibility of an emotional trigger catching them off guard.

I write from years of personal experience of fear fuelled triggers resulting in erratic behaviour.  If you are new to my blog, in a nutshell, I spent 19 years of my life using but mostly abusing alcohol, drugs, food, money, sex, not to mention smother mothering my children and being a neighbourhood drama queen and gossip in order to keep busy and far, far away from myself.  Whilst I could focus on people, places and things I was too busy to feel and face my hearts truth.  And in my down time, when I did stop and relax, I ensured I always had either a glass (couple of bottles really) of champagne (more like a case), wine, tequila, cups of strong coffee, cigarettes, pills or drugs and chaotic girlfriends  as my companions so that whilst relaxing I did not connect to my own heart.

I had many heart wounds that I had ignored for years, like splinters of glass in my flesh. I had mastered how to use emotional pain killers (booze and drugs) and distractions (being very busy and drama) so that I could remain in denial.

An emotional trigger is like having one of those splinters of glass in your heart knocked whilst your defenses are down.  It is excruciatingly painful, and frightening because what just happened to you is invisible to the human eye, and makes you feel and act like you are really crazy.

Others looking on see our behaviours as an over-reaction, and it is.  An emotional trigger that upsets us causing deep unhappiness simply indicates that there is an unaddressed issue that needs nurturing and attention.  People are coded to react to pain, and over react to immense pain.

Resolve it, or repeat it!

I have come to understand that the heart is directly connected to our five senses way before it hits the wiring to our logical mind.  So sight, smell, taste, touch and sound are the gentle messengers Mother Nature and Father Time use to help us heal.  We can either work with it, or against it, that is our choice.

I have been clean and sober for 14 years now and am aged 47.  During my recovery,  I have come to learn through working with an amazing therapist and wonderful wise elders like beautiful Barb (my hearts mother) how to make friends with my heart and respect its triggers.  My head and heart no longer war; they respect each other and mostly waltz these days.

Instead of  expereincing fear triggers followed by crazy behaviour, these days I experience love triggers, followed by sane and constructive behaviour .... Most of the time.  But when I first started this journey they were mostly fear triggers.  There were many splinters in my heart from years of child hood abuse and denial that needed to be acknowledged and then gently removed. 

I also learned a great deal about a term called transference.  Because once I was triggered I seemed to travel back to the place and time when each  shard of glass got lodged deep into my heart.

In the early days something as simple as going on a date with a new guy could set off a fear trigger, as I became a single mum in early recovery.  I recall one particular date where this lovely guy was driving me up to Noosa to take me to lunch.  I had only been clean and sober about three months.  He was a very tall good looking man I had met at the local swimming pool.  He was a water polo player for Australia, so he was strong and athletic, in a nutshell, tall dark and handsome.

I was all dressed up in white linen with a soft pink jumper around my shoulders and was doing my best to hide my nerves.  I had never dated in my teen years.  I was a huntress back then.  I just chose men, seduced them and then left them.  Seduction and punishment were the only two channels I knew when it came to men.  So dating and courting were very new concepts to me at 33 years of age back in 1995.

My tall, dark and handsome date was chatting away to me as he drove, and I was doing my best to acknowledge his conversation, but the anxiety in my gut was rising.  Looking at him was triggering deep fear in me and I couldn't work out why as he was lovely.  I stopped avoiding visual contact and deliberately looked over at him so I could try and work out what was happening, and I focused on a black curl of his hair sitting on the back of his thick neck.  I then became emotionally unstuck.

I flashed back to being four years of age, with one of my abusers on top of me.   This man used to cry and often apologise after he had violated me.  And I recalled as I sat in that car driving to Noosa, how I used to as a very little girl, stroke his hair to let him know it was alright.  I always remained silent as I was being abused, because if I didn't yell or make any noise I was often thanked for my compliance, punished and threatened less.  So I travelled back in time to this moment as if it was happening then and there, just by looking at this black curl of hair on his neck.

The abhorrence at remembering such an upsetting time with such clarity overwhelmed me and I remember my hands clutching the shoulder strap of my seatbelt.  I wanted to undo it and jump out of the car.  He saw me clamoring to find the buckle and noticed I was very distressed. 

"Are you okay Cynthia?" He asked with genuine concern.

By this stage I was so triggered back into my past I became mute and was losing my vision.  I just needed to run and get away from him.  I had never been in his car before so I was frantically looking for where the door handle was.

He pulled the car over realising I was trying to get out and open the door.  By the time he had pulled over on the freeway, I had the door open and fell out of the car, fetal onto the side of the highway.  I remember curling up in a ball trying to bury myself with the gravel on the side of the road.  I must have looked like a crazy woman.  All dressed up for a lovely lunch in Noosa, groveling around in the dirt trying to dig myself and hole to escape into.

As a traumatized child my inner world consisted of all of these wonderful fairy tunnels that I could hide in to protect myself from the outside world.  So when I was being hit or violated I would go into an almost meditative space and envision I was carrying my heart into one of my tunnels with the fairies to find safety.  And I always did.

Mother Nature, and Father Time were then, and still are today, my hearts parents.  So often after my abuse I would lie outside on the earth and literally go to ground.  Ground myself and calm myself through lying on the soft earth.  It is what I intuitively did as a child to save my sanity.

But as a grown woman this simple trigger of remembering this time in my life now made me feel and act crazy.   I was clean and sober and therefore now had no weapons of mass distraction to block feeling the shards of glass and the immense pain in my own heart.  I resorted to all I knew how to do before drugs and alcohol, and that was to take refuse on Mother Earths lap, like I did as a little girl, but I wanted to wrap myself in her and this state of blind panic took me to the side of the road trying to bury myself.

I transferred the abusive males in my past onto the poor guy taking me on this date.  He ceased being my date as soon as I saw that curl on his neck, and I was triggered into my past, and he then became my abuser.

This is just one example of how an emotional trigger can manifest into what seems like crazy and overly dramatic behaviour once the individual gets stuck in transference.

Transference is often explained in the therapeutic arena as having the capacity to turn people into a biological time machine.   Because for many of us during transference a nerve is struck when someone says or does something that reminds us of a time in our past when the shard of glass intoto the heart was initiated. This creates an emotional time warp that transfers our emotional past and our psychological needs into the present. 

It is also common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children (cross-generational entanglements). For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.

I was working with a young 17 year old male a few years ago who was having real problems with his Dad.  He was sharing with me that he got so angry with his father at times, that he felt really violent thoughts and wanted to hurt him.  He felt so much shame as he shared his feelings with me.  He went onto explain that he didn't always feel this way, actually most of the time he loved being with his dad, it was just sometimes.  And when he felt like this he avoided being around or talking to his dad for days because he felt so upset, confused and guilty.

I shared with him about emotional triggers and what I have learned through my own experience about transference.  I needed to create word pictures for myself, once my therapist told me about how my fearful transference.  So I now have a visual image of a range of emotional transference sunglasses that I subconsciously use when I am triggered in fear.  He was interested in hearing more about how these sunglasses worked, so I explained further.  

For me, some words, smells, sounds and visuals were triggers and I learned how to manage them with love rather than have them control me with fear using the sunglasses as visual aids.

The way my transference sunglasses work is quite simple.  When I have a fear trigger like I did in the car that day, or like when I used to get extremely enraged when anyone called me silly (I was always called a silly billy or a scatterbrain as a child) I remember that a pair of sunglasses with bright red lenses have fallen from ontop of my forehead back onto my nose without me knowing.  Everything I then see becomes red.  The red represents my fear from the past about men being abusers and the belief that I need to be compliant to them initially and then I later punish them.   The red lenses also convince me that all men also think I am dumb and stupid, but I just act that way around them so they hurt me less.   

I also have sickly yellow sisterhood sunglasses that sometimes drop onto my nose.  Those glasses rarely appear these days but they used to turn every female into a yellow sickly colour making them my enemies who were out to put me down, compete with me and stab me in the back. I also used to see y ellow when I met a woman who was a certain Zodiac sign believing these women were the most dangerous of all because females in my childhood who were coincidentally this one star sign seemed to enjoy hurting me and calling me names.

The orange glasses that used to sometimes change my view of the world convinced me that bad stuff would always happen to me because I was a bad person and I would always have good stuff taken from me and be punished.   So when I am in a state of self sabotage I have to remember to remove my orange sunglasses because this transference has been triggered from my past and is no longer true in my present life.

And the green sunglasses that used to blur my world, did turn me into a green eyed monster.  When I had these on my nose I believed that everyone else was better than me and I was never and would never be, good enough.

So I had red sunglasses that convinced me that all men were out to abuse me and thought I was silly.  Yellow sunglasses that fooled me that women were unsafe to be vulnerable with.  Orange lenses that were about punishment and my green sunnies were all about me seeing a world where I was less than and never good enough.

So this young man then said to me after hearing this explanation. 

"Every time dad threatens me and says that I have to wear the consequences of my behaviour, he reminds me of that teacher I had in Grade 5 who said that same sentence always just before he took me into his office and did horrible stuff to me." He paused in silence for a moment, but then said to me with conviction, as if a penny had dropped for him.

 I see red Cynthia; I definitely have transference sunglasses too!

This brave boy then went onto disclose more past abuse and discover some word and behavioural triggers that were controlling him.  He now has mastered his transference sunglasses, and can take them off when he sees red and if they ever blur his view of this world and his dad.  This boy is now working closely with a wonderful therapist I was able to recommend him to, and he and his father are now closer than ever.

I wanted to share about this topic of emotional triggers and transference with you as many people find the sunglasses visual helpful.  You may choose to perhaps reflect upon your own life to see if you recognise any emotional triggers.   Or you may identify with occasionally wearing coloured sunglasses of transference that change the beauty in your world into doom and gloom?

These days I have a wonderful pair of rose coloured glasses, that I choose to put on every morning during my morning meditation.  They do slip of sometimes during my day, but if I notice myself making all men bastards and all women scary I know I have subconsciously allowed the old sunglasses to slip on, and I can remove them once I recognise the red, yellow, orange or green hue that has tainted the beauty and my view of the world.

The shards of glass in my heart, I am thrilled to report, have all been removed over the past fourteen years.  I still do have a few small surface splinters, that my wonderful therapist The Gentle Giant, and my Beautiful Barb help me see and gently remove as I need to.

One of the beautiful benefits of choosing rose coloured glasses for me, is that when I put them on if someone in my day becomes challenging, difficult or argumentative I just ensure I keep the glasses securely on my nose.   It seems that once my rose coloured glasses are in place, simultaneously as I look over at the other person, the soft pink gentle hue has also put huge feathered white magnificent wings onto their shoulder blades and I can look at them with love and see their beauty and divinity.

I am always reminded of the lovely Sanskrit term Namaste when I remember to look at myself, others and the world with the eyes of my heart.  My heart chooses love not fear and to wear only rose coloured glasses, and when I make this choice, I can then also see the wings on others.  Namaste is one of the few Sanskrit words commonly recognized by Non-Hindi speakers. It is about mirroring love and translates into us acknowledging and honoring the place in ourselves and the other person in which the entire Universe dwells.  For me the entire Universe is parented by Mother Nature and Father Time.

When I choose to use transference with love instead of fear I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.

Have a wonderful Easter I will be back here next week and hope you have some time to connect with me again then.  My Word Vitamin for today and for the Easter break is simply.

Namaste  ...   All that is best and highest in me greets and salutes all that is best and highest in you.