Sekhem: Meeting Emotional Triggers and Opening to Love

Sharing: Recognizing Emotional Triggers

Teachings by Patrick Zeigler.

Question: “After working with feminine and masculine energy, pain that I normally have in my left hip is now in my right hip.”

Response: “So you went from the feminine pain to the masculine pain.” There are different ways to approach this. Return to the question of triggers.

Even after a great deal of inner work, an important part of healing is finding what really triggers a response. These are the things that throw the energy off. Begin with a simple question: Who brings up a strong feeling in you right now?

Sharing: “My mother.” A father was also identified as a trigger.

A trigger can bring up something experienced as positive or negative. It is about who triggers a feeling. Dividing the experience into positive and negative brings in duality. Instead, ask what emotion arises in relation to that person.

Question: “What emotion does your mother trigger in you?”

Sharing: “Anger.”

Anger can be given a label, but notice the response to actually experiencing it. Is it enjoyable? Consider coming home after a day of work and finding an angry partner. Is that something welcome?

Response: “No. Definitely not.”

That refusal reveals resistance. Now change the imagined circumstances: What if the partner were angry because they had been working so hard making your first million? The suggestion brought a different response and caught the listener’s attention. The question remains: What is it about the anger that triggers you?

The Earlier Blueprint in a Relationship

Question: “What is going on right now? What are you feeling?”

Sharing: “Fighting. I have to fight constantly.”

The exploration then turned toward the person with whom that fighting happened most often: a partner. There was an active dynamic between them, with many things to fight about.

Question: “What is your favorite thing to fight about?”

Sharing: “That he is making me wrong.”

The other partner was asked whether making the first partner wrong was enjoyable. Finding the words in English was difficult, so the response was clarified with help: when other people decide what this person must do, or give orders, resistance comes up.

Question: “Who in your life loved to give you orders the most?”

Sharing: “When I was little, it was my father.”

This is how the pattern works. A father gives orders during childhood. Later, the feeling that people order you around becomes an original blueprint, and a relationship can form with someone who matches that energy.

The partner did not agree that giving orders was what they were doing. Yet the person receiving the requests experienced them as orders. For this exploration, whether the partner was actually giving orders was not the central point. What mattered was the feeling that it was happening.

Question: “In your opinion, what is the main order your partner likes to give you?”

Sharing: “Sometimes they are very little things. ‘Do this. Do that.’ In my head, I say that I make my own decisions.”

From a Small Request to a Childhood Memory

The small requests became clearer through a specific example: taking a pair of glasses on a trip.

Sharing: “I had just bought new glasses. My partner said, ‘Take your glasses with you.’ I thought, ‘No, I am not doing that.’ I had just bought them, and I wanted to leave them at home. Then my partner said, ‘No, take them.’”

There was a lighthearted exchange about whether glasses were better left at home. For one partner, leaving them there felt right; for the other, it did not.

Sharing: “So I took them with me. But what was my choice in that moment? I did not have a choice.”

The exploration then moved inward, toward what the father had wanted the child to do.

Sharing: “It was mostly around work. There was work to do at home, and all day there were orders: ‘Take this.’ When I was halfway there, he would shout, asking why I was not back yet. When I came back, he would hit me.”

Question: “Where did he hit you?”

Sharing: “Wherever he could.”

Asked whether there was a usual place, such as the buttocks or hands, the participant clarified: “Most of the time, the head.”

The present-day reaction to being directed could now be understood alongside that earlier experience. A small request from a partner brought up more than the practical question of whether to take the glasses.