“It’s Just Chemistry”
Understandably, my clients sometimes don’t like when I coach them to bite their tongue. We all know how the desire to respond in the moment can be overwhelming. I often hear “why do I always have to take the high road?”
It’s easy to respond without thinking in the fiery moments. It may feel good to release pent-up negative emotions. The negative intimacy that developed during the marriage may have become a patterned response that is challenging to interrupt.
When you’re triggered make it a habit to pause and breathe. You can control your emotional “on/off” switch by interrupting your patterned response. It takes less than 90 seconds for the chemistry of the triggered emotion to enter, flood and exit the bloodstream provided we allow the chemicals to run their course[1].
Here’s what is happening when we are triggered:
The amygdalae sense danger and the reflexive response is fear, anger, or hostility as the brain’s first stop in defending against threat.
By pausing, we allow the chemicals that flooded the bloodstream when the amygdalae sensed danger to dissipate and exit the bloodstream.
If, instead of pausing, we rethink the thought that triggered us, we can restart the chemical cycle and stay in the triggered state for much longer than 90 seconds.
By pausing and breathing we can buy time to allow the chemical cycle to complete so that we can come back to our rational thinking brain. It may help speed up the cycle to reassure yourself in the moment by silently saying “it’s just chemistry”, reminding yourself to trust your body to flush out the unwanted chemicals that are affecting your ability to think.
By acknowledging and controlling our chemical response cycle we:
Model this behaviour for our children.
Take back control of the “on/off” switch from our former partner.
Retrain our brain to understand that this trigger no longer has any effect.
Teach our former partner that we do not engage when they communicate in a triggering way.
Debbie is a founding partner of HD Collaborative Law and you can follow her as The Divorce Guide on instagram at: http://www.instagram.com/thedivorceguide.ca
[1] “Whole Brain Living” the Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D