Hello Everyone,

Hope you are all having a beautiful month. One of the questions that often comes up around relationships is how to stay calm when we are feeling triggered and reactive. Most of us want warm loving connections with our partners, children and friends, however, despite our best intentions we can feel triggered resulting in anger and disconnection. So how can we best work with this?

The first step is to acknowledge our feelings and be willing to take 100% responsibility for them. The other person may have been the catalyst for these feelings but only we can decide how we are going to respond to them. There is a great temptation many times to blame the other person for what we are feeling and hoping if they will change then our feelings will change. But in doing so, we place the power outside of ourselves which results in us feeling like a victim and powerless to make the changes we would like. Instead, if we can just take a moment to just acknowledge the hurt, the sadness, the anger or whatever else we are feeling we can learn to take care of ourselves in any situation.

Sometimes journaling about what we are feeling can help us to gain clarity about why we are being triggered and how we generally feel in this particular relationship. Holding and embracing the hurt parts of ourselves can go a long way. We can take the time also to breathe into our feelings, softening and allowing ourselves to feel the full extent of what is transpiring for us. In general, we want to be able to use our relationships as a means of healing, to stay open hearted to learn from them. If we become reactive and have a tendency to blame others, we might instead become defensive, shut down and build a wall between us and the other person.

Love is something we all want to give and receive. Seeking the ways that we can stay connected to ourselves and others provide us with the best way to show up as the love that we are.

Much love,

Vivianne