Photo Credit (‘Danger Mines’ Watch where you step. Taken on the road to Stanley on East Falkland. by Stefan1981 on FLICKR.)
UPDATED 9-9-2018 [AUDIO INCLUDED]
The Minefield. We know the comparison well. Sometimes relationships seem like minefields. But what is new here is that the defusing of these hidden bombs is not a hopeless quest.
I have come to realize is that life is continuously prompting us to discover and defuse these ‘death traps’ (death to our happiness and connection). Now, each time a charge is triggered, I know I’ve hit goldmine instead of a land mine.
Once we start relying on the Symmetry in whatever upsets us to re-wire our stressful reactions, we are even supplied with the exact location of own own inner charges and given step-by-step instructions for defusing each one!
While we wouldn’t knowingly go play in a minefield, it often feels like that is what we are doing in our most intimate and even very casual relationships.
Before I learned the science of defusing my own underground charges, it seemed like there were potential triggers lying in wait in the most innocent exchanges. And the role I played in this dangerous game varied: sometimes I set off the bomb for someone else; sometimes they would stumble onto one of mine and lose a body part.
Other times the whole thing was an inside job: my inner critic could explode mercilessly and blow my happiness and inner peace to shreds when I hadn’t lived up to its survival-driven conditions. In any case, a hidden charge gets detonated from beneath the surface, by the unconscious programming deep within us, and there is usually plenty of fallout and collateral damage for those within our sphere.
The fact is, we can stumble into an emotional charge even in perfectly well-intentioned exchanges, especially in marriage, with our grown children or our colleagues, or in areas where anxiety or even rage can be triggered by something as small as a look, a tone of voice, or someone asking for what they want.
In planning for an event a couple of years ago with a member of my Mastermind group, one such occasion popped up in the process of my asking a long-term client if she had any flexibility in what she wanted for her accommodation at an overnight event.
After giving me her answer, she became aware that her stated wish POTENTIALLY CONFLICTED WITH THE NEEDS OR WISHES OF ANOTHER. For whatever reason, that was a serious game-changer for her. Something happened deep within.
Suddenly, it became very hard for her to just let her answer stand.
It was like I had tripped on a wire, and I watched as she went from a calm ‘grown-up’ woman who had just told me which room she preferred to someone who could no longer own what she wanted. When someone else’s needs entered the picture, she immediately back-pedaled on her stated wishes. She also pulled away from me abruptly; which I became aware tripped my own hyper-vigilant wire. (And the more we work with these things within ourselves, the more we can watch the wire get tripped and still truncate the connection to the inner charge).
“The Look” Wire. The “Tone” Wire… Direct links
While she said it didn’t matter, her tone of voice and comments revealed that I was suddenly the enemy for having conveyed the other party’s request, and the other party was also the enemy–for having a preference or need.
It was strange and sudden and confusing. Our warm, comfortable, light, humorous connection suddenly got blown out of the water.
It was like we had just stepped on a land mine together—it came up unexpectedly in an otherwise normal conversation.
What is most fascinating is that, because we had the tools to spot it and use it, we were able to harness this one tiny moment to go back later and unplug the habitual knee-jerk reactivity that had been in place for years.
That’s how it works. And then the next time we are in that same situation, our inner landscape has changed. The survival intensity story can no longer be found; or exists with much less charge beneath it.
While she couldn’t do it that day, I knew from our former work together that there existed–in this seemingly insignificant situation–a ripe opportunity for her to defuse the stuck charge that had been getting triggered over the course of a lifetime.
It was a golden chance to minimize, for good, the future internal explosions–and the external reactions to events or others that were the regular fallout–that tended to come up in her life, sometimes when she had her unsuspecting victims had no clue there was a “LIVE one” hidden just beneath the surface.
It is far easier than you think to discover for yourself–by following the breadcrumb trail of your thoughts as reactions– that the “Danger” you perceive as a threat is not something “OUT THERE,” but is set off by YOUR OWN deeply buried survival script. Learning that this is not random, that it is an exact predictable since–and that we can choose to go in and defuse these old charges with complete safety and reliability– is, for many (me included) the shift of a lifetime.
AFTER YEARS OF INNER WORK
It is amazing watch hundreds of clients get hold of this personal peace paradigm–even after years or decades of inner work. Because life brings us the next one we are ready to tackle, and the next, and the next, it is suddenly possible at any age to locate whatever is left (our pain lets us know), and defuse one triggered reaction at a time till there are very few left. Suddenly the landscape of our relationships is safe; the worst (and best) that can happen is that a painful reaction helps us locate and defuse the next piece of false fearful thinking that had been lurking just below the surface–left over from an early erroneous assumption that got wired to appear as “THE TRUTH.”
It is not as hard, nor does it take as long, as we used to think to bring this subconscious programming into the light and literally defuse the cognitive wiring that sets off these big emotional charges.
I’ve seen and facilitated this shift, via The Work and the Wheel of Self-Love, over and over in people’s lives–with uncanny reliability. ultimately resulting in their relief from old habitual suffering that–while buried–is actually not at all mysterious or unpredictable.
This client grew up in a large family where it was never OK to put your own needs or wishes first; in fact people were regularly shamed if they did. And in the end, while that inability to simply state what she wanted or needed appeared ‘selfless and kind,’ it left her resentful much of the time, and judging those who did simply advocate for their own needs as self-serving.
Needless to say she saw herself, and was sometimes seen by others, as someone with a “SHORT FUSE,” easily triggered on any given day. While years of traditional “inner work” or efforts to “be more present or spiritual” hadn’t worked to disentangle the wires that got crossed in childhood, working from the current moment of the belief behind the trigger allowed her to completely neutralize the explosive charge.
I invite you to stay tuned for the rest of the story in Part II for the invitation I wrote to her, and her reply to me. You might want to extend the same invitation to yourself, so you no longer feel you are in dangerous territory in the most important relationships of your life.
THEY DON’T JUST DISCHARGE THEMSELVES
This is not analysis–in fact we don’t even have to understand it or know why from explanations like the one above about her childhood. All we need to do to restore peace, freedom, and choice is follow the thread of emotional pain to the thought that triggered it, then neutralize it by reversing the errors in our logic.
What remains is pure presence, connection, unencumbered logic, and creative win-win problem-solving.
Emotional charges and reactions DO NOT simply discharge themselves, even with time. In fact, sometimes they tend to increase in intensity when we ignore them, fueled by the belief that we are a victim of circumstances or others’ choices.
What we avoid, grows. With this paradigm-shifting work, we can safely and easily go in and defuse the charge–that’s why I am going to share here (in Part II) my invitation to her (and her response) about whether she was ready to clear the remaining charge between us and finally take the time to unpack this live bomb.
Wouldn’t you do that if you had discovered the location of a land mine? If you knew you could access a sure-fire way to save yourself and others from future pain and you knew which wire to cut in your brain–so that these hidden ‘death traps’ would no longer continue to adversely affect you and your loved ones in the future?
If you want support with a dangerous, self-wounding underground charge, feel free to grab a Happiness Breakthrough Session (a full 50-minutes, free) with me, by clicking here!
And I invite you to stay tuned in Part II for the invitation I wrote to her, and her reply to me. You might want to extend the same invitation to yourself, so you no longer feel you are in dangerous territory in the most important relationships of your life.
