What are Emotional Triggers?

Emotional triggers consists of thoughts, memories, or physical sensations that provoke an automatic underlying response in us. It just happens without any conscious thinking. A trigger does exactly what the word implies - it "triggers" us into a flashback type sensation or an automatic response that feels nearly exactly like the feelings we experience at the time the original trauma, abuse, or negative event occurred. It feels like we are re-experiencing the memory all over again.

The subconscious mind buries many deep painfully emotional memories for us for several decades after it happens, especially abuse memories, and in particular sexual abuse memories.

This is a protective mechanism instilled in us at creation. God knew we couldn't handle the fall-out at age 3 or 8 or 14, or any other age for that matter, when the event occurred, so it all gets buried.

Burying the hurtful memories (and that well could be a mild word - hurtful) sounds like a great idea!

It was in that moment, but TODAY those memories are running a chronic STRESS response behind the our conscious awareness. Our bodies weren't created to deal with ongoing chronic stress.

Eventually the emotional stress breaks down our body. The ongoing tension has to go somewhere if it isn't released.

It's kinda like a spring. It is designed to do a job but eventually it wears out and something breaks!

Tap, tap, tap!

We must settle down our emotional & physical mind. We must re-regulate ourselves. The Holy Spirit is right there with you to help. We must turn off the decades' old alarm bells, and triggers are those old alarm bells STILL ringing!

Triggers are messages from the Holy Spirit alerting us that there is still old faulty emotional information running behind the scene of our conscious mind.

He will bring to mind whatever memories need to be tapped on WHEN HE KNOWS YOU ARE READY AND CAN EMOTIONALLY HANDLE IT.

For those of us who have experienced very early emotional abuse, it may take months or years of sitting with the uncomfortable feelings and tapping. I often hear women say that they felt better after an hour of tapping, but then the "feelings came back." Yes, they do. This doesn't mean that your tapping and praying was wasted, it just means there is much more to do. Keep at it. Eventually the amygdala (alarm center) tends to settle down. It sometimes takes a lot of soothing to convince it that you are now safe.

Remember, EFT is NOT a substitute of good medical or psychological care, so take care of yourself by contacting your personal physician please.

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series

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Epigenetics and EFT

Do you know that the statistic has changed on genetic expression? Prior to today the statistic I had heard was only 35% of who we are is genetically hardwired. Eye color, hair color, height, etc.

As of today I read that statistic has been lowered to only 10% of who we are is hardwired.

What that means to us humans is that 90% of who we are is due to environmental signals.

Environment means outside forces and inside bodily thoughts, memories, or attitudes.

Those environmental thoughts tend to end up in the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind controls 97-99% of our thinking, so in reality it leaves little to our conscious control, doesn’t it?

This is why it is imperative that we use a method like tapping to get to the root of what is going on inside us.

All our early learned lessons and thinking now runs our life whether you know that thinking is there or not.

EFT is God's tool to get to the bottom of why we do the things we hate doing, or thinking the things we know we shouldn't.

Something else is going on here! Here is the scientific explanation:

"The environment that activates genes includes both the inner environment - the emotional, biochemical, mental, energetic, and spiritual landscape of the individual - and the other outer environment. The outer environment includes the social network and the ecological systems in the individual lives. Food, toxins, social rituals, predators, and sexual cues are examples of outer environmental influences that affect gene expression. Researchers estimate that approximately 90% of all genes are engaged...in cooperation with signals from the environment.

The understanding that much of our genetic activity is affected by factors outside the cell is a radical reversal of the dogma of genetic determinism, which held for half a century that who we are and what we do is governed by our genes. Research is illuminating a new biology in which consciousness plays a PRIMARY role.

Pharmacologist Constance Graunds says, 'An undisciplined mind leaks vital energy in a continuous stream of thoughts, worries, and skewed perceptions, many of which trigger disturbing emotions and degenerative chemical processes in the body.'"

How Genetic Expression Happens

"Signals passes through the membrane of each cell and travel to the cell's nucleus. There, they enter the chromosome and activate a particular strand of DNA.

Around each strand of DNA is a protein 'sleeve.' This sleeve serves as a barrier between the information contained in the DNA strand and the rest of the intracellular environment. In order for the blueprint in the DNA to be 'read,' the sleeve must be unwrapped. Unless it is unwrapped, the DNA strand cannot be 'read,' nor can the information it contains be acted upon. Until the information is unwrapped, the blueprint of the DNA lies dormant. That blueprint is required by the cell to construct other proteins that regulate virtually every aspect of life.

When a signal arrives, the protein sleeve around the DNA unwraps and, with the assistance of RNA, the DNA molecule then replicates an intermediate template molecule. The blueprint that has up to this point been concealed within the sleeve can now be acted upon. This is what scientists mean when they say that a gene expresses. The genetic information contained in the chromosome has gone from being a dormant blueprint into active expression, where it creates other actions within the cell by constructing, assembling, or altering products.

Proteins control responses of our immune systems, form the scaffolding that supports the structure of each cell, provide the enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions, and convey information between cells, among other functions."

This whole chain of events starts with a signal. This signal then unwraps to let the information in the gene move from potential to expression.

Field of Epigenetics as explained by Science magazine is "the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence". It's the study of signals that turn genes on and off.

Physicist Richard Carlson says, "all the genome [DNA] provides is the parts list. How things interact is what's more important in biology than just the things that are there. The genome tells us very little, if anything at all, about how things interact."

So, what does all this mean? Your every thought has more influence over your genetics than any DNA that your parents gave you. Your beliefs about where you fit into the world, how loved you feel, your thoughts about yourself and those around you, what experiences you have had, traumas, etc., etc. are more important that whether you have every disease gene ever created.

Whether those disease genes are turned on depend on your OWN personal thoughts than much of anything else.

This is why scientists now say 90% of all diseases are under our thought control. Sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? As the future moves on, we are about to find out!

Enter Christian EFT!

pgs. 37-55 Genie in Your Genes by Dawson Church

Remember, EFT is NOT a substitute for medical attention. Please consult your own personal physician for all medical and psychological needs.

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

EFTforChristians.com

Author EFT for Christians

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFT & Neural Pathways

Dawson Church wrote, "When you pass a signal through a neural bundle for 20 seconds or more, you stimulate it to begin creating new synaptic connections. You increase its signaling capacity. It’s like an electrical cable that gets bigger and bigger as more and more electricity flows through it.

When you have a good experience and don’t savor it for those 20 seconds or more, the size of your electrical cable — the bundle of neurons in your brain that signals pleasure — does not increase. But if you deliberately stretch out the good feelings for 20 seconds or more, you build increased capacity in your brain for carrying similar signals.

When you’re meditating, feeling good, tapping, filling your mind with loving thoughts, and having a wonderful experience, stretch it out for as long as possible. Slow yourself way down today. Waste as much time as possible gazing at the brilliant hues of a spectacular sunset. Notice the kiss of the wind on your skin. Savor the delicate flavors of a sip of your favorite tea. Listen to the patter of rain on the rooftop. Remember the last time you heard a baby laugh."

We know that every hour we think about something, whether the thought is something negative or positive, we double the neural branch in our brain around that idea.

This is why, for some of us, negative neural pathways are so hard to change. They are great big, fat trunks of neurons, synapses, dendrites and axioms. Happy thoughts or affirmations don’t seem to budge them. They are difficult to break without a tool like EFT. The thoughts are stuck, cemented into place.

EFT is the language the brain structure understands to mean, “Wake up, pay attention, I have a new job for you to do. I've changed my mind.” Tapping opens the conversation with that subconscious – the part of you that you cannot normally access and the part of you that normally runs 95-98% of your life.

Tapping has the ability, since we focus on the negative thoughts, to snap those negative neural paths, allowing new, albeit smaller, ones to grow in their stead.

Feelings like thanksgiving, happiness, joy, love all grow those new pathways, allowing the old ones to die off, literally.

This is why EFT works so well.

The “trick” is we must tap out the negative before instilling the positive; otherwise it is like pouring a tablespoon of high quality perfume in a 60 gallon barrel of sewage. The perfume, like positive affirmations (or sporadic happy thoughts), aren’t strong enough to compensate for the smell of the stinky, moldy barrel.

Give Christian EFT a try today. Tap while you pray, sing, read, and allow God to change those negative pathways in your heart and mind.  He’s love to have a conversation with you today.

Remember, EFT is not a substitute for medical care. Take complete responsibility for your own emotional and physical health.

Blessings in Christ Jesus!

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

Certified EFT Practitioner

Author of EFT for Christians

EFTforChristians.com