Triggers
How We Can Stop Reacting and Start Healing
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
The author of The Happiness Trap offers a self-help guide full of creative tools for managing triggers and trauma responses—so you can find peace in painful moments and lasting emotional well-being.
Psychotherapist David Richo examines the science of triggers and our reactions of fear, anger, and sadness. He helps us understand why our bodies respond before our minds have a chance to make sense of a situation. By looking deeply at the roots of what provokes us—the words, actions, and even sensory elements like smell—we find opportunities to understand the origins of our triggers and train our bodies to remain calm in the face of painful memories.
The book offers in-the-moment exercises on how to process difficult emotions and physical manifestations in order to to cultivate the inner resources necessary to deal with recurring memories of trauma. When we are triggered, Richo writes, “we are being bullied by our own unfinished business.” Explore what your body’s knee-jerk reactions can teach you. Triggers: How We Can Stop Reacting and Start Healing acts as a guide to your body's powerful responses, helping you to remain calm under pressure and discover the key to emotional healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Psychotherapist Richo (The Five Longings) explores the physiological and emotional origins of triggers and offers ways to manage them, in this insightful guide. Triggers, in his estimation, are experiences that set off excessive emotional reactions when early needs (what Richo calls the "Five A's": attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing) remain unresolved in the present. Richo writes that triggers can be "catalysts for grief," but also can be seen as opportunities to no longer be "bullied by... unfinished business," and to process what was interrupted in the past. By being mindful of what arises in the body and mind during a triggering experience, one can, Richo argues, pause between the trigger and the reaction and fight against a "restricted imagination" in order to conceive of new possibilities for being. Because the book is predominantly psychological and empirical, the final chapter on spiritual resources is a somewhat awkward ending despite the strong Buddhist underpinnings to his method of close attention and embracing suffering. With pointed yet compassionate advice, Richo's exploration of triggers will appeal to those interested in the psychological benefits of acknowledging and working to understand troubling experiences.
