5 Steps to Successfully Navigate Emotional Triggers Using Somatic Awareness
A no‑fluff, body‑based guide for my fellow sensitive high‑achievers
Ever found yourself ready to throw your laptop out the window because one Slack message pushed every single ancient insecurity button? Yeah, me too. That molten‑lava feeling in your chest isn’t just “being dramatic”—it’s a triggered nervous system kicking you into fight, flight, or freeze mode. When the body hijacks the brain, logic goes on a coffee break and leaves chaos in charge.
But here’s the good news: with a dash of Somatic Experiencing®, some radical self‑honesty, and five bite‑sized steps, you can steer that inner storm back to calm seas. Below is my go‑to roadmap, plucked straight from the Trigger Guide I made for clients who want practical, trauma‑informed tools that actually work.
First - What is a Trigger?
A trigger is a catalyst. It can be anything that creates activation in your body (some form of fight, flight, or freeze response) that is often very uncomfortable.
When we are triggered, our cognitive capacity is severely compromised. This means we become more reactive instead of responsive. (Ex: Saying something you don't mean in a heated argument.)
Learning to work with your triggers allows you to grow, heal, and respond to stressful events with more compassion and confidence.
Triggers are not anyone's "fault." They are a biological reaction in the body that happens based on a variety of factors, but it is usually greatly influenced by how you learned to cope with emotional stress in childhood.
While getting triggered is not your fault, it is your responsibility to handle your emotional world. In a triggering moment, the key is to guide yourself away from the pain and into a healthy and desirable direction. This is a personal practice that happens inside yourself and is almost never resolved by sharing the trigger with someone else (unless you’re bringing it to a trained professional to gain resolution).
1. Observe — Name the Beast
The first step is often the hardest - observe the Trigger. Try to access a bit of curiosity. How do you know that you're triggered? What are the clues? Notice the first tell‑tale signs: racing heart, sweaty palms, catastrophic thoughts, sudden urge to ghost the world.
When you observe, you are reminded that you are not your trigger. The goal here is to separate you from what you’re feeling.
Try to guide yourself away from making decisions or taking actions from this place.
Again, observing creates just enough distance to remember: you are not the trigger; you’re the human witnessing it.
2. Distance — Step Away from the Drama
Create distance between you and the trigger.
If the thing that is external is another person that you are in a conversation with, you have the option to communicate your need for space to process. Taking pauses can be very helpful. This might sound something like: "I need to step away for a moment, can we come back to this conversation in 20min?"
If the trigger is Internal, like a thought, try to distance yourself from that thought through awareness. Shift attention to something neutral (hello, fuzzy blanket). You may even want to call a friend to help interrupt the pattern.
If you’re like me and tend to dive headfirst into, well everything, I want to remind you that we don’t want to always jump into healing mode. Usually, it’s better to take a bit of a break to come back to center and re-convene with the situation from a better place - a place where you are choosing to RESPOND instead of REACT.
3. Feel — Let the Body Finish the Story
This is the step that most of us skip. This is the messy magic.
It is tempting to numb or run away from our discomfort, but doing that leaves the trigger stuck in our system. Instead, find a safe, private place to be with the emotions that the trigger brought up. Instead of doom‑scrolling, give the emotion healthy airtime: shake out anger, curl up with sadness, journal the unfiltered truth.
Can you let yourself embody the emotion or express a small piece of the feeling? Let your arms squeeze if you're angry, let your head droop if you're sad, or curl up into a ball if you're scared. Give your body a chance to feel out what it needs to in the safety of your own space. It may be supportive to have professional guidance with this step if it feels too big to work with on your own.
Completing the stress cycle discharges stuck survival energy, so it doesn’t boomerang later.
4. Reflect — Extract the Wisdom
After feeling through the emotions in your body, it can be really empowering to reflect on your experience. Once you’re back in your window of tolerance, grab a pen. Ask:
What is the truth that I know now about this circumstance or myself, now that I'm not triggered?
What was my trigger trying to protect me from?
What have I learned about myself through this experience?
How do I want to show up in the face of this trigger differently in the future?
5. Comfort — Return to Safety & Self‑Care
Congratulations! You have successfully navigated a trigger! Doing this work requires energy and effort - sort of like running an internal marathon.
After successfully navigating your trigger, it is important to give yourself some rest or comfort. Hydrate, lie down, hug a tree—or a consenting human—and let your body know the saber‑toothed trigger tiger has left the chat. This restores the baseline and tells your nervous system, “Good job, we survived.”
Once you feel grounded again, you’ll often find that yo'u’ll have a lot more energy to take the next aligned step.
Putting It All Together
Triggers aren’t personal failures; they’re doorbells from the subconscious saying, “Hey, something still hurts in here.” By cycling through Observe → Distance → Feel → Reflect → Comfort, you move from reactive autopilot to embodied choice. With practice, you’ll spend less time spiraling and more time living.
What to Do Next…
Don’t forget to check out the RESET Practice - it’s an amazing resource to come back to over and over again when you’re feeling, stressed, tense, overwhelmed or just to shake off a long day. It’s the most popular practice I’ve ever created. It’s only $1.
If you’re looking for a somatic practitioner to really re-wire some of these patterns, and get rid of these triggers forever, let’s chat about virtual coaching sessions. Send me an email: Annabelle@annabelledura.com
Transparency: I used the help of AI to help me synthesize the information in this post. (but it is mostly my writing and all of my own ideas.)
As a writer, I sometimes feel conflicted about using AI in writing. I’ve found that it does an amazing job synthesizing information and making things more SEO friendly, but at the same time, it blurs the line between what is authentically “mine” and what is not. After a lot of internal back and forth, I’ve decided to lean on it when I’m creating posts for marketing purposes, as it will help me tremendously in my mission to share my work with more people.
In the meantime, I’m also developing my own sort of “code of ethics” as I use AI that will likely evolve as I learn more. For now, I am committed to:
1. Acknowledging when AI has been used on this blog in any form.
2. Not using AI at all in the creation process of personal/expressive writing shared on this blog.
3. Growing my skill set as a writer.
4. Not claiming any AI-generated content as my own.
5. Reading through each piece that AI helps me write to make sure it is an honest and accurate representation of my knowledge, skill set, values, mission, and message.