In today’s workshop, a question came up that made me want to share this technique with a participant:
How to catch your triggers early, so you can do something before they become overwhelming.
Luckily for you, the workshop didn’t have enough space for a detour on this topic, so now I’m sharing it with everyone 😉
In my early twenties, I did some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And while most of my fellow embodiment practitioners love to take the public position (at least in their marketing) that talk therapy is useless, I personally found it extremely helpful.
This technique is something I picked up from those sessions.
In Dutch, it was called “the 5G technique”, which sounds catchy because every step starts with a G.
I’d love to share them with you like that, but unfortunately in English not a single of the words starts with a G (and some people are distrustful of anything called 5G).
So here we go, the 0G technique (pronounced “Oh Gee“):
When you zoom in on a triggered or overwhelmed state, you’ll notice that the trigger is not a singular event (as in: “a person said poop and I became offended”), but more something like an amplifying series of events (“a person said poop and I believe that is rude, so I perceived them as violating the space we shared, and then I felt threatened, so my body responded by going into offense, and then…”).
This series of events leading up to a trigger follow a 5-step loop, and the more loops we go through, the more triggered we get.
The 5 steps (now also called, the “0 G’s” because none of them start with a G) go like this:
- Event (happens)
- Thought (about the event)
- Feeling (responding to our interpretation of the event)
- Behavior (result of the feeling)
- Impact (of the behavior, which leads to the next event and restarts the loop)
When the moment is over, it can be helpful to take a piece of paper and recount the series of events:
Where in this cyclical loop are you right now?
- Where in these 5 steps am I now? (Am I experiencing a behavior, feeling, thought or event?)
- What came right before that? (What was the thought before my feeling, or the event before my thought…)
- And what came right before that?
Keep repeating the tracing backward of cycles until you reach a point where you don’t remember what came before.
The more you do this, the more you’ll train the skill of retracing it further. You’ll also start seeing patterns:
Certain types of thoughts lead to certain types of feelings. Certain types of behaviors lead to certain types of impact. Certain types of events will likely lead you to forming certain types of thoughts.
Becoming aware of these will help you catch the trigger very early on, in one of its first cycles. One of the manageable ones, way before it spirals out of control.
This will allow you to regulate and regain your faculties, empowering you to stay with the interaction without losing yourself.