"Houston, we have a problem"

I had just answered the phone when my BFF said, “Houston, we have a problem.”

She’d been talking with a woman who had a habit of, shall we say, stretching the truth?

With every ridiculous detail this woman piled on, my friend felt her anger building.

Until finally she lost it.

“I ripped her a new one,” she confessed. “And now I feel like a jerk.”

Have you ever had a moment like that?

Maybe you fired off a pissy email you wanted to snatch back the second you sent it.

Or you snapped at your teenager over a cereal bowl left in the sink.

Then later the guilt creeps in.

And you catch yourself lying awake at 2 a.m. wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”

First, there’s nothing wrong with you. Just like there was nothing wrong with my bestie.

That woman really was lying through her teeth.

The trouble was the size of the response.

My friend had been lied to plenty of times before.

Only this time her brain sounded the alarm for every one of those moments all at once.

That emotional trigger sits deep in your brain.

The problem is, it can't tell the difference between a real threat and a fib told over coffee.

And it has zero sense of time.

So when something today looks like an old hurt, you can suddenly react as if it's happening right now.

And then every time you replay the scene, the reaction gets stronger.

Until you stop trusting yourself altogether.

Fortunately, there are effective ways to defuse old emotional triggers.

So your feelings can return to the size the moment actually calls for.

That’s one of the many things I help my clients do with hypnosis.

And no one has to relive the pain to get there.

Sure, my friend still would have spotted the lie.

She just wouldn’t have added her own guilt to the mix.

I’m curious, where does a small thing tend to set off a huge reaction for you?

Hit reply and let me know.

Sometimes naming it is the first step to clearing it.