You Can’t “Out-think” Your Triggered Body

Have you ever found yourself completely overwhelmed, frustrated, or stuck in a cycle you can't seem to break? You may feel your body tense up, your mind race, or feel paralyzed by indecision. You know you’re triggered, but you’re not so sure what to do next.

In this episode of The Modern Phoenix, Gervase dives into what it actually takes to move through a trigger, not just from a logical, intellectual place, but through a somatic and soul strategy that allows you to shift your nervous system and return to a state of clarity, empowerment, and ease. This is not your basic “identifying triggers” surface-level episode. This is about integration - learning to recognize, resource, and regulate yourself in real-time so you stop spinning in mental loops and start embodying a new way of being. Listen in as Gervase shares how to move from an activated state into a place of true self-knowing and safety, so that the next time a trigger hits, you’ll know exactly how to navigate it.

If you're tired of being hijacked by your triggers and ready to move through them with ease, grace, and actual solutions, hit play now. And if you’re feeling called to go deeper, Gervase’s Inner Knowing Mastermind is now open! Check out the links below for more info.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why knowing about triggers isn’t enough (and what actually shifts them)

• The biggest mistake we make when trying to "fix" a triggered state

• How to recognize and work with your body’s activation responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn)

• A simple question to ask yourself when you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what to do

• How resourcing yourself properly can completely shift how you experience triggers in the future

• Why emotional intelligence isn't just a mental game, but a Mind-Body-Soul strategy

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*NEW* The Inner Knowing Mastermind. A sacred space to develop unshakable self-trust and body and soul-led intuition

• This 8-week group coaching/ live training experience is designed to give you access to your deepest, most profound truth, and help create a life that makes YOU most happy (instead of all the pushing, pretending and people-pleasing that creates so much stress and incongruence now).

• If you are a woman who has “it all” but still feels something is wrong despite all you’ve “done right,” this mastermind is for you. 

• G will help you unlearn the conditioning that keeps you trapped, and tap into your soul-voice and body wisdom to live a life of authenticity, freedom and feeling fucking good. 

• It’s time you get to be who you REALLY are, not who *they* told you to be.

• Check it out here:  https://www.gervasekolmos.com/inner-knowing-mastermind

Follow Gervase

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: www.instagram.com/gervasekolmos

• Visit her website: www.gervasekolmos.com

You Can’t “Out-think” Your Triggered Body

Episode Full Transcript

Hi, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Phoenix podcast. I am your inner transformation coach here today to offer you some more of what I do, which is somatic and soul strategy. And this is something that you really need when you are stuck in a trigger.

Raise your hand if you, like me and every person I have ever met walking planet Earth, have experienced the distinct pleasure of being triggered. And now I want you to take that a layer deeper. And I want you to think about maybe you're triggered right now. Maybe you popped on this podcast because you're in the middle of a trigger, or maybe something is really fresh. And if you can tune into right below this top layer, the mind's understanding of I am triggered, I want you to go into the body. I want you to go into the nervous system and notice, how do I know that I am triggered? What is happening in my system, in my body, when I experience this trigger? And likely, what you're going to notice is sensations that feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel a body that is tense. People use words like anxious, tightness. A client the other day just said like a pot of water boiling over. And this is all totally normal and just very cool. And I think it's very cool when we start to relate to ourselves as not just minds having experiences, but bodies having experiences.

Today I want to talk to you about what to do when you're stuck in a trigger. But we're going to approach this from a trauma-informed nervous system approach. We're not going to get into all of the information of what's happening in your nervous system. Because my guess is you probably know all the information. You probably saved all of those, you know, infographics online. You can talk about the parasympathetic and the sympathetic and blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't actually help you move through a trigger when you're in it. And what happens and what has happened to us as modern women is we're in this modern age of information. So we have all the information about what's happening when we're triggered, all the information about what a nervous system does. But we actually don't have somatic and soul strategies to work through those things. We don't know how to apply that information and integrate it through a mind, body, soul strategy to reach the other side where we get to feel complete, relaxed, relief, solutions, et cetera.

Another thing I want to say about triggers is that aside from them being totally normal, a natural part of the human experience, they are a very common phase of a phoenix cycle, of a cycle of death and rebirth. And, you know, a lot of the times on this podcast and when I'm sharing my own stories, I'll share with you like the big climactic phoenix cycles that I've been through. But also it's worth noting that anytime we feel activated, paralyzed, indecisive, uncertain, confused, which by the way are different symptoms and ways that triggers can present, we have this opportunity to move through a mini cycle, a mini phoenix session, a mini phoenix cycle. And that is really cool. When we start to see our life's experiences through this cyclical lens of constant, infinite, circular dynamics, it can just be a relief because I don't know about you, but for me in the past, when I have found myself really triggered by something, the bigger it is, the more I let my mind convince me that this is the only way that it is. And this is the way it is going to be indefinitely and that I am stuck. And this becomes like the identity I wear. For example, I am a person who just, I have a mother wound. I have challenges with my mother and this is just who I am and et cetera. Versus I am a person in process working with this trigger I have around my mother. This is, I mean, I've shared tons of that on this podcast and how it has shifted significantly over the last decade through thousands of mini phoenix cycles. And the more you're willing to wash and repeat, you know, get in there, wash it out, circulate it all, come out the other side, the quicker you're going to change paths, the quicker you're going to make different choices. And as we know, on this podcast, I'm really here to teach you and equip you and empower you to know, know what's happening in your body, know what's happening in your subconscious and your limiting beliefs and your patterns and your behaviors and your relationships and make different choices. So that little by little, you find yourself at the end of a road that is suddenly so different than where you started and where you thought you were going to end up. Because through this cyclical pattern of the phoenix, your awareness and knowing is leading you to making thousands of tiny choices that are a little bit different every time until suddenly you end up with a totally different nervous system, with a new neural pathway when it comes to you and your relationship with your mom, or you and your relationship to your work, or you and the way that you relate to your kids. Fill in the blank.

So what do we need to know when we're stuck in a trigger? Aside from the fact that it is so empowering and helpful to start to bring awareness to our bodies and our felt senses and our nervous systems and to identify, oh, a trigger for me is likely an activation state. Okay, so if it's an activation state, if my nervous system is activated, which is casually referred to as I'm in a trauma response, but I don't really want to pathologize here. I don't want to get into that because we can just say broadly, our nervous system is activated. So we may be feeling some variation of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It is so helpful to then identify, okay, what's happening for me? Oh, I feel frozen. I feel an inability to make a choice. I feel ill-equipped to have that conversation. Or we might notice a fight response. I had a client who was talking about this exact experience of feeling trapped in this cycle, in this trigger with her kids. And every time she would get triggered by something her child would do, she would feel that activation response inside of her that I helped her identify was a fight response.

Now our conditioning and our culture will come in here and give you all the reasons why that is bad. You are a wrong parent for feeling like you want to fight your kid. And I think it's really helpful here to notice all the places culture and conditioning come in and interfere with what is actually a very normal, healthy biological process. Our physiology is doing its own thing unrelated to our intentions to be whatever, mindful parents or the mind's, you know, ideas of what it is to be a good parent. And that is normal. That's what we, I refer to it often as the animal body.

So once again, once you've gotten out of the mind of like, I'm triggered by my children. So let's stick with this example of this client. I'm triggered by my children. And every time this happens, my body goes into a fight response. Now I can know, okay, that's what's happening. That's all that's happening. I'm in a fight response. And on top of this, let's add some gasoline. I feel a lot of guilt and shame about having this physiological response because my conditioning tells me that good mothers do not get triggered by their children, which by the way is absolute bullshit.

So what all my clients know and what we practice and strengthen in their patterns, behaviors, in their choices is that when they feel this activation response, if they, I mean, if they get on a call with me or if they can put a little bit of distance or bring in a little bit of awareness to know everything we just talked about, the symptoms, what is happening in their nervous system. And if they can know that this is the part where the mind is going to come in and try to override anything you try to do by bossing you around and gaslighting you and telling you what is right, wrong, what you should feel ashamed about, what you should feel guilty about, what a good mother does, what the right way is to behave in this whatever situation, if you can know all of this, this is a superpower. Because then what we know is there is nothing that you can choose out there in the world from an activated state that is going to create the type of results that you are looking for in your life. There is nothing that you can choose or create from an activated state that is going to leave you feeling calmer, more grounded, and more like your authentic soulful self. Because if you make choices from an activated state, we're not here to make it bad or wrong. The trigger is normal. But if you start to make decisions and choices from this state, we know we'll just create more and more and more and more chaos, more and more and more paralysis, decision paralysis, more and more rupture and fighting. If you're angry, and you try to tell your kids not to be angry, suddenly everybody's angry. It's like that funny meme where it's like no one in the history of the world has calmed down when they've been told told to calm down like that. It doesn't actually work. Okay, because these are mind strategies. These are just like thinking, you know, the quote unquote, right thing to do and trying to do it from this mental state when your physiology is inflamed, when your nervous system is having its own experience when your animal body needs something absolutely different than what your mind is going to tell you that you need.

And so what I was saying with my clients is like, we all my clients know, this is the moment where we need to create some space, we need to pause, we need to do nothing, we need to reel it in, we need to bring it back to the it's all me framework, we need to be able to control. And so we need to be able to control. And so we need to be able to do this. In this moment. And right now, if I'm tuning into more than just my mind, if I'm tuning into my body and my heart and my soul, I can sense and feel that I am activated, upset, overwhelmed, angry, frustrated, tired, not sure how to fix this. Okay. Okay. That's okay. That is normal.

If you have gotten to this step in the process without any support from any facilitation, I mean, really, you are a freaking pro. Like I hire people to help me do this because it is not taught. It goes against everything that we have learned, which is like, do everything right and you will get the right results. And if you don't get the right results, use these mental strategies to overcome those results and convince people to get you what you want. But hopefully you've realized by now that life doesn't work that way. The best way to shift your state, if you're triggered, if you're not getting the outcome you want, if you feel stuck in a loop of anger or a freeze response, or you keep trying to run away from your problems or repress your feelings, the best thing you can do is to honor that you are a mind and a body and a soul. Is to thank your mind and your ego for trying to protect you, trying to problem solve, trying to push through and be resilient and keep you safe. Give yourself so much grace and compassion. Like, thank you. That part of me that's doing that thing again, where I push through or I, I scream to get results or I shut down to protect this relationship or I don't have that conversation or I become this version of myself to get that result. Thank you. Okay. I can have so much compassion and appreciation for this old strategy and understand that I am here for a new way of womaning. I am here for an integrated approach to womaning that brings my body and soul wisdom on board and creates true harmony and collaboration and peace in my life. It is absolutely possible when I just know what's going on when it's happening, create that gap, that pause where I thank my mind and my ego for stepping in and also let them know, actually, we got this from here.

And I check in with the body. What do you need? I check in with my heart. What do you need? Check in with my soul. What do you need? Or somebody that you're working with helps you. Check in with these parts of you because it may feel like totally meta and hard for you to even conceptualize. I just went for a walk in my backyard and did this like check in with myself because I've been doing it for like 15 years. And when we focus then on, okay, it's all me. What is the resource that's needed? I know you want to fight that battle or prove you're right or make yourself wrong or focus on this external thing, but let's bring it in. It's all me. I'm tuning in to what's happening beneath the mind, below the mind. I'm literally thinking about like a body and then you go down and then below the mind is the body. I don't know. I'm checking in with the heart, with the soul. What is it that you actually need right now? If you didn't need to worry about being wrong or right or good or bad or making your case or fixing anything right now, I know you're triggered. But if I promised you, we are going to fix that. We're going to get to that. We're not bypassing it. We're not going to force you to come to a conclusion with it that you don't actually even like. We're just going to like pause and put it aside for a minute and check in with the body. What is it that would feel so good right now?

On the Season of Pleasure Masterclass, which if you haven't grabbed the replay to that, you absolutely should. I will link it in the show notes. I refer to this as like, where's my water? It's like you're in a desert. I'm triggered and I'm in a desert. I want to focus on where is my water? Not on solving all these problems and getting to the other side. It's like rule number one. Okay, I need water. And so in a trigger moment, you're just going to do the same thing. Like where is my water? And this could look like laying down, calling a friend, canceling something, going to something, shifting things around, having space from the person, doing something that brings you pleasure, that brings your nervous system, that humming pleasure that is going to change everything about the experience that you are having.

And what you're going to notice, if you give yourself the permission and the gift of time, just a little bit of time. I mean, most of us don't even give ourselves like five, 10 minutes. We don't even give ourselves time to like refill our glass of water or like make that quick call or do anything that isn't hyperproductive or efficient or for someone else or crosses off something on our to-do list or isn't exciting or fill in the blank. So when I say time, yes, this can turn into long stretches of time. But if you're just listening to this and that feels really uncomfortable for you, just know, I'll take five minutes. And by I, I mean, your body will accept five minutes. Your soul will gladly take five minutes if it's gotten zero in weeks.

Back to this client example, she found herself stuck in this trigger with her family and with her work. And she just said, like, I just have felt so anxious, like this pot boiling over. There's so much to do. There's so much going on. Everybody needs me. If I don't handle it, it falls apart. Raise your hand if you relate to this experience. It is so common with modern women. And then she came to our Phoenix Revolution group call for alumni and current private coaching clients. And this is like a very intimate, intensive, high level group coaching call, right? So we go very deep in these spaces because these women have done this work. They're here to be supported. And as soon as it's her turn to speak, what do you think happens? She's given herself the gift of this 90 minute call. She was not able to prioritize it for such a long time, for a week since she comes to this call and what happens? Tears, tears and tears and tears and relief and tears. The tears don't mean anything except she's finally giving herself a little bit of space, a little bit of resource, a little bit of community. And this gives her nervous system the signal, you're safe here. It's okay. It's okay that you felt angry. It's okay that you made those choices. It's okay that you are who you are. It's okay that you are where you are in your journey. And the resource that is needed is like, let's just be here on this call and allow ourselves to be seen, allow ourselves to be witnessed. Let's allow ourselves to be supported and just give ourselves permission to just be who we are and feel how we feel and just not overthink it in this space.

How many of us would benefit from just giving ourselves space to be held? And it didn't take long. After her hot seat, it's like she's suddenly feeling herself again. There's space for her soul. All of her suddenly gets to fit in her life. And yes, of course, we talk through that trigger. We troubleshoot. We create somatic and soul strategies, but we also are meeting the nervous system where it's at in that moment because you can't rewire your nervous system while it is activated. The best way to choose differently from a triggered state is to choose resource, is to choose compassion and permission and space and grace and teach your nervous system to attune to that. We refer to it as pleasure. We refer to it as water. Refer to it as breath. Okay. It is the resource that's needed to teach your nervous system. It's okay. We're okay. We don't actually need to fight that fight. That's actually not the enemy. Oh, what's actually happening is you actually feel really overwhelmed. You feel like there's not space for you in your life. That's okay. That's normal. What is the resource that's needed? Okay. Why don't we just come to this call and give ourselves space to feel and be seen and witnessed and heard and supported and have community and sisterhood? And let's see what kind of choices we make after we have that kind of space. Let's see what kind of choices we make when we have that space consistently, repeatedly. We're strengthening that pathway in the nervous system.

That trigger begins to feel smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. It doesn't mean that the next time when you normally would feel angry with your kids, you don't feel angry. First of all, you get to feel angry. There's nothing wrong with anger. Anger has a very vital place in your physiology, but that's a totally different podcast. However, we always want to make it right-sized. We want to make sure that our anger is identified and understood and worked with in a productive way instead of something that is repressed or shamed.

So for this client, it's like she came to the session thinking, it's not okay for me to stop. It's not okay for me to feel my anger. It's not okay for me to feel my feelings. It's not okay for me to have space in my life. It's just none of it is okay. So if you're holding all that in your nervous system, what do you think that's going to feel like? Anxiety much? And it's complex and it's layered and it's multifaceted. And so we work with that, right? That's why you find someone who is trained to untangle all those different layers and interlacing threads to help you make sense of them and see things clearly so that you can show up as the most regulated, authentic, self-sovereign version of yourself who is integrated in mind, body, and soul. You can know what's happening when you're triggered and you can know all the different choices that are available to you to shift out of that trigger. And you can also know, oh, if I am caught up in the mind's logical choices, I'm not tapping into the good shit. I'm missing out on the best wisdom and solutions and problem solving that I have in me, which is my body, my somatic and soul strategy.

Okay. So if I want to tap into my somatic and soul strategies and I'm trapped in a mind fuck and I'm triggered and I'm going over a soap opera in my head and I'm thinking of all the things I could do, I already just know I'm like in the wrong arena. I need to look around, notice the arena I'm in, politely excuse myself, back myself out of that arena, give myself a lot of heaping doses of grace and compassion, like whoops, wrong one. Shut the door, open the new arena. Okay. Here, let's check in with the animal body. Oh, I'm in a fight response. Okay. If that wasn't bad or wrong, if I wasn't going to fix it from the mind's perspective, if I was just going to tend to that activation response and ask myself, what is the resource that's needed? What can I offer myself? What are the resources available to me? And then you choose that and you feel what it feels like to be authentically you. You feel your soul. You feel your body. You feel that integration of mind, body, soul. You feel them all working together. And then suddenly it's like, like the whole engine is on board, right? There's gasoline, there's oil, there's tires, there's a person driving, there's the gas pedal. Everything is there. And you're suddenly like, oh, I'm not perfect. I might run out of gas again. I might get angry again. This thing might happen. Life is going to life. And also I'll know how to get back to myself. I'll know how to honor myself, not abandon myself or judge myself or shame myself for being triggered, but instead just tend to my nervous system, to my activation response and give myself the resource that's needed. So I can come home to myself and my soul.

And from that place, the solutions that I think of, the next steps, you would be amazed when someone comes to a call with me and they're trapped in the mind, which is not bad. That's literally my job, right? So they know that's okay. And they're trying to solve a problem. And then we drop in to somatic and soul strategy after that. And then I ask them what they're supposed to do. What do you think? What do we do now? What's the next step? They could have never come to the somatic and soul strategy while in the mind. It's like a different, truly a different arena. It's like two different trees, right? It's not even like two branches of the same tree. And so just knowing that without making it bad or wrong that you're in one or the other, it's just incomplete if you're just using one. Okay? You are meant to integrate mind, body, and soul strategy to move through life. And life includes activation responses, physiological responses that might be culturally inconvenient. Well, so what? Sorry. Sorry, culture that was created for something besides like a whole messy human who is animal and human, who has a limbic brainstem that negotiates so much of the actions that they take and the physiological responses in their body.

So when we have these things all working together, when we integrate, the trigger isn't such a big deal. And the solution to the trigger, we know which arena to go into to get to it. And where we usually land at the end of this twisty, turny little phoenix cycle is, oh, it's okay for me to be who I am and feel what I feel. And I can have so much understanding and appreciation for the ways I've tried to have my needs met in the past or the behaviors I've engaged in. And I can see the path forward now. I can see a path forward. And mine is going to look different from yours. And there's little paths. And then there's the big, gigantic life changes that we make. And they're all important. They all compound to create a life that is true, a life that is yours, that is authentically you, that is integrated in mind, body, soul, that feels on the inside as good as it looks on the outside.

I am so thrilled to share that enrollment for my new Inner Knowing Mastermind is now live. This eight-week program is one of a kind. It is a hybrid of live training and group coaching. And my intention is to not just pile on more information about what Inner Knowing is, but to give you a felt experience of your own inner guidance system each and every week in all the somatic, subconscious, and soulful ways I am trained to do so. And in a group format that makes it accessible and interactive, which is so, so cool.

Having a concrete and well-rounded understanding of the intelligence flowing through you can change your experience of your life. No matter what you are going through, where you've been, or how sure you feel that you can't change, activating your intuition and beginning to create safety, balance, wisdom, and pleasure inside of you can transform everything outside of you. To take advantage of early bird pricing of 25% off, make sure you get in by April 9th. It's on sale today. You can find the link with all the information and registration in the show notes on my website, gervasekolmos.com, or at the link in my personal Instagram bio, which is @gervasekolmos. I have not been this excited about a program in a really long time, and I really hope that I get to connect with some of you inside.