by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

The Emotional Reservoir: Using Trigger Work to Get Your Emotions Moving Again and Grow Real

Imagine for a second that you’re going about your day, feeling relatively balanced and pretty real about things, but – all of a sudden – someone cuts you off in traffic, and within an instant, you’re red-faced, raging, and hurling obscenities that even a sailor would be ashamed of…

Or maybe you’re watching Netflix with your partner and they say something that seems innocent on the surface but suddenly – and involuntarily – you find yourself spiralling into a pit of insecurity.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to being human in a world where humans are gonna human.

This article is about trigger work and exploring how these kinds of reactions don’t come out of nowhere but about how they come from within – not because of some random mood swing or chemical imbalance but from something very real inside you: an emotional reservoir that most of us carry around inside the deepest recesses of our being.

Understanding this reservoir could be the key to transforming not just your emotional life, but your whole sense of who you are because it’s the difference between living from a fragmented ego and growing into your realness.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Trigger work is about feeling what you really feel - not just what you think you feel.

What We’ll Cover in this Article

The Emotional Reservoir: Using Trigger Work to Get Your Emotions Moving Again and Grow Real

The Hidden Reservoir Inside You (Yes, You)

Unless you’re completely enlightened like Jesus or the Buddha (in which case, congratulations but you might as well stop reading), chances are you’re lugging around a hefty load of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ as you go through life.

This emotional backlog – your ‘reservoir’ – is made up of old pain, disappointments, shame, grief, rage, and other sticky bits of experience that weren’t fully processed at the time.

Instead of moving through us like energy should (because “emotions are e-motion, energy in motion” to quote John Bradshaw) they got blocked, suppressed, and locked behind the ego: our carefully constructed identity which is dependent on us not facing these things so we can continue to identify in a way that feels ‘familiar’ (no matter how satisfying or unsatisfying that might be).

Unfortunately (to the ego, at least), emotional energy doesn’t stay quietly tucked away forever – it keeps leaking…especially when life turns up the heat or the pressure gets too much.

Pressure Doesn’t Create, It Reveals

When life squeezes us – through stress, conflict, or emotional discomfort – it doesn’t insert something new into us. Instead, it just reveals what was already there.

When we’re ‘triggered’ or ‘activated’ in this way, the pressure pushes the ‘juice’ out of the reservoir and what comes out might not be pretty but it’s powerful because it tells us exactly what we need to work with.

In other words, whatever ‘juice’ comes out when you get ‘squeezed’ shows you what’s really going on inside yourself.

Let’s say, for example, that you get criticised at work and immediately feel defensive and tearful:

Is the feedback itself really the issue? Or did it just poke a wound that’s been there since childhood when love was conditional and based on your ‘performance’ according to certain unrealistic standards?

Or perhaps you find yourself consumed by jealousy when your friend shares their latest win:

Is it their success that causes you to feel pain or is their success shining a spotlight on your buried insecurity and unacknowledged potential?

In all these cases (and any like them), it’s never the ‘thing’ or ‘event’ outside of you that’s making you feel whatever you feel – those feelings are already there but outside of your conscious awareness because they’ve been shoved down into your unconscious reservoir. All these external ‘things’ or ‘event’ really do is remind you of what you’ve been hiding from.

This is not abstract theory – it’s given evidence every day:

Two people can experience the exact same external event – being cut off in traffic, for example – and have wildly different internal responses. One shrugs it off, the other goes ballistic.

The only difference is what’s already in their reservoir.

Trigger Work and Reality: You Can’t Flow If You Don’t Let Go

Your REALNESS isn’t some magical state of bliss – it’s the process of becoming whole by facing what’s real within yourself, the world, and reality.

To grow real at the level of your emotional life, you have to stop pretending the reservoir doesn’t exist and start being honest with yourself about whatever you’re carrying so you can start letting it move.

The only thing stopping you from doing this is the ego which always resists the stirring of unconscious ‘stuff’ because it wants control, an ordered self-image, and self-protection – all of the things that facing your reservoir will be a threat to (because allowing the reservoir to get ‘moving’ again will cause your shadow self to surface which is the biggest threat to the ego of all).

To make matters worse, when you deny the ‘stuff’ in your reservoir, it doesn’t disappear – it festers and it tends to explode when you least want it to. This is exactly what happens when we get ‘squeezed’ and that ‘juice’ comes out that we’re not ready for.

A strategy that we can use here is becoming proactive instead of waiting for a trigger to knock us off course. In other words, we can consciously turn towards the contents of our reservoir, rather than letting life pull the cork and send us flying when we least expect it.

This is the gift of “trigger work” which we’ll explore briefly in a second – it teaches us to reverse-engineer our reactions so that we can see what’s really going on inside us, stop blaming the world, and start facing the truth.

Let’s have a quick look:

Trigger Work: Reverse Engineering Your Reactions and Growing Real

Step 1: Awareness – Catching the Leak

The first step is simply becoming aware that something in you has been activated when you get ‘squeezed’ and that ‘juice’ starts to leak out of the reservoir.

You don’t have to psychoanalyse it to death and drive yourself made or anything – just notice:

What emotion is present?
Where do you feel it in the body?
What story is your mind telling you about the situation?

Awareness is simply about witnessing, not ‘fixing’ or even trying to find solutions – it’s simply about pulling your attention back from the trigger and placing it on the reaction it produced in you.

That reaction is your clue and will show you the way back to realness so see it for what it is and learn what you can from it without any sort of attachment or identification (filtering it through ego and its projections).

Step 2: Acceptance – Owning the Reservoir

This is where most people bail because it’s confronting. You realise something that maybe you would prefer not to realise like, “Oh. That rage was already in me” or “I’ve been holding onto this shame for years“.

This is uncomfortable because it means taking radical responsibility and realising that there’s nobody to blame for “making” you feel in a certain way.

The brutal truth to remember is as follows:

You can’t heal what you don’t accept and what you deny just becomes your prison.

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation or surrender – it means being strong enough to acknowledge that this emotion is a part of your current relationship with yourself and reality. It’s yours because it’s in the reservoir. Pretending it’s not won’t make it go away.

Accepting the emotion without judging yourself (or the emotion itself) is what starts to drain the reservoir because it means you’re not reacting from ego anymore – you’re relating from truth.

(And the ego is always a reaction to unaccepted emotional ‘stuff’ so you’re growing real and becoming free).

Step 3: Action – Transmute the Energy

Here’s where we get tactical and a bit more strategic because – once you’ve felt it – you have a choice: suppress it, explode with it, or transmute it.

Emotions are e-motion, energy in motion, as John Bradshaw said – they’re meant to move and if we stop them from moving because of mental and physical blocks then we just end up causing problems for ourselves (and others by extension, tbh).

Different emotions require different outlets – here are some basic examples to help you create a strategy in your own life:

If it’s anger:

Channel it into physical movement like boxing, lifting, or even shouting into a pillow.
Use it to get clear about your boundaries and your sense of purpose. Anger points to power so let it fuel you and serve as energy for action instead of breaking you down and holding you back.

If it’s sadness:

Don’t intellectualise it and explain it away – just mourn what needs mourning as you let go of what needs letting go of. Allow yourself to cry if need be – that’s a catharsis in itself.
Reflect with music, journaling, or a real conversation. Sadness is cleansing and is about shedding old skin.

If it’s shame:

Look for the origin: Whose voice is it that you’re judging yourself with, for example? Where did you learn to judge yourself and hold back like this? It’s NOT your real state, that’s for sure
Bring light to it by speaking it aloud to someone safe – shame dissolves in connection and expression (seriously, just sharing it with somebody can make it disappear sometimes as you’ll see you were holding on for totally unreal reasons).

If it’s fear:

Challenge the story behind the fear. Is it real or an echo of the past? Often fear is just F.E.A.R (“false evidence appearing real”). Go find out for sure (if there’s no physical danger then it’s just emotional discomfort which means there’s room to grow).
Breathe deeply and re-enter your body and your awareness. Fear lives in the hypothetical future – stop worrying and come back to now.

If it’s guilt:

If it’s healthy guilt (a short-term pang until you accept that you did something wrong), make amends.
If it’s toxic guilt (you feel responsible for someone else’s emotions and it LINGERS), release it.

The goal is to let the emotion move through you and transform by either being released or allowing you to integrate parts of yourself you may have been hiding from.

When you do this enough, something amazing happens: your energy shifts and the reservoir becomes a canal.

From Reservoir to Canal: The Energy Shift Trigger Work Can Bring

A reservoir stores water. A canal channels it – that’s the evolution of your emotional life when you start living in your realness.

In this state, you’re no longer just storing up emotional pain and hoping not to erupt – you’re letting it flow and you’re using it in alignment with your values: the energy that once caused destruction every time you got ‘squeezed’ now fuels your vision, your habits, your purpose and the ‘juice’ tastes so much sweeter.

Rage becomes clarity. Grief becomes depth. Shame becomes humility. Fear becomes focus.

When you have a reservoir you become stagnant and nothing ever changes; if you have a river then your emotions consume you and take you wherever they want to go; when you have a canal, you CHOOSE to direct your energy where it needs to go so you can live your REAL life.

This is what it means to be emotionally intelligent in the truest sense – you don’t block, you don’t explode. You realise.

Practical Steps to Start Using Trigger Work Today

Here’s a step-by-step you can use to implement some “trigger work” principles the next time you get emotionally activated:

1. Pause, Breathe, and Observe

As soon as you feel triggered, stop, and take three deep breaths – this creates a gap between stimulus and response so that you can just observe instead of reacting on autopilot (based on what’s in that reservoir).

Remind yourself that you are not your emotions – they are just something you have (not that you are). Many problems with emotions come about because people identify with them (which stops them moving).

2. Name It to Tame It

Say out loud (or write in a journal): “I’m feeling [emotion] because [story/thought]” – this builds awareness and starts to separate truth from projections of old reservoir ‘stuff’ and the narratives that come from it instead of reality.

3. Track It in the Body

Where is it sitting? Chest, gut, throat? Somewhere else? Bring your attention there and stay present with it without trying to push it away. If you’ve had your reservoir for a long time then the odds are that some of the emotional ‘stuff’ will be showing up as tension in your body (which is why yin yoga and other somatic practices can be so valuable at building resilience overall).

4. Ask: What Does This Remind Me Of?

Does the emotion feel familiar? Old? What past experience or belief might be fuelling it? What do you still need to let go of or process that’s keeping that reservoir full and that you keep reliving?

5. Accept That It’s Yours

Like we said, this isn’t about blame – it’s about responsibility. The emotion lives in your reservoir so own it without judgement (which means that the emotion isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it just is what it is).

6. Channel the Lesson

Every trigger contains truth. Ask: What is this emotion teaching me about myself, my needs, my values, or my past?

7. Take REAL Action

Once you’ve learned the lesson: DO something with the knowledge you’ve acquired. As the old saying goes the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Do something that takes the energy in that reservoir and directs it into your purpose instead of just going around in the same old circles again and again (i.e. start to build a canal).

8. Rinse and Repeat

This isn’t a one-off trick – it’s a practice, and – like anything worthwhile – it gets easier and more powerful over time as you go deeper and deeper into wholeness.

Trigger work is about bringing forth what needs facing so it doesn't destroy you.

Final Word- Trigger Work: Your Pain is a Portal

The aim of facing all of this ‘stuff’ isn’t to become emotionless like a robot – the aim is to stop being emotionally hijacked so that you can turn your emotional pain into emotional power and move from reacting unconsciously (reservoir) to responding wisely (canal).

Every trigger is an invitation back into the truth and so a portal into something real – if you follow that path, what waits on the other side isn’t more chaos but clarity and calm.

If the ‘juice’ that comes out when you get ‘squeezed’ isn’t what you want it to be, then maybe it’s time to do something different?

Stop running away from yourself and start running towards something REAL.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you’re ready to grow real and start changing your life then book a free call with me today and start moving fast.

Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.

This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.

It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.

Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.

The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.

Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.

Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.

Real Always Works

Trigger Work: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Emotional Pain for Growth

The Emotional Reservoir: Using Trigger Work to Get Your Emotions Moving Again and Grow Real

What We’ll Cover in this Article

The Hidden Reservoir Inside You (Yes, You)

Pressure Doesn’t Create, It Reveals

Trigger Work and Reality: You Can’t Flow If You Don’t Let Go