The Power of Negative Anchors: Who's Pushing Your Panic Button?

Recently one of my Juicy Women emailed me and asked me why lately she automatically gets angry for no apparent reason when she sees her husband.

Here is what I told her.

"In a relationship where two people are living together, it is common to experience stress and tension. Sometimes the stress comes from within the marriage but sometimes it comes from other things, work, kids, financial strain, family pressures, etc. The stress chemicals that flood your body when it senses tension, create an association in the brain that will trigger bad feelings. These negative feelings remain in the body until they are dissociated and released.

Now that you know that stress affects you, here's the clincher. Your brain is always working to create new associations. Here's the rule of thumb... anytime you are in an intense emotional state, you are susceptible to creating anchors. Anything that happens around you can get connected in your mind with the way that you feel at that moment. It gets wired into your brain that way. Therefore each and every time that you repeat or trigger the anchor, you will get the same response.

For example, you might be able to think of a certain song that you love and instantly it will make you feel good. The song would be a trigger or considered a stimulus. It will affect your heart rate,
breathing, your pulse, maybe even send a message to the receptors in your skin to create goosebumps, etc. In essence, every part of you will be affected by those yummy feelings as they wash over you.

You could be feeling down and if that song would play on the radio, it would change your state of mind from gloomy to great. This is an example of a positive anchor. Now you don't necessarily have to rely on a song to create an anchor, as I mentioned, your brain does this automatically. Sometimes it works on your behalf and other times it doesn't.

Now let's look at the other form of anchoring which is considered a negative anchor. Let's take the specific example of what may be happening in the case of your husband.

Let's say one day you're having a fat day, you know those days when you just feel as fat as a house and nothing and nobody can make you think or feel differently.

So you're already feeling awful. Your body is defenseless, you're depressed and feeling very vulnerable.

Let's say your husband walks in the room and he's feeling a bit prickly and says something just a bit insensitive about your weight. That is the stimulus that triggers your brain to connect those
feelings of helplessness, and vulnerability to your husband. He may have been well intentioned, yet his delivery may have stunk, however your brain is looking for patterns to prove that he is the bad guy because your brain tells you that you've been hurt.

In your mind, he is perceived as a threat to you. Although he may not be anything of the sort, your brain connected up those extreme feelings of vulnerability with his presence and his specific words.

Therefore until you eliminate this pattern of feeling hurt and vulnerable around him, you won't ever feel the confidence to set him straight in a loving way and let him know from a position of power
that you are not okay with his commenting on your body.

That's why it's so important to use EFT to collapse those negative anchors that just make you feel bad for seemingly no reason at all.