True Emotions - Untrue Triggers

The quotes below are taken from The Five Levels of Attachment by Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. You may be familiar with The Four Agreements by his father Don Miguel Ruiz. Both books have been important helps to me with improving the quality of understanding my beliefs and behaviors as well as in dealing with Gregory's Alzheimer's.

While I have always recognized emotions as a part of being human, I felt that emotions out of control were a bad thing. I never thought of them as an anchor to how I am feeling about myself or my environment.

I wrote about this recently when I realized that when dealing with a difficult interaction between Gregory and myself, my emotions would seemingly inappropriately explode. It turns out the emotions were real and I needed to honor and give them notice. The difficulty was that old expectations in my relationship with Gregory were triggering the emotions and the triggers were no longer true.

For example now and then I would interpret Gregory's behavior as showing his not caring or not trying hard enough to behave in a way that I was used to. Turns out the emotions caused by my interpretation was real but the trigger was no longer true. He does the best he can but the Alzheimer's is what at times scrambles his behavior, not his lack of caring.

I realized that I was still allowing the old triggers to cause my emotions when if effect, the old triggers were no longer true. I needed to look at those triggers and delete them while adding new triggers and new emotions, like feeling nurturing in place of feeling anger when Gregory did something that looked like a lack of caring when in reality it was that he could no longer focus on the issue at hand.

A short while later, I came across this discussion in Ruiz Jr's book which reinforced what I had already begun to understand:

"It is important to keep in mind that our emotions are real and should not  be ignored as if they don't exist or stuffed away as if they aren't valid. Emotions create the most authentic anchor we have to ourselves.

"The whole spectrum of emotions--fear love, jealousy, insecurity, anger, joy--is very real. But here's the thins: What triggers those emotions may not be real. 

"Our emotions--regardless of the triggers--are expressions of ourselves. These are the important questions to ask: Are we aware of the triggers? Do we know if the trigger is based on reality or if it is based on faulty information? Is the trigger based on an attachment to a certain belief or expectation?

"Uncomfortable emotions are like car alarms: they let us know there is a problem to attend to, a wound for us to wrk on, thus allowing us to see our own truth. Whenever an emotions gets triggered, it is the opportune moment to ask questions such as: What is this about? What agreement is at the heart of this? What attachment does this threaten? Do I really believe this? Is it important? Answering these questions gives us the opportunity to examine our beliefs and choose whether or not to continue to believe.

"We honor our emotions by realizing that they are an expression of how we feel and what we are going through. We look at what has triggered our emotions, while still allowing ourselves to simply feel. We further honor our emotions by having the awareness that they may have been triggered by something not based on truth. Thus we use our emotions as a tool for transformation, because they completely expose whatever agreement has been hiding beneath the surface.