TRIGGERZ: Transforming Kansas Youth Mental Health Through Emotional Mastery
A science-based movement to empower adolescents with emotional processing tools—preventing addiction, transforming lives, and building resilient futures across Kansas. KS State Grant-Supported to help organizations impact as many youth as possible in the state of Kansas, specifically in Wyandotte, Geary, Harvey and Reno Counties.
The Crisis Gripping Kansas Youth
Kansas adolescents are facing an unprecedented mental health emergency. The statistics paint a devastating picture of youth drowning in emotional pain they cannot process, with consequences that ripple through families, schools, and communities.
20.3%
Major Depression Rate
50,000 Kansas teens experienced major depression last year—up from just 15% in recent years
66.7%
Received No Treatment
Two-thirds of depressed teens go untreated—far exceeding the national average
13.1%
Contemplated Suicide
Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for ages 10-24 in Kansas
63.8%
Youth Suicide Surge
Devastating increase in suicide rates between 2001-2020
The consequences extend far beyond these statistics. Substance use disorders among students ages 12-18 more than doubled to 8.8%. Teens increasingly turn to marijuana, alcohol, and drugs not for recreation, but to numb unbearable emotional pain they cannot process. ER visits for youth mental health jumped 63% during school months. A staggering 63% of Kansas youth have experienced two or more adverse childhood experiences—major risk factors for lifelong struggles.
Despite Kansas ranking 3rd nationally in mental health coverage, 40-50% of Kansas City-area children still don't receive needed services. Social media triples depression risk. Nearly one-third of children now turn to AI for emotional support instead of learning healthy human connection and emotional processing. Most alarmingly, adolescents with untreated depression are twice as likely to develop adult addiction.
The Root Cause: Unprocessed Emotions
The Science Is Clear
Beneath every statistic—the depression, suicides, substance abuse—lies one scientifically proven truth: Unprocessed emotions are the root cause of both the youth mental health crisis and the adult addiction epidemic.
This isn't theory. It's neuroscience. Adolescent brains show hyperactive amygdala activity (emotional reactivity) combined with underdeveloped prefrontal cortex (emotion regulation). Teens feel emotions intensely but lack the neurological tools to regulate them effectively.
In the Brain
Overactivated amygdala creates neural patterns associated with depression, anxiety, and emotional volatility. fMRI studies confirm teens with major depression exhibit abnormally hyperactive amygdala activity.
In the Heart & Nervous System
Chronic stress elevates heart rate, blood pressure, inflammation, and dysregulates the autonomic nervous system. The ACE Study found children with unprocessed emotional experiences have persistently elevated stress hormones.
In Behavior
Unable to tolerate intense feelings, adolescents turn to numbing—substances, screens, pornography, withdrawal—to escape pain rather than process it. These maladaptive strategies provide temporary relief but deepen the cycle.
Research is unequivocal: individuals with substance use disorders have significantly more difficulty regulating emotions than those without SUDs, particularly in controlling impulsive behaviors and accessing effective regulation strategies. This difficulty is a crucial process leading to continued substance misuse and the development of addiction.
The Critical Window: Ages 12-18
Adolescence represents a uniquely vulnerable period—and an unparalleled opportunity. What happens during ages 12-18 determines the trajectory of a life. The brain is simultaneously most vulnerable to trauma and substance use, yet most receptive to learning emotional regulation skills.
Without Intervention
  • Unprocessed emotions create entrenched patterns of depression, anxiety, and emotional volatility
  • Teens turn to substances to numb pain they cannot process
  • Substance use becomes the learned default coping mechanism
  • The brain literally wires itself for addiction as the automatic response to emotional distress
  • Adult addiction becomes nearly inevitable
With Emotional Processing Skills
  • Teens develop adaptive regulation strategies and emotional clarity
  • Emotional distress decreases measurably across multiple indicators
  • Substance use loses appeal as a coping mechanism
  • The brain wires itself for resilience and healthy emotional expression
  • Adult addiction risk drops up to 50%

The Science: Rates of substance use and psychopathology peak during adolescence, with emotion regulation deficits serving as a core transdiagnostic risk factor underlying development of substance use, addiction, and comorbid psychopathology. Trauma and substance use both dysregulate the stress response system and cause neurobiological changes affecting emotional regulation, motivation, and physiologic stress response.
The vicious cycle is clear: trauma triggers difficult emotions, people seek relief through substances, substance use creates new problems and trauma, and the cycle repeats—worsening the original trauma. But this cycle can be broken. Teaching emotional processing during this critical window creates lasting neural pathways for resilience.
The Solution: Teaching Emotional Processing
If unprocessed emotions are the root cause, then teaching teens to process emotions effectively is the solution. The research is definitive and overwhelming in its consistency across multiple studies and populations.
Emotional Clarity = Resilience
Adolescents with higher emotional clarity report significantly fewer depressive symptoms and greater overall resilience to life stressors
Adaptive Regulation Works
Youth using adaptive regulation strategies show measurably lower stress, reduced amygdala activation, and better emotional balance
Lifelong Protection
Teens who master emotion regulation have substantially lower rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, and behavioral disorders in both adolescence and adulthood
The Evidence Base
  • Model-based emotion regulation is significantly associated with lower frequencies of nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis use
  • Emotion regulation is a core transdiagnostic risk factor for substance use, addiction, and psychopathology—making it a key treatment target
  • Social-emotional learning is among the most effective tools for preventing substance abuse
The Bottom Line
Learning to process emotions well is one of the strongest lifelong protective factors against addiction, mood disorders, and poor health outcomes.
This isn't just managing symptoms. This is addressing the root cause and fundamentally changing life trajectories.
Why Organizations Turn to Triggerz
Going Upstream
Most programs focus on the behaviors of addiction—the visible symptoms. They teach "just say no" or manage consequences after a crisis has already struck. They miss the root cause entirely.
Triggerz goes upstream. We teach adolescents to transform the emotions that drive destructive behaviors before those behaviors take root.
01
Identify the Root Cause
Unprocessed emotions driving destructive coping mechanisms
02
Teach Processing Tools
Science-based techniques to transform emotions from pain to power
03
Practice & Integrate
Weekly sessions plus daily app reinforcement for lasting change
04
Prevent Adult Addiction
Break the cycle before it becomes entrenched in neural pathways
Organizations turn to Triggerz to prevent addictions in adulthood by teaching, learning, and integrating tools that transform emotions from pain to power. This isn't symptom management. This isn't crisis intervention after damage is done. This is root-cause prevention that changes the trajectory of lives.
The Triggerz Differentiator
Not Another Mental Health Program—A Transformation System
Faith & Science Integration
Built on the powerful integration of faith principles, neuroscience, heart coherence research, nervous system regulation, and emotional energy biology. Every tool is grounded in both spiritual wisdom and peer-reviewed research.
The 13 Pillars Framework
A complete roadmap for emotional mastery covering thoughts, mindset, beliefs, emotional triggers, nervous system regulation, conflict repair, and purpose—providing students with a comprehensive toolkit.
Learning Through Feeling
Triggerz doesn't just teach about emotions—students feel and embody them. Neuroscience proves affective, embodied learning engages deeper brain systems and creates stronger, longer-lasting neural pathways than cognitive insight alone.
Engaging Curriculum
Six weekly 60-minute workshop-style sessions featuring visual slides, a science fiction narrative spine for relatability, real-world tools, and small group intimacy (up to 20 students).
Daily Reinforcement App
Learning continues beyond sessions with the Shaw Enterprises Transformational Journal App—featuring daily emotional processing tools, interactive quests, and progress tracking.
Empowerment Focus
Triggerz teaches that emotions are messengers pointing toward healing. Students transmute pain into power, anguish into authority, victimhood into accountability.
Dual-Pathway Neuroscience: Why Triggerz Creates Lasting Change
The secret to Triggerz's transformative power lies in how we teach. Most programs rely solely on cognitive learning—lectures, worksheets, intellectual understanding. But neuroscience reveals this approach is fundamentally incomplete for emotional transformation.
Cognitive Learning
Intellectual understanding of concepts through explanation and discussion
Affective Learning
Emotional experience through feeling and embodied practice
Somatic Integration
Physical sensation connecting mind and body awareness
Neural Rewiring
New pathways forming between cognition and emotion centers
Lasting Behavior Change
Sustainable transformation through integrated learning

The Neuroscience
Emotional experience activates limbic circuits (amygdala, insula, ventral striatum), creating stronger, longer-lasting memory encoding than cognitive learning alone. When concepts link to personal emotion and bodily sensation, both explicit and implicit memory systems activate—making learning "stick" at unconscious levels that shape future automatic decisions.
Affective experiences reorganize neural connectivity between cognition and emotion centers. This means Triggerz students don't just know the lessons intellectually—they know them emotionally, physically, and at the deepest neural levels. This produces more sustainable behavior change than knowledge alone could ever achieve.
The Triggerz Advantage: Students feel emotions in real-time during sessions, practice processing techniques with their own actual triggers, and experience the bodily shift from dysregulation to regulation. This dual-pathway learning creates neural pathways that become automatic responses to future emotional challenges.
The 13 Pillars: A Complete Roadmap to Emotional Mastery
Triggerz provides students with a comprehensive framework for understanding and transforming their emotional lives. Each pillar builds on the previous, creating an integrated system for lasting change.
1
Thoughts, Mindset, Beliefs = Reality
Understanding how our internal narratives shape our experienced reality
2
Law of Neutrality
Recognizing that events are neutral until we assign meaning and emotion
3
Theory of Intentions
Learning to discern motivations—our own and others'—behind actions
4
Conflict Repair
Tools for healing relationships and resolving interpersonal struggles
5
Flip the Script & Hand of God
Reframing adversity as opportunity for growth and meaning
6
Map of Consciousness
Understanding the emotional energy frequency scale from shame to enlightenment
7
Laws of Attraction & Magnetism
How our emotional frequency attracts corresponding experiences
8
Imprisonment to Empowerment Spectrum
Identifying where we are trapped and how to step into freedom
9
Three Core Belief Wounds
Healing the foundational wounds that drive destructive patterns
10
Emotional Triggers
Understanding what activates us and why—the key to transformation
11
Nervous System Entanglements
Recognizing when we're dysregulated and tools to return to coherence
12
Power to Build Another Person
Using our words and actions to elevate others rather than diminish them
13
Who Are We, Why Are We Here
Discovering purpose, identity, and meaning in life's journey
The Triggerz Program: 6 Weeks to Emotional Mastery
Our 60-minute weekly sessions are designed to engage adolescents aged 12-18 through an interactive and experiential learning journey, focusing on practical emotional processing skills.
1
Week 1:
Mindset & Neutrality
Understanding how thoughts and beliefs shape reality, and recognizing events as neutral.
2
Week 2:
Intentions & Repair
Discerning motivations behind actions and healing relationships through conflict repair.
3
Week 3:
Reframing & Consciousness
Reframing adversity as growth opportunities and understanding emotional energy frequencies.
4
Week 4:
Attraction & Empowerment
Exploring how emotional frequency attracts experiences and moving from imprisonment to freedom.
5
Week 5:
Belief Wounds & Triggers
Healing foundational belief wounds and understanding what activates emotional triggers.
6
Week 6:
Integration & Purpose
Regulating the nervous system, empowering others, and discovering life's purpose and identity.
Inside Each 60-Minute Session:
Engaging Questions
Thought-provoking prompts to create connection, connect topics to students' personal experiences, disarm walls and prepare for optimal informational receipt.
Informational Learning
Clear, age-appropriate insights into neuroscience and emotional biology.
Emotional Activities
Experiential exercises that stimulate embodied emotional processing.
Take-Home Tools
Practical strategies and exercises for independent practice between sessions.
Integration & Share
Discussion and reflection to solidify learning and prepare for the week ahead.
Expected Outcomes: Transformation That Lasts
Immediate Results
During & After 6 Weeks
  • Measurably reduced depression and anxiety symptoms across validated assessment scales
  • Decreased numbing behaviors including substance experimentation, excessive screen time, and withdrawal
  • Improved relationships and communication with family, peers, and authority figures
  • Greater self-awareness and emotional vocabulary
  • Increased resilience when facing stressors and setbacks
  • Enhanced sense of purpose and personal empowerment
  • Tools immediately applicable to daily life challenges
Long-Term Impact
Into Adulthood
  • Significantly lower rates of depression, anxiety, and mood disorders throughout life
  • Up to 50% reduced risk of substance use disorders and addiction
  • Higher life satisfaction and subjective well-being measures
  • Stronger, healthier relationships and family systems
  • Greater achievement in education, career, and personal goals
  • Better physical health outcomes including lower rates of heart disease, inflammation, and stress-related illness
  • Greater emotional intelligence and leadership capacity
  • Lifelong tools for navigating adversity with resilience rather than avoidance

Breaking Generational Cycles: Triggerz students become emotionally intelligent, resilient, purpose-driven adults who break generational cycles of addiction, abuse, and emotional dysfunction. They create lives of meaning and model healthy emotional processing for their own future children—transforming not just one life, but entire family lineages.
Program Details & Investment
Structure
6 weekly sessions, 60 minutes each
Maximum 20 students per program for intimate group dynamics
Workshop-style format with experiential learning
Investment
$250 per student
($5,000 per complete program of 20 students)
Includes all materials, app access, and ongoing support
Limited Grant Opportunity
$100 rebate per student
Available for first 540 enrollees
Rebate issued within 3-6 weeks of program completion
Our Goal
27 programs secured across Wyandotte, Geary, Harvey, and Reno counties, serving 540 students, by December 15th, 2025
Programs begin January 2026
Who Can Purchase
  • Schools and school districts
  • Recreation centers
  • Churches and faith communities
  • Community organizations
  • Youth-serving nonprofits
Note: Programs are purchased by organizations, not individual families or students
Implementation Support
Triggerz provides complete implementation support including facilitator training, program materials, technical assistance, and ongoing consultation to ensure program success.
The Shaw Enterprises Transformational Journal App
Learning doesn't stop when the weekly session ends. The Shaw Enterprises Transformational Journal App extends the Triggerz experience into students' daily lives, providing continuous reinforcement and practical tools for emotional processing.
The app features a compelling science fiction storytelling format that links concepts for maximum engagement and retention. Students track their transformation journey from imprisoned to empowered, trapped to free, victim to champion through interactive, gamified experiences.
Complete Transformation Quest
An engaging narrative journey that reinforces the 13 Pillars through interactive storytelling, personal reflection prompts, and milestone achievements that celebrate growth.
Conflict Repair Workshop
Step-by-step guided tools for navigating relationship challenges, practicing difficult conversations, and healing interpersonal wounds in real-time situations.
Heart Coherence Practices
Research-backed breathing and meditation techniques to regulate the nervous system, reduce anxiety, and create emotional balance—accessible anytime, anywhere.
Daily Reflections & Tracking
Guided prompts for processing emotions, tracking triggers, monitoring mood patterns, and documenting personal growth over time with data visualization.
Personalized Reminders
Customizable notifications that prompt practice of specific tools, emotional check-ins, and reinforcement of key concepts at optimal times.
Progress & Achievement System
Visual tracking of skill mastery, consistency streaks, and milestone achievements that motivate continued engagement and celebrate transformation.
The Time to Act Is Now
Kansas youth are suffering. The statistics are alarming. The consequences of inaction are catastrophic. Every day without intervention, more adolescents sink deeper into depression, turn to substances to numb unbearable pain, and wire their developing brains for lifelong addiction and mental health struggles.
But there is hope.
We Know the Root Cause
Unprocessed emotions drive the mental health crisis and addiction epidemic—this is established science, not theory.
We Have the Solution
Teaching emotional processing during the critical ages 12-18 window prevents adult addiction and transforms life trajectories.
We Have the Tools
Triggerz offers a proven, comprehensive, science-based system that works—combining neuroscience, faith principles, and experiential learning.
The Window Is Closing
Every year we wait, another cohort of Kansas youth ages past the optimal intervention window. We must act now.
This Is More Than a Program
It's a Movement
Triggerz represents a fundamental shift from symptom management to root-cause prevention. From crisis intervention to proactive empowerment. From victimhood to agency. From pain to power.
We're not just changing individual lives—we're transforming the mental health landscape for Kansas youth. We're breaking generational cycles. We're preventing addiction before it starts. We're creating a generation of emotionally intelligent, resilient, purpose-driven adults.
Join Us
Partner with Triggerz to bring this transformative program to your school, organization, or community.
Secure your program for the January 2026 cohort and be part of changing lives forever. With limited grant funding available for early adopters, now is the time to invest in Kansas youth.
Contact us today to learn more and enroll your organization.
TRIGGERZ: From Pain to Power. From Anguish to Authority. From Victim to Empowered.
Let's unlock what Kansas kids need to take control of their hearts and their minds—one student, one heart, one transformed life at a time.
Sources
THE CRISIS
Kansas youth are drowning.
20.3% of Kansas teens (about 50,000 adolescents) experienced major depression last year—up from 15% in recent previous years.
Sources:
https://kasb.org/48409_2?articleID=14369
https://mhanational.org/the-state-of-mental-health-in-america/data-rankings/youth-ranking/
https://lawrencekstimes.com/2024/09/25/ks-mh-ranking-24/
66.7% received no treatment, far exceeding the national average.
Source:
https://kasb.org/48409_2?articleID=14369
13.1% contemplated suicide—now the second leading cause of death for ages 10-24.
Sources:
https://kasb.org/48409_2?articleID=14369
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/rates-by-state.html
Substance use disorders among students ages 12-18 more than doubled to 8.8%.
Source:
https://kasb.org/48409_2?articleID=14369
Despite ranking 3rd nationally in mental health coverage, 40-50% of Kansas City-area children don't receive needed services.
Sources:
https://kasb.org/48409_2?articleID=14369
https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/there-were-gaps-for-kids-childrens-mercy-launches-program-to-bridge-mental-health-care-gap
Adolescents with untreated depression are twice as likely to develop adult addiction (national data from NIDA):
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2022/03/depression-during-adolescence-increases-risk-of-substance-use-disorders
THE ROOT CAUSE: UNPROCESSED EMOTIONS
Individuals with substance use disorders have more difficulty regulating emotions.
Source:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20015584/
Chronic stress elevates heart rate, blood pressure, inflammation, and damages immunity.
Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15250814/
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Last updated: 08/24/2025
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