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The Free Advantage
Are you feeling lost, stuck, or unfulfilled? Do you long for a deeper connection with your authentic self but aren’t sure where to start? The Free Advantage is a podcast designed to help you break free from self-doubt, past trauma, and emotional barriers so you can live a more empowered, meaningful, and authentic life.Hosted by Heather Davis, an authenticity coach with over a decade of experience, The Free Advantage guides you toward self-awareness, self-acceptance, and wholeness so you can live free, unlike conventional self-help approaches focusing on surface-level change, habits, and goals. Heather shows you that real transformation is possible when you embrace risk and vulnerability, dig deep, get curious and creative. Through immersive, empathetic conversations that engage all your senses, each episode offers practical tools to help you grow, overcome hopelessness, and cultivate genuine connections—with yourself and others.Expect deep dives into topics like:Authenticity: How to align with your true self and live fully in your purposeVulnerability: Why embracing your emotions is the key to lasting transformationEmpathy and Awareness: Learning how to better connect with yourself and othersCommunication and Relationships: Developing deeper, more meaningful connectionsGrowth: Overcoming self-doubt and moving toward a life of fulfillment and empowermentIf you’re ready to get risky and move from feeling disconnected and hopeless to a place of clarity, self-love, and freedom, The Free Advantage is for you. Whether seeking emotional healing, personal growth, or simply wanting to feel seen, heard, and validated, this podcast will help you unlock the tools to create the life you’ve always wanted—one filled with purpose, authenticity, and freedom.Ready to break free? Subscribe and tune in to The Free Advantage to start your journey toward the freedom you already own. For more resources, visit The Risky Path website. Like, subscribe, and leave us a review—your voice matters! Let’s walk this path of risk and freedom together.
The Free Advantage
Why We Go Back: Learning to Feel Safe Again
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Why do we keep going back to what we worked so hard to leave?
In this reflective episode of The Free Advantage, Heather Davis unpacks one of the most common and misunderstood parts of healing: returning to old patterns, even after growth.
Building on last week’s powerful conversation with Anna, Heather explores why peace can feel uncomfortable, why safety can feel unfamiliar, and why relapse happens even when life appears to be going well. Through honest insight and lived experience, she reframes relapse not as failure, but as part of the healing process.
✨ Why we return to familiar patterns, even when they hurt
✨ Why peace and stability can feel unsafe to the nervous system
✨ How relapse shows up beyond substances through behaviors, people, and mindsets
✨ The role of triggers, community, and unresolved trauma
✨ Why growth is not linear and returning does not erase progress
If you’ve ever wondered why healing feels harder than expected, this episode offers clarity, compassion, and a reminder that you are not alone on your journey to freedom.
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🎙️ Be Our Guest
Hello friends and welcome back to The Free Advantage. I'm your host, Heather Davis, and I want to invite you into a new season of real stories, real recovery, and real freedom. This show has always been about self-discovery, authenticity, and recovering a life of freedom. And this year, we are taking that journey together in a deeper way. You're gonna hear raw, honest conversations with people walking this path in real time. Stories of growth, healing, purpose, and becoming whole. You'll also hear from me as I reflect on these themes that rise from the stories, answer your questions, and offer small, meaningful takeaways that you can carry back into your week. This is not just a podcast you listen to. It's a place you belong, where you are part of the conversation. Hello everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Free Advantage. I hope you guys are all doing well out there in the world and you are enjoying your new year. As we get started here, I am just getting used to doing video. It's not something I'm comfortable doing or I'm used to. So if I seem a little nervous, I am. So just bear with me. Um if you guys had listened in last week or you got to watch our video on YouTube, um, thank you. I'm very excited that we're starting this new process where you guys can listen and watch in. Um, but if you know there is a lot for us to unpack um from last week's episode and our conversation with Anna, if you did listen in. So I really just want to kind of get into it. Um, one of the things that I really wanted to explore from our conversation last week was why do we go back? It's something that I get a lot from people that I coach and stuff like that. So why, you know, why? Why do I keep doing things that I don't want to do? Why do I keep going back to the same situations? And the truth is we've all done it. And some of us, we all still do it. Um, I've done it, she's done it, I know that you probably have done it, but we go back. We go back to the relationships that we've worked hard to leave, we go back to the same places and the environments that we promise ourselves that we wouldn't do. Um, and we go back to our patterns, our behaviors, those same mindsets that we've worked hard to get out of that keep us stuck. Um, the the real truth of the matter is that we go back because we're still learning how to feel safe, how to feel safe in this new place that we're coming into. Um, and that leads me into this this whole conversation that even after the episode, uh, Anna and I talked about is why is peace so hard? Um, we want it. We want peace. We want um that that quiet stillness within our lives. We want to feel comfortable, we want to feel safe and we want peace. But why? Why is why is peace so hard for us? And uh during our conversation, Anna said something that was super, super important. I am still kind of reeling from it. When she said it, I was like, oh, I kind of had like, oh, my own aha moment. But when we were talking about her living with us, especially in the beginning, how she struggled with how good things were, um, she said that no matter how wonderful everything was, she still really struggled. And she said, and I quote, it's like you forget how to breathe clean air. And she went on to share after that, she shared a metaphor about a fish living in a in a dirty tank. Um, and you've I know we've all seen it, um, how like you have fish tanks that are really, really dirty and they've been kind of living in it in a while, and then you go to clean it, and then the fish gets sick or it it doesn't do well or it dies. You know, it's we have to come to this place where you have to acclimate slowly, right? Because it shocks, it shocks the fish, and and as it is with us in our own growth, it it shocks us. You know, it your recovery and our healing, it takes time and it's slow. And we're used to the kind of the chaos and and the toxicity of our environments. And when we whip ourselves out of that into something good, your body and your mind and your emotions, they they panic. They they fight back, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is unfamiliar. This is unsafe. And they don't, your brain tells us, so our brain is like that. Anytime that our brain experiences something unfamiliar, it's saying, Hey, stop. This is uncertain, we don't know what this is, this is dangerous, and we're not safe here. And so we go back, we dip our toe back into our dirty water because that's where we want to be. We want to be where it's safe. And not that we want the toxicity, not that we want all of the the bad parts and the negativity that that surrounds that, but it's the safety that we're looking for. It's the safety and the calm that we're all looking at. And that's where we like being. And we're not used to knowing that the place that we've come out of is really what is dangerous for us. Um it's hard. It's it's really hard when we're we're going around the same kinds of mountains all the time and we keep coming back to that same place. It's it is the truth of why we go back. And once we get out of it, once we come into this place where we're learning how to live in what's good and what's and what's not toxic anymore, um it begins this slow burn. I want to say that I want to, I want to say, oh, it's really easy. And once we get out of this and we're in the new place, that it works, that it's it's easy for us to accommodate ourselves and to learn that this is what's good for us, um, and to feel safe. But it's not. It's definitely not. I know that Anna had talked about how no matter how many times she had gone, she always had this catalyst, this next thing that helped her push her to the next phase. Right? She would come, she would go back, she would come, she would go back. And then when she finally came that last time and things really started to click for her, and she started to get comfortable where she was, is when real growth started to take place. And as she had moved through a lot of her healing and her time with us, coming to trust that it was good and that it was safe, that she could be herself there, that she could relax, she started to thrive. And as we continued on, she ended up living this whole great life. She got a wonderful job, she eventually moved out on her own, she got her own apartment and had her own car. She had furnished her own place. She was super excited and super proud of herself. And I know that we've all found our self in these places where we feel like, oh, we're here, we're doing it, we're doing really well. We've we've walked away from this past life and we're walking into what's really good for us and what we're excited about doing, where we want to be. You're looking forward to your dreams and your hopes and your goals, and then relapse happens, you know, and not only does it happen, it's this overwhelming place where when it does, we feel like a failure. So why does that happen? Why does relapse happen? Every person is unique. Every person is different, they have different needs during your healing and your recovery. We all have different life circumstances, our backgrounds are different, our family circumstances are different, our personalities, our physical, mental, and emotional and spiritual conditions. They all are different and they all play a part in our healing and recovery. And I want to point out again that relapse is not just for those with substance abuse issues. Relapse is defined as returning to a specific behavior after a time of abstinence. And this can be with anything. Healing and recovery take time. There are so many different outside influence and contributing factors and that lead to warning signs that say, oh, hey, somebody's headed for relapse. But the things that actually cause the relapse are triggers. And I know so many people use this term, like, oh my God, I'm so triggered. We do that when we get upset. And the truth is, is it's it's a real thing. This phrase has become super viral. We all use it, but it really is a true marker of relapse. It is it is a trigger. It's anything or anyone that has been associated with your past or reminds you of your past. So when Anna moved out on her own, she was doing really great. She had all of these great things lined up: her job, her home, her car, her furnishings. But when she moved out, she was alone. And one of her markers for recovery and for healing was community. It was connection. And at this point in our relationship, we had not adopted her yet. She, we were, we were, we had talked about it. We were on our way to really solidifying if that was something that she wanted to do, but we had not done that yet. So when she moved out, when she started feeling lonely and separated from us, I mean, physically separated from us, she started to feel that feeling of abandonment, that same feeling that she had felt with her own family. And when that starts to set in, even though it wasn't true, even though she wasn't abandoned, we hadn't abandoned her, she wasn't alone. She felt that way. And she started to feel unsafe again. And then you start feeling, oh no. And so you start going back to what's familiar. Those old emotions start setting in. It sends you back into the tailspin of your mindset, and it goes back and you start looking for those old familiar patterns that make you feel comfortable. And that's what happened. Um it really does go to show you that even when life is going well, even when everything seems good, that it's easy for our old emotions to arise and to cause trigger triggers, or not to cause trigger, but triggers that cause the trauma within us to rise back up and things that have yet to be resolved. She was scared. And when we get scared, we go back to what feels safe, and it leads us down the path of relapse. Anna really did need that constant connection with her community and support so she could feel love and joy. And without it, truly, relapse was inevitable for her. But I want you all to hear me because it happens with all of us. It's not just with Anna. It's why I'm having all the people on to have the stories to share their stories. I want everybody to understand that they're not alone. That you're you're you're not alone. There are so many of us out here that experience this. I have had this in my own life. I've had my own journey with this. And I'm gonna share my story on here too, because I don't want you all to feel like, oh, I'm just sharing everybody else's, but not mine, because I have my own journey with these same kinds of things. But I want you to know that when we when we even after we've done well, even after we've done well, and we end up finding ourselves back into that same place again sometime, it's not failure. Every return, every relapse, every detour that we take is a step in our healing. It brings us closer and closer to where we want to be. Growth is not linear. And sometimes we have to go around that same mountain more than once. But I want you to know that each time, each time we do, we see it differently. As we come back next week, um, I want you to know that these videos aren't going to be super long in between. Um we'll have our longer uh conversations that might be a little bit longer. But the the in-between and the in the takeaways and stuff that I want to discuss, I want them to be short. I want you to be able to listen and take something back into your week that's not super long. But I'm looking forward to doing more and more of this with you. If you have a story that you want to share, I please reach out. You can message me personally at heather at theriskypaths.com on my email, or you may go to my website and we have a link in the menu where you can share your story or reach out. If you have questions about anything that we've talked about or anything that comes up for you, please message me. Uh please message me and I will go ahead and share that and answer that on the air for you. But I hope you guys are all doing really well. I hope that this is helpful and that you're learning more and you're learning something about yourself along the way. I want you to join me next week as we discuss more about Anna's story and how self worth permeates every part of our lives and how it fuels every decision we make. I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today. I hope you all have a wonderful week. And remember, freedom is the advantage you already own. Until next time.