Congratulations, You Escaped Your Cage And Built The One Next Door

What if the hardest parts of your past didn’t define you, but the meaning you gave them did? We dig into the quiet mechanics of interpretation—how the mind assigns stories to keep us safe, why those stories become identity, and how to step out of a prison built from protection. Without minimising loss or trauma, we show how to separate the fact of an event from the lens that formed around it, and why that lens can be revised when you’re ready to live from power rather than fear.

Together we trace the journey from survival meaning to sovereignty. You’ll hear why two people can share an experience and carry away entirely different lives, how the nervous system craves order, and how memory can trick the body into reacting as if the past is still present. We challenge the tempting bypass of nothing matters—a stance that looks enlightened but simply swaps one cage for another—and offer a grounded alternative: collapse the limiting interpretation, keep the wisdom, and choose a meaning aligned with who you are now.

This conversation is practical and deeply human. We ask the only question that cuts through labels: is what I’m doing giving me the outcome I want? If not, it’s time to re‑author the story: rebuild trust from the inside out, redefine safety as capacity plus boundaries, and make choices from your throne rather than from an old alarm bell. You are not the wound, not the ego defending it, and not the body reliving a memory. You are the awareness that chooses meaning—and that choice is where deliberate life design begins.

If this resonates, join our Rise Up membership or work with us one‑to‑one to examine survival stories, dismantle unconscious meanings, and reclaim authorship from sovereignty. Subscribe, share this episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help more people rise up and live on their terms.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Premise

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, welcome to Rise Up Podcast. The Inner Work With Me, Vicky Ross. This podcast is where I examine stories that shape our lives. And it's not about blaming your past, but it's to free your future. Because if you want to live life on your terms, which is something that I totally stand for, you must understand what has quietly been defining your life, your thoughts. And it's not for us to go deep into the past so that we can create change, but it's to just have an awareness and an understanding of why you are here right now living this life with this identity, what you need to release and let go and change so that you can create the future of your desires and live life on your terms. So today we're going to talk about meaning because meaning is so important. And like everything else, your precursor to change is understanding, it's knowledge. So this is what we are doing today and every day, every podcast. So I recently heard someone say, nothing that happened to you meant anything. So nothing that's happened in the past means anything. And on some level, I get it, but also felt so much resistance in my body. And I know that if I say that to people, if I say something similar, and I have done that in the past, there's huge resistance. Because how can you say to the trauma that you experienced that it meant nothing? How can you say to somebody that's lost somebody, it meant nothing? How can you say to somebody that was betrayed, well, it doesn't mean anything. But yet a part of me does agree, like I said. So I'd like to unpack this properly. I want to unpack this in the way that I agree and disagree because I will because I find that this brings a whole new level of understanding to the way that we react and respond. So let's unpack this properly. Events do not arrive with a built-in meaning. You know, if you think about when you first started life and started living, you had no reference, you had no experience. So everything that you experienced it, whether you experienced it by having been in an event or whether you were on the side minding your own business and witnessing an event, it's still the experience was that. So if you think about it logically, two people can experience the same event and walk away with completely different interpretations. People say, why? Because meaning is assigned, it's not given. You don't have the experience, and then somebody comes behind that and goes, Oh, by the way, that thing that you experienced, this is what it means. No, we assign the meaning to the experience, and that's how we then know what it means. But for the same token, everybody does that, which means that everybody's meaning will be different. So when something overwhelming happens, your nervous system cannot tolerate chaos. Your nervous system is like constantly trying to protect you. So the mind has to create a story, otherwise, it doesn't make sense. So your mind is the storyteller in your life, right? And it says, This event, this event shaped me. This must have happened for a reason. And people even sometimes joke and they go, Well, I don't know what the reason is, I haven't seen it, but I know that one day I'll see the reason. But it must have happened for a reason. It wasn't just random. Or since then, I have never been the same. And that's something that Dr. Joe talks about. He says that when people are stuck in a trauma response, and you know, you say to them, Well, what happened to you that you are scared or that you're anxious or that you feel insecure or you don't have confidence? What happened to you? What's your story? And then people will tell you that story, and basically what they're saying is this event happened to me 20 years ago. It changed me, and I've never been able to go back to myself, and I've never been able to let it go, and I've never been able to release it. So this is where you can see and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My life is full of stories because, yeah, your mind will assign meaning to everything that you experience, and therefore there's the story. So that meaning that your mind assigns makes the unbearable survivable. Otherwise, how do you survive something that has absolutely no meaning, that it's random? So it protects you. And what protects you at one stage of your life can imprison you at another. And this is really important because we develop a whole lot of survival mechanisms when we are young, when we don't understand what is happening, we're witnessing, we experience, but we don't have that reference and experience, like I said. And therefore, something feels wrong, it feels confusing, it feels scary, frightening, it feels all sorts of you know, like not comfortable things. And your your body has to protect you, your mind has to protect you. So the problem is not what happened, the problem is what it now means about you. Because there you gave it meaning and you moved on in your life, and you changed, I'm quite sure, but now it means something about you. And it might mean that I can't trust, I can't trust life, I can't trust people, I can't trust the outside world, I can't trust men, I can't trust women. You know, there's an element of I can't trust. Uh I'm not safe. So a lot of people will not go and do certain things in the in their lives because they don't feel safe, or they won't do things that they really want to do because they feel they're not good enough. The good enough is a big thing. Or something like, I'll never be able to, blah, blah, because. So that interpretation becomes identity. So the longer that that story, that meaning that is a story lives within your unconscious mind, the more familiar, the more normal it is, and therefore it becomes part of your identity, part of your personality. That identity is also your prison. Not because you're weak, but because you never question the meaning you created while you were trying to survive. So you would probably say to me, Well, at that moment where I was trying to survive, how I was supposed to also question if this meaning is going to help me? And probably you were too young, you didn't have conscious thinking, and therefore meaning was assigned. And where was that question going to happen? It wasn't. The truth is, is that you don't suffer from that event anymore. That event is not happening to you. You suffer from the interpretation that you've got in your mind, from the memory. And the problem is, is that your unconscious mind cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. So when you're thinking about something that happened but it's not happening now, and you've got an interpretation of what happened then, it's not happening now, your unconscious mind does believe that right now you're going through that again. So, how many decisions in your life today are still being shaped by the meaning that you formed when you were hurt? Not because they're true, but they're also not false, but because it once kept you safe, how many dreams are paused because of a story that has never been re-examined? A story that was relevant then, but totally irrelevant now. So now, here, this is where we have to go deeper. It's not that nothing has meaning, is that the first meaning you gave something was a survival meaning. And survival meaning is not sovereignty. And by sovereignty I mean where you sit in your throne, you make the choices and decisions about how you show up in life, how you react, who you're going to be, what you want to do, what decisions you make. You are the sovereign of your life to do and decide everything. But when you have a survival mechanism, you're not in your sovereignty. So when you become aware of that interpretation, you can collapse it. Not the event, not the experience, but the interpretation. And when that collapses, something powerful remains. It's wisdom, not pain, not distorted identity, but wisdom. And this is where authorship begins. Events do not define you, interpretations shape you. And interpretations can be revised. Nothing is carved in stone. You can choose to be somebody else in a heartbeat. Now, how long it takes to get to that heartbeat is questionable. That's what Tony Robbins always says. But when you make that decision, because of all the work and all the deciding and all the pain and all the this and all the that, you might decide, I'm done with this. And you make a decision in a heartbeat, and your interpretation changes because it can be revised. You can also learn to understand through the wisdom that you are not the wound, you're not the ego defending the wound, and you're not the body reacting to a memory. You, beautiful soul, is the awareness capable of choosing, meaning. You are in control, and that is the power. And without that power, and without that power, you cannot design your life deliberately. You've got to understand it's you. You're the one that has the control. Because you cannot create a new future while unconsciously you're defending an old story. Because that story creates behaviors, feelings, out perceptions, outlooks. So here's something important. Breaking free from one prison does not mean you should build another one. If you swing into nothing matters, nothing means anything, I'm above this, you're just in a different prison. This is like saying, I'm addicted to cigarettes, I smoke, and I have now stopped smoking. Then what you're saying is now I'm still a smoker that doesn't smoke rather than I'm a healthy person. So think about when you say to yourself, nothing matters, nothing means anything, I'm above this, you know, because that is a different prison. You're still in the old prison, but you're just in the prison next door that says, Yeah, those things happen, I just don't let them bother me, rather than I now choose to live a different life. Freedom is not denial, freedom is not a spiritual bypass. A lot of people do think it is, but it's not. Freedom is conscious choice. You extract the wisdom, you release the identity distortion, and you take back your sovereignty. And then you can deliberately decide what this experience now means, not from fear, but from power. So I want to leave you with this that you never had control over what happened in the past. When you were a child, you had no choice and no control. But you always have control over what you become now. You are not what happened to you, you're what you choose now. And if you choose now to be a victim of what happened 30, 40 years ago, it's a choice that you're making. And some people have argued and they go, No, I don't choose this, this is not what I would choose. Then take a deep breath and just let go of that stress inside of you and ask yourself, how is this meaning that you've allocated to an event that is controlling you? How is that working out for you now? Because, like I've said before, it's not about good or bad, it's not about right and wrong, it's not about positive and negative. I do not like labeling things like this. To me, there's only one question to ask. Is what I'm doing giving me the outcome that I want? If the answer is yes, you're good, step away. But if the answer is no, if you feel restricted, constricted, limited, you're not living your life on your terms. You have to sit and analyze this and think about it and choose that authorship is how you want to live your life on your terms. Authorship and sovereignty that you are in charge, you are sitting on your throne. This is your kingdom. So if this resonates, this is the work we do inside rise up membership. It's the work that I do one-to-one with people. And what I do, whether it's in the membership or one-to-one, is we examine survival stories, we dismantle unconscious meanings, we reclaim authorship, and we build from sovereignty. So if you're ready to stop living from the story from the past, formed in pain, and start creating deliberately, come and join us. Carry on listening to this podcast. There's lots of uh different episodes. Share, share the love. And otherwise, the link will be in the notes. So we hope to see you there. Thank you for being here. If this episode made you think, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Until next time, peers to your success and rise up and live on your terms.