Episode 34 — What You Avoid Still Controls You.

You can know exactly what your triggers are and still be nowhere near healed.

Sometimes all we’ve really done is gotten better at avoiding the people, places, conversations, memories, and situations that hit the wound.

In this episode, Bob breaks down what a trigger actually is, why your brain creates them, and why identifying the trigger is only the beginning.

The real work is underneath it.

What did your brain learn?
What are you still carrying?
What needs to heal so the old wound stops making decisions for you?

Because freedom isn’t building a life where nothing can touch you.

It’s healing enough that the past no longer gets to control the present.

Episode 34 — What You Avoid Still Controls You.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I hope you heal enough to hang pictures in your house again.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

I I saw that line somewhere recently, and it's it's kind of stuck with me. But it got me thinking. Sometimes sometimes something happens.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

And it could be in a room, it could be in a house, uh, a relationship, even uh a season of your life. And afterwards, you stop going there. You stop going certain places, you stop having certain conversations, you stop doing certain things because they hurt.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

For a while. It makes sense. You know, think about it. If you break your arm, moving it hurts, so you stop moving it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Goal should never be to not move your arm again for the rest of your life. The goal is to heal it.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

I think we get this wrong emotionally all the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Or you've got some people that, you know, they they say they're doing the work. They they they figure out what the trigger is. They figure out what hurts, what sets us off.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

But then instead of healing it and actually putting the work in, they just get really fucking good at avoiding it. And that's not the finish line. Knowing where your pain is, knowing what's hurting. That's where it starts.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Freedom, it's not learning how to build your whole life to avoid the things that hurt you. Freedom is healing enough that they don't control you anymore. Welcome to the Man in Motion Podcast, episode 34. What you avoid still controls you. I'm Bob. This is a show about what it means to be a man in today's world, navigating real life with strength, purpose, and clarity. No hype, no hacks, no fixing yourself, just awareness, responsibility, and choosing direction while you're already in motion. Ever forward. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

So before we get into this, let's talk about what exactly is a trigger?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

What are we talking about? What are we dealing with? So if you want the textbook clinical definition, a present-day cue, internal or external, that activates a learned response connected to a past experience. So what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

It means at some point you learn something. And something in the present resembles something that mattered in the past.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

A couple things here matter. Because the cue, which is what's happening now, and the original experience, they're not going to be identical. They're going to be similar. There's going to be aspects of it where you go, oh, I see that. I see that looks like that. That reminds me of this. And then your reaction to that cue, that trigger, is going to be determined by how intense the lesson was that you learned in the past from this. And our brain is very good at this. I mean, we've talked about this.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Our brain is the greatest prediction machine in the history of history, where if you so our brain is very good at learning these associations, and sometimes it learns it a little too well.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

But your brain says, this has an element that reminds me of that. That was my response then, so this needs to be my response now.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

The problem is what was reasonable now becomes unreasonable. It's out of proportion. So what do we do with this? What do we do with this? These triggers. We look at them, you know, we dig out what they are. And we think, oh, okay, I've I'm good. I know I so I just avoid this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

But that's not healing. That's just more avoidance. It's the issue's still there. The problem is still there. The thing that's eating you is still there.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Naming that trigger, it's not going to heal the wound that we have. You know, going back to the broken arm analogy.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

I mean, you break your arm, you move your arm, it hurts.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

We don't move our arm.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

And that's in instances like that, that's absolutely necessary. You know, you have an injury, you protect it, but the goal should be to protect it long enough to heal it. Not to walk around with a broken arm for the rest of your life. So, just like with that broken arm, once you identify what your trigger is, that shows you where the work begins. The work is not figuring out what the trigger is, the work is figuring out how to deal with what the trigger is, how to deal with what it's pointing at, how to heal that. So I I know I've spoken about this before. Why am I talking about this topic today?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Um. So my my brother was a junkie.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

He uh lost his battle to a lot of different drugs.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Uh committed suicide in 2024. And, you know, that's on top of dealing with the loss of my mother.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Maybe uh, I don't know, a little over a year before that, and I can a couple years before that, the loss of my daughter.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Um, I got really good at avoiding shit.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

You know, you know when you uh you look at a dog and the dog, I don't know, say the dog chewed up your shoe. You look at the dog and go, did you do that? What do they do? They do this thing where they look away, they they avoid looking at it. Like, if I don't see it, I didn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Yeah, that was me. That was me. Still is to some extent, but I'm getting better. I'm working on it. In this particular instance, someone sent me a picture that they had found of my brother. And my initial response was, why the fuck would you send me this?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

I don't want this. Because I remembered that the time the picture was taken. And, you know, when the picture was being taken, we were having fun. But as the day wore on, it became more and more apparent that my my brother was um, shall we say, in an altered state. Uh, and it it it snowballed from there. And I'm sure some of that fault was mine too. I I can own that at this point. Um, but I actually got mad at the person that sent me the picture, and I actually said to him, Why would you send this to me? Why? And his response was actually having trouble saying this. His response was because one day you're going to heal enough to want these pictures.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

And that that that was a slap. That was a slap. Because I thought I was good. I thought I was good to go.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

I thought that I was okay with this. With with everything that had happened and how it had gone down and the history and turns out I had just gotten good at avoiding it.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

So what do I do with this? What do we do with this? What my what my friend did was was revealed the trigger.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

He helped me figure out what it was pointing at, what the actual problem was. Not just my response, but the actual problem. What is this, what was that touching for me? What what taught my brain to react in that way? What am I still carrying from all that? And then that was where my work was. That's where I had to dig through it and sift through it and figure out and untangle all those feelings, those complex emotions.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

You know, I the trigger is not the thing that you need to fix. The underlying association is what you need to fix.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

And that healing, it can mean it can mean grieving, it can mean forgiving, it can mean reframing, confronting, accepting, processing, getting a therapist.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

You can't change the past. You can change your reaction to the past. You can't change the past. You can change what the past means to you now. You can change how you react to the past now. And that's what I realize is that the past can remain part of your story.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

And it can remain part of what formed you into who you are and what you are, where you are. But it doesn't have to continue to dictate where you go, what you do, how you react, how you respond. The goal is not to become better at enduring the trigger or avoiding the trigger. It's it's it's healing what's underneath so that the trigger stops being a trigger.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

There's nothing left to trigger. And that's real freedom. That is real freedom. That healing. Letting that shit go.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Whatever you want to call it, dealing with your bullshit, whatever you want to call it. It gives you space. Most triggers are are just automatic. They're immediate and automatic. Boom, they hit you, and it's right there. Something happens, reaction hits, and you're off and running, and you're six steps into the the process of your response when the incident that happened that caused your trigger to become active. It's just like it's just at an opening stage, and you're already dealing with the end stage of something that probably isn't going to happen with a response that's about 10 times what it needs to be. When you start healing that, when you start letting that shit go, it creates space. It slows that down. It gets you to a point where you see what's actually happening, and it gives you a moment to choose. Right?

SPEAKER_01 13:57

I say that at the end of episode, choose. It's so important because that's that's all the power we have is to choose how we respond.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

And all of a sudden, you no longer have to control every situation around you. You don't have to control what other people do or say, you don't have to control what someone else is feeling. You get to choose your response to what's actually happening in front of you.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

And you stop letting yesterday make that decision for you. You know, I used to think freedom was numbness.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And it's not. Freedom is not nothing bothers me anymore. Freedom is not becoming cold and detached and being impossible to hurt. Freedom is being able to experience what's going on around you and actually experience it without automatically becoming what that old wound trained you to be. Freedom is being able to choose who you are now instead of letting what happened then choose for you.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Stop arranging your life around this bullshit that we carry. Stop running from it, stop hiding from it, stop So to all of you. I hope you heal enough to hang pictures in your house again. That's it for today. Take what's useful, leave what's not. Heal what's underneath and keep moving.