Why It Won't Go Away — Triggers, Hidden Wounds, and Why You Keep Getting Pulled Back In

Let me ask you something. Have you ever lived somewhere you hate or been in a situation you absolutely cannot stand and for whatever reason you cannot just pick up and leave? Yep, that's my current situation. My husband and I have been fortunate enough to travel and live in different places over the last few years. We are adventurous after all and in this season of moving, exploring, living somewhere new has been the most freedom I have ever felt. Decisions made by us, not by outside opinions. Have we angered people in those decisions? Absolutely, and I could care less because they were finally our decisions. But then we ended up here in the city I hate. Upon arriving I realized how much I disliked it and I have not been quiet about hating it. But what my husband hadn't figured out nor had I, up until recently, was how much I hated it. A few weeks ago my husband sent me a text about the future of this city. He was essentially telling me to put myself first for once, that he would commute, that the marriage mattered more than a zip code that I had sacrificed enough. It's a beautiful text, right? Well, apparently not for my body. My chest got tight, my throat held back tears, and before I could even process what he had just said, my body had already answered. And we're talking about a text, a loving text. But what my body felt was, please, never going to happen. Something inside me took over before I had a chance to think. I was seething. Luckily, I did not send any angry texts. I just did not respond. But I was angry and I had no idea why because the reality is that I should have said, thank you, or I love how you take my feelings into consideration. I should have said something warm, something true, but instead, nothing, just anger, sitting in my chest where gratitude should have been. And then, after my indignant attitude wore off, my overthinking brain started to actually tune in. And that is when I realized that this was somewhere much deeper than a text about a city. This was not even about the text or my husband. This was the catalyst about something older that had been waiting for a moment to surface. I was triggered. But what was the trigger? What was the actual hurt underneath it? That question is what this whole episode is about. Welcome to Founded 17. I am Rosanna. Today, we're going to talk about the thing that keeps pulling you back, even when you thought you had healed it. The word trigger gets thrown around so much that it has almost lost its meaning. Nowadays, people use it to mean offended, uncomfortable, annoyed. That is not what I am talking about. A trigger is not an overreaction. It is a recognition. It is a moment or a tone, a silence, a smell that bypasses your brain entirely and lands straight inside your body. The thing is, your body does not recognize it as a right now kind of thing. It is taking you back to something that happened before. That is why the reaction feels so big. The trigger is never about the thing. It is always about the original wound. Let me use an example to explain healing and the thing that triggers you. Think of your wound like a set of nesting dolls. If you've never seen them, nesting dolls are a set of wooden dolls that all fit inside each other and are painted individually. But when you twist it open, there's another doll, and underneath that one, another one, and another one, and they're all smaller. Each one identical in shape and hidden on the inside of the one before. From the outside, you would never know they were there. Looking at them looks finished, but there's always something more inside. That is your wound. The outer figures are the ones you've already named, processed, talked about in therapy, but the set does not end there. Underneath every figure that you've already opened, there's another one. Sometimes more tender, or sometimes so tightly sealed. You did not even know it was there until something rubbed you the wrong way, or you get a text, and in that moment you begin to unravel. That is the trigger, where your body responds with dismissal before your brain can intervene. But don't look at that moment as a sign that you have not healed. Quite the contrary, it is a sign that you have healed enough to reach the next one. Here is what I found when I followed my trigger all the way down. You see, my husband's text was about acknowledging my disdain for the city we live in, and how he's open to commuting, so I could be somewhere that feels more like home. But what my body heard was, you have to choose. Not necessarily choosing the city versus the marriage, because remember, the body does not think in that here and now situation. The body went to a place that was older than that. My body heard, you cannot have both. You've never been able to have both. Pick one and lose the other. That is how this works for you. And when I followed that, I realized that's the pattern in my life. In the end, this is not about a city or a text. This is a wound that has been running a pattern for my entire life. I have never believed I'm allowed to have both. That belief did not start with my husband's text. It started long before I had words for it, and it has quietly been shaping every choice, every relationship, every place I have tried to call home for as long as I can remember. That is what the dolls revealed. That is what the trigger was protecting. So let me come back to that question I asked you at the beginning. Have you ever lived somewhere you hate? Here is what I figured out about why I hate this city so much. I grew up somewhere that felt suffocating. Where decisions were made for me. Where the walls were invisible, but absolutely were there. Where what I wanted was never really part of the equation. And while this city is not that place, it feels like that place inside my body. In the same way I feel when I'm trapped. I feel imprisoned again. Like I had gone backwards into a version of my life I had worked so hard to leave because for the last few years traveling, moving, living somewhere new, I had finally felt free. Things were on my terms. And that freedom was not just geographical. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I was living from the inside out instead of shrinking to fit someone else's version of what my life should look like. And then the roads led back here. And I had not felt heard about it. So I had gone quiet, which is totally unlike me about what was really going on inside. Because I want to be a good wife. I want to show up for my marriage. I do not want to make everything about what my needs are. But I also do not want to lose myself in the process. And I cannot figure out how to hold both without feeling like wanting them makes me selfish. Do you hear that? Even now, even after all this work, I'm still doing it. You see, this is exactly why the work matters because one statement, one word can unravel your day faster than your brain has time to catch up. The trigger showed me all of this, a text, a city, a feeling in my forehead and in my chest, and a figure I did not know that was still inside. So when the trigger fires, and it will, here is what I want you to remember. Do not act from inside of it. Not the conversation you start with, everything is raw. When you are triggered, you are not in the present. You are in the past. And decisions made from the past rarely serve the future. Get curious instead of critical. Do not ask yourself what is wrong with me. That question will only send you down your own rabbit hole. The better question is, what does this remind me of? Not intellectually in your body, in the oldest, quietest part of you. Follow it one figure deeper than where you are, just one. And turn the anger toward the wound, not towards yourself. You are not the problem. The belief you inherited is the problem. The conditioning is the problem. The years of being taught that what you want is too much. That is the problem. You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to grieve it. What you are not allowed to do is keep making yourself the villain of your own healing. Here's the thing nobody tells you about healing. It does not happen in a straight line. You already know that. Everyone says that. But here's the part they leave out. Healing does not mean the triggers stop. It means you start to recognize them faster. It means the gap between the trigger firing and you catching it starts to close. Where it used to take weeks to understand why you reacted the way you did, it starts to take days. Sometimes you catch it in real time. That is not a small thing. That is everything. And the other thing nobody tells you. Every new thing you do is to get the healing. The figure you open is evidence that you were deeper in your healing than you have ever been. You could not have reached this three years ago. Your nervous system wasn't ready. You had not done enough of the outer work to be safe enough to go this deep. The fact that it hurts in a new way means you've arrived somewhere new. That's not regression. That's progress. The dolls do not lie. There's always another one inside. And every figure you open is one less wound running you from the inside. I want to say something here that I feel strongly about, not as a judgment, but as a conviction. I believe this is why so many marriages fail. Not because people stopped loving each other, but because two people brought their unprocessed wounds in the same room and neither of them had language for what was actually happening. The trigger fires, the nervous system reacts. And suddenly you're in a fight about something that has nothing to do with the other person and everything to do with something that happened long before you even met them. And here's the part that breaks my heart the most. When we let pride take over and refuse to get professional help, and I am not talking about family or friends, but real professional support, those wounds do not disappear. They go on your ground. They quietly do their work. And over time, the distance grows, the resentment builds, and the marriage starts crumbling from the inside out. Not because the love was not real, but because the wounds were never addressed. Pride will cost you more than therapy ever will. I promise you that. If something in today's episode landed, if you recognize the trigger you had been living with without a name, I want you to know that you do not have to follow it down that road alone. That is the work I do, one on one. Following the trigger to figure the beneath it, and the figure beneath that until we find the belief that has been running the show. If you're ready for that, a free coffee chat is in the show notes. No pressure, no pitch, just a real conversation about where you are and what you're carrying. I would love to meet you there. And if you're not quite there yet, that's okay too. The best thing you can do right now is leave a five star review on Apple Podcast. Next lesson 30 seconds, and it is how the show finds women who need to hear this the most. That is your way of saying, this matters. Keep going. All the links are in the show notes. Next Tuesday, I am bringing in Dr. Kendall Arons and her work is unlike anything I have talked about on the show. It is not talk therapy. It lives inside the body. You do not want to miss this. And remember, you were left without an explanation, but you were never left without a purpose. You were found. I'll see you on Tuesday.