Why Most People Stay Stuck (And How to Escape)
The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast with David Goggins | DATE
You carry it with you every day. The raised voice. The slammed door. The person who was supposed to protect you but didn’t. The memories you’ve tried to bury but keep surfacing at 3:00 AM.
Maybe your parents divorced badly. Maybe you grew up with addiction in the house. Maybe someone told you that you’d never amount to anything. Maybe you watched someone you love get hurt and couldn’t stop it.
Here’s what no one tells you: that pain isn’t just baggage. It’s also fuel. The question isn’t whether you’ll carry it. The question is whether you’ll let it destroy you or drive you.
Some people spend their entire lives as victims of their past. Others become unstoppable because of it. The difference isn’t what happened to them. It’s what they decided to do with it.
Why Most People Stay Stuck in Their Past
Most people approach their childhood wounds in one of two ways. Neither works.
The first group buries everything. They pretend it didn’t happen. They push the memories down, stay busy, and never look back. The problem? Buried things don’t disappear. They fester. They leak out in destructive relationships, self-sabotage, and unexplained anxiety.
The second group wears their pain like a badge. They blame their present problems on their past trauma. They wait for apologies that will never come. They stay stuck because they’ve made peace with being broken.
Both approaches share one fatal flaw: they give the past power over the present.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
Here’s what separates those who transcend their past from those who remain trapped by it: they stop asking for an apology and start taking responsibility.
This sounds harsh. It sounds unfair. Because it is.
The person who hurt you probably isn’t coming back to say sorry. The system that failed you isn’t going to make it right. The world doesn’t owe you anything, even if it took everything.
Accepting this isn’t letting them off the hook. It’s letting yourself off the hook. Every day you wait for someone else to fix you is another day you stay broken.
The people who turn pain into power realize something crucial: their suffering had a purpose, even if that purpose was simply to make them who they are.
How Pain Forges Uncommon Strength
There’s a reason why so many high achievers come from difficult backgrounds. It’s not coincidence. It’s chemistry.
When you grow up in chaos, your nervous system develops differently. You become hyperaware of your surroundings. You learn to read people quickly. You develop survival instincts that comfortable people never need.
But these same traits that helped you survive can also hold you back—unless you consciously repurpose them.
The hypervigilance that kept you safe as a kid can become extreme focus as an adult. The people-reading skills that helped you avoid danger can make you an exceptional leader. The emotional sensitivity that made you feel everything can become deep empathy.
The question isn’t whether you’re damaged. The question is whether you’re willing to do the work to transmute that damage into something useful.
The Science of Post-Traumatic Growth
Researchers have identified a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth. It’s the idea that struggling through adversity doesn’t just leave you scarred—it can actually make you stronger in specific ways.
People who experience genuine post-traumatic growth often report:
- Deeper relationships and increased compassion
- Greater appreciation for life
- Increased personal strength
- New possibilities they wouldn’t have seen otherwise
- Spiritual or existential growth
This doesn’t happen automatically. It requires conscious effort. But the research is clear: humans are capable of using hardship as a catalyst for transformation.
Practical Steps to Transform Pain into Power
Step 1: Study Your Darkness
Most people run from painful memories. They distract themselves with work, substances, relationships, or entertainment. Anything to avoid sitting with what hurts.
The first step to transformation is reversal. Instead of running, study.
When a painful memory surfaces, don’t push it away. Get curious. Ask yourself: What exactly happened? How did it feel? What did I believe about myself afterward? What patterns did I develop to cope?
This isn’t about wallowing. It’s about gathering data. You can’t fix what you don’t understand.
Step 2: Map Your Demons to Your Strengths
Every survival mechanism you developed served a purpose once. But some of those mechanisms now hold you back.
Take inventory of your patterns. Ask yourself:
| Childhood Survival Pattern | How It Helped Then | How It Hurts Now | New Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| People-pleasing | Kept me safe from conflict | Drains energy, attracts takers | Channel into genuine service |
| Hypervigilance | Helped me detect danger | Causes anxiety, burnout | Refocus into strategic awareness |
| Emotional shutdown | Protected me from pain | Blocks intimacy, connection | Develop into steady calm under pressure |
| Perfectionism | Made me feel in control | Creates paralysis, fear of failure | Harness for excellence, not self-worth |
The goal isn’t to eliminate your survival patterns. It’s to repurpose them. Take what kept you alive and use it to help you thrive.
Step 3: Build Evidence That You’re Capable
One of the deepest wounds from a difficult childhood is damaged self-belief. When you grow up being told you’re not enough, you internalize it. You carry it like a truth.
The only way to overwrite that programming is with evidence. Real, undeniable proof that you’re capable of hard things.
Start small. Pick something difficult and do it. Not because you have to. Because you choose to. Run when you don’t want to. Wake up early when you’d rather sleep. Finish what you start when quitting would be easier.
Every time you follow through, you build a brick in the foundation of a new belief. Eventually, that foundation becomes strong enough to hold the weight of your past without collapsing.
Step 4: Stop Waiting for the Apology
This is the hardest step. It’s also the most liberating.
You may never get closure. The people who hurt you may never acknowledge what they did. They may never change. They may never become who you needed them to be.
Waiting for them to fix you is a trap. It gives them power over your present while they’re not even in the room.
Choose to move forward without them. Not because they deserve forgiveness. Because you deserve freedom.
Step 5: Create Something From the Pain
The most powerful way to transform suffering is to use it in service of others.
When you’ve been through something hard, you gain something valuable: you understand. You can spot pain in others because you’ve felt it yourself. You can offer hope because you found some yourself. You can guide people through darkness because you’ve been there.
This doesn’t mean you have to become a public speaker or write a book. It means letting your past inform how you show up. Listen differently. Speak differently. Show up for people in ways that no one showed up for you.
Why This Approach Works
There’s a reason why therapy alone often falls short. Understanding why you’re broken doesn’t automatically make you whole. Insight without action is just expensive self-awareness.
The approach outlined here works because it’s active, not passive. You’re not just analyzing your past—you’re actively repurposing it. You’re taking what was done to you and using it as raw material for who you want to become.
This isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s about refusing to let it have the final word.
The Truth About Moving Forward
You will never be the person you would have been without your trauma. That person doesn’t exist anymore. Grieving that lost self is part of the process.
But here’s what you might discover on the other side of that grief: the person you became might actually be stronger. More compassionate. More real. More capable of handling life because you’ve already survived the worst of it.
The goal isn’t to go back to who you were before. The goal is to become who you were meant to become because of it.
Your past isn’t just a weight. It’s also a teacher. The question isn’t whether you’ll carry it. The question is where you’ll let it take you.
Continue Your Journey
Building unshakeable mental strength from past struggles is a profound first step. To fully transform your life, this inner foundation must be paired with the right mental frameworks and practical neuroscience. In The Mindset That ENDS Self-Doubt: Lesson from Novak Djokovic, you’ll discover how a tennis legend channeled his own deepest insecurities into the fuel for 24 Grand Slam titles, offering a masterclass in reframing your inner critic. Then, to understand the “how” behind lasting change, dive into How to Rewire Your Brain for Lasting Success, which reveals the neuroscientific process to align your very identity with the future you want to build, turning hard-won resilience into automatic, daily progress.
Conclusion
Childhood trauma leaves marks that don’t fade. But those marks don’t have to be scars. They can become signposts. Evidence of where you’ve been and proof of what you’ve survived.
The people who turn pain into power don’t have a secret formula. They simply refuse to stay victims. They take what was done to them and use it as fuel. They stop waiting for rescue and start building.
You can do the same. Not by pretending the past didn’t happen. But by deciding that what happened isn’t the end of your story. It’s just the beginning.
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