A personal-reflection YouTube monologue by Lori Harder about how stress can reactivate old self-sabotaging patterns—particularly in close relationships—and the conscious choice she made to stop a stress-triggered fight with her husband and instead let it go to preserve the day. The content centers on an anecdote illustrating noticing triggers, observing the spiral, and choosing a different response.
I think what happens when a lot of stress comes in is that our default responses we thought we were done with or that we healed or solved or I'm not that person anymore can come back. And so one of the things that had come back for me recently is, like, I'll notice that I'll, like, kind of want to pick fights with my husband. My old ways were, like, sabotaging my life in some way. And of course, I'm gonna sabotage the person I love the most or sabotage the relationship. So the other day, we finally get a day off, and we were together, and he had said something that would have never normally bothered me, but I just watched myself be like, oh, that's a trigger for me, and wanted to dig in. I wanted to fight. And in that moment, I was like, lori, you can either fully enjoy this day and, like, really enjoy your time off in your life, or you can go with the story that you're stressed out and your husband is, like, not understanding, and that life is hard. And I just watched the spiral of what my old self would have done, and in that one decision, I was like, let it go. You could either have the best day and the best week, or you can start destroying it all right here.
